Acum un an și ceva, vă povesteam despre cartea lui Michael Pollan, Dileman omnivorului (https://filme-carti.ro/carti/dilema-o...). De curând, a apărut la Editura Publica și varianta pentru tinerii cititori și i-am dat și acesteia o șansă.
Michael Pollan a încercat să descopere secretele mâncării din farfuria noastre, mergând pe patru paliere importante: mâncarea procesată, mâncarea organic-industrială, mâncarea organică și mâncarea din natură (ceea ce vânăm și culegem). Cartea de față nu mai este așa de masivă (volumul original avea 600 de pagini), este simplificată pentru a fi pe înțelesul adolescenților și conține foarte multe imagini și scheme grafice. Se citește ușor și ne pune în fața multor întrebări cu privire la ceea ce mâncăm zilnic. Ceea ce e și mai important, te face să mănânci mai sănătos, mai local, mai organic.

Michael Pollan is quickly becoming a new favorite author. This book and all its lessons on the American food system will live in my brain rent-free for a long time to come.

This was one of my favorite nonfiction books of 2024!
Click here to hear more of my thoughts over on my Booktube channel, abookolive!

We are a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily (p. 3).

Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is a critique of industrial farms: they raise animals shoulder to shoulder standing in their own manure, feeding them foods that they are not designed for and which make them ill, and then use chemicals to compensate for these sins. Who knew that we are corn-eaters – not directly, like Mexicans, but through our cattle and chickens, and in processed foods.

“When you look at the isotope ratios,.. we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.” Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar."
(p. 23)

Pollan looks at industrial and pastoral farms, briefly flirts with being a vegetarian, then becomes a hunter/gatherer. He doesn't "look" the way I would, but goes out in the field, visiting and working farms, learning to hunt (and kill), and to gather wild mushrooms. Each major step on his journey is punctuated with a meal.

Our typical, industrial farm, Pollan argues, is not healthy for us (making us obese), not healthy for the animals (making them ill), and not healthy for the soil and environment (using vast amounts of oil to raise food in a monoculture). He may something good about this kind of farming, but I've forgotten it. This farming is good for conglomerates – making them rich – but not farmers or consumers.

His week on Joel Salatin's pastoral farm is fascinating – even for me, a vegetarian of more than 40 years. Salatin is a libertarian, deeply suspicious of government and governmental intervention. However, hw is a scientist's kind of farmer. He recognizes that everything is connected, so considers how to balance the activity and placement of cattle, chickens, pigs, and trees, each entering an environmental niche at a time that makes sense for the animals and farm, keeping all healthy while being largely chemical-free. As Salatin argues:

"Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.” (p. 243)

Finally, Omnivore's Dilemma is an ode to mindful, grounded eating, praising the food from Salatin's farm, but also that hunted and gathered in Sonoma and the Bay Area of California. He drools not just as be eats, but as he prepares to do so (although some of what he must do brings him close to losing his lunch), For Pollan, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted (pp. 409-410). He ends up in favor of locally-grown and harvested foods, foods with few chemicals, foods where we own the costs of eating.

Pollan convinces me – not to eat cow, as some parts of Omnivore's Dilemma would be well-served with Sinclair Lewis's The Jungle. He does convince me to invest in local farms. I had been considering dropping my CSA membership in favor of the farmer's market, but decided against this so I support local farmers (mine is a cooperative of 12 Amish farms and includes a handwritten letter by one farmer each week). We have been decreasing our consumption of processed foods, but Omnivore's Dilemma will likely speed up this process. And, I will hesitate – I can't promise more – the next time I am looking at vegetables from half-way around the world.

As Claude Lévi-Strauss argued, food must be “not only good to eat, but also good to think” (quoted on p. 289). Pollan's food-writing is thoughtful, and I enjoyed Omnivore's Dilemma as much for the writing as the content. And, he is dryly humorous.

Pollan clears Lévi-Strauss's bar.

