A VC in Vacationland

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan is one of the best supply chain strategy books ever written.  That’s a pretty strong endorsement from a guy who’s read most if not all supply chain strategy books produced in the last thirty years. It’s not your classic supply chain strategy book, but one that explores where your food comes from, how it gets to market and how your consumption affects and is affected by the environment in which the food as produced.

At the supply chain strategy level, the book explains in great detail how our food is sourced through four distinct supply chains–industrial, industrial organic, pastoral and personal. 

Industrial refers to how the vast majority of our food is produced, using corn as a basis for many products, along with “healthy” doses of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.  OK, not much new here, but the actual processes of how our industrial food machine creates and distributes so many products is fascinating reading.  Industrial organic refers to the Whole Foods supermarket world and related “organic” aisles at traditional grocers, with mega suppliers such as Cascadian Foods and Earthbound Farms providing huge quantities of “organic” (see the FDA guidelines and you will be surprised that the supply chain is only marginally different than the industrial, primarily in the use of pesticides and some fertilizers).  Pastoral refers to the “beyond organic” producers who are local providers of foods grown in a manner consonant with the environment, such as using manure and green plants as fertilizers and rotating crops to control pests. Personal refers to the “do-it-yourself” methods of hunter/gatherer food collection, including shooting your own meat, collecting your own greens and mushrooms,etc.

In spite of the fact the author is a vegetarian, he presents a very balanced view on the whole issue of animal meat consumption, mostly focused on the treatment of animals in the industrial and the industrial organic food chains.  I won’t spoil the story, but it will make you think a lot about where you food comes from and under what conditions it is “harvested”.

One interesting aspect of the book is that many of the industrial and industrial organic suppliers would not let him view their food production processes in detail, or at all.  Many suppliers cited national security concerns, so as not to give potential terrorists insights in where and how food is produced, as if they could not figure that one out for themselves.  The scary part is how easy it would be to disrupt parts of our food supply chains if terrorists figured out ways to poison food in process, something we manage to do quite well it seems all by ourselves–witness the latest salmonella scare with tomatoes (or is it jalapeno’s?)and our inability to figure out where those vegetables were sourced.