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By Root 674 0

has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. (The process of hydrogenating oil also eliminates omega-3s.) We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of our food chain. It was a change we never noticed, since the importance of omega-3s was not recognized until the 1970s. As in the case of our imperfect knowledge of soil, the limits of our knowledge of nutrition have obscured what the industrialization of the food chain is doing to our health. But changes in the composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the diseases of civilization—cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc.—that have long been linked to modern eating habits, as well as for learning and behavioral problems in children and depression in adults.

Research in this area promises to turn a lot of conventional nutritional thinking on its head. It suggests, for example, that the problem with eating red meat—long associated with cardiovascular disease—may owe less to the animal in question than to that animal’s diet. (This might explain why there are hunter-gatherer populations today who eat far more red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.) These days farmed salmon are being fed like feedlot cattle, on grain, with the predictable result that their omega-3 levels fall well below those of wild fish. (Wild fish have especially high levels of omega-3 because the fat concentrates as it moves up the food chain from the algae and phytoplankton that create it.) Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain fed and the salmon krill fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on grain, we might actually be better off eating the beef. (Grass-finished beef has a two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to -3 compared to more than ten to one in corn-fed beef.) The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten.

The fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that food’s food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is that beef is beef and salmon salmon. It also throws a new light on the whole question of cost, for if quality matters so much more than quantity, then the price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients in it. If units of omega-3s and beta-carotene and vitamin E are what an egg shopper is really after, then Joel’s $2.20 a dozen pastured eggs actually represent a much better deal than the $0.79 a dozen industrial eggs at the supermarket. As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go on unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.

OKAY, but what about to someone equipped with a more or less standard-issue set of human taste buds? How different does a pastured chicken actually taste? It certainly smelled wonderful when I raised the lid on the barbecue to put the corn on. The chicken was browning nicely, the skin beginning to crisp and take on the toasty tones of oiled wood. The corn, on which I’d rubbed some olive oil and sprinkled salt and pepper, would take only a few minutes—all it needed was to heat up and for a scattering of kernels to brown. The browning of the chicken skin and the corn looked similar but in fact it owed to completely different chemical reactions, reactions that were contributing to their flavors and smells. The corn was caramelizing, as its sugars broke apart under the heat and formed into hundreds of more complicated aromatic compounds, giving a smoky dimension to the corny sweetness. Meanwhile, the chicken skin was undergoing what chemists called the Maillard reaction, in which carbohydrates in the chicken react