I was so scared that this would turn out to be a foodie hipster's rant on what food should be like, instead of what it actually is. I'm relieved to admit that I was mistaken - in fact, it's one of the most thought-provoking books I've read this year. It's helped me to fully flesh out some apprehensions I had which I'd never actually put into words, such as 'Is organic really about chemical paranoia?' 'What's the environmental impact of mindlessly shipping food all over the continent?' 'How in the world does that even make sense economically?' Okay, that last one I had actually wondered about, more than once. I used to have a long commute.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is also less location specific than Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, which was a plus for me. I love reading about American lifestyles and behaviors (it's the whole deep-down-i-know-we're-next thing), but most of the industrial talk doesn't really apply to me. Pollan did a great job of giving a panoramic view of all the different approaches to eating in the first world, that's true. But mostly, it was his naturalist's view of things that made his discourse universal and relatable for me.

Also, I've realized I have some very strong and mostly unfair prejudices against hunters. A book that manages to make me change my mind on a particular subject* is a book that deserves 5 stars. Shame on me.

What else? Oh, apparently now I find ecology fascinating, which poses a new TBR list control challenge. F****ck.



*while quoting a lot of Ortega y Gasset, I might add. Ortega FTW!! I went through an Ortega phase when I was like 17, so anyone who quotes Ortega to prove a point instantly gets bonus points with me.

Twice a week, there is a farmer's market at my local park. It is half a block away from my house. For the last several years, I've brought food there. I can no longer eat, for instance, apples from the supermarket. They taste waxy. Considering how much I like my local farmer's market, it's surprising that it took me so long to read this book.

Seeing marked down to a dollar helped motivate me.

It's a good book. It's a scary book. It makes me want to buy everything from the farmer's market (which is impossible because they don't have chocolate and I need chocolate). I also have to say something that I never thought I would say.

Corn sex is fasinating. It really, truly is.

In thoughtful, clear, and inticing prose (much like a fine wine), Pollan leds the reader down a menu of food. The first part of the book concerns America as the corn chip nature. It is frightening how much corn is in things; the second section looks at organic foods and farm foods (or post organic), and the third concerns Pollan hunting and gathering his own food. Of the three sections, I enjoyed the second the best. Pollan describes Polyface farm in great detail and no romance. He also raises and discusses important points about meat and slaughtering. The section where Pollan discusses his own hunting is interesting because Pollan himself is not ashamed or afarid to show the reader his exhilaraion and shame. Even the section on corn is an interesting and thought provoking reader. Better yet, Pollan doesn't preach!

The Omnivore's Dilemma is definitely worth your thyme!

Have you ever thought about where that burger came from?

How about the diet of your store-bought salmon?

Are you just tired about hearing about the exhaustive origins of your food at every fancy restaurant?

Do you wish your hipster friends would stop trying to get you to forage for mushrooms?

Then I've got the book for you!

I'd been taking down the audiobook of Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals intermittently for months. It first started as a companion on a road trip, but gave way to the book I occasionally put on as I was doing some housework. At first, I found it a bit dull and slow-moving, due in no small part to Scott Brick's slow, laborious narration of the book. But as soon as I ticked up the narration speed to 1.5x, I couldn't stop finding excuses to put on my headphones and listen to this superb treatise on food.

This book is about humankind's relationship to food, the environment, and our own personal health. Earlier this year, I reviewed  The Dorito Effect by Mark Shatzker, and while both books deal with food, Pollan's book is more concerned with ecology than taste and flavour. Though, it should be noted, that there are plenty of delicious sounding food descriptions littering the 16-hour listening experience.

Four Meals

The premise of Pollan's book is based around four meals: fast-food, industrial farm, self-sustaining organic farm, and one meal hunted, foraged, and prepared by Pollan himself. Using this intuitive structure, Pollan is able to progress from least enjoyable and viable to the most rewarding and delicious of his meals. It also works because Pollan digs deep into the thoughts, historical events, and effects on the larger world that have shaped our industrial food chain. Though I like to think I know a lot about food and how the human body converts that food into energy, this book made me realize how little I know about the tumultuous transition between captured solar energy and the slab of meat on my plate.

Even if, when Pollan really digs into the ubiquity of corn in North American foods, I couldn't help but thinking of  this clip.

I won't attempt to condense Pollan's ideas into this simple review, but I will say that it helped me to think more fully about the meal from its origins to my plate. I'll admit that I've often been semi-interested to hear the stories and origins of my food in restaurants, but I now have a deep respect for what those restaurants are trying to accomplish. It makes more sense after listening to this book that you'd want to eat foods that are in season. Knowing where one's food comes from is an attempt to connect to that lost part of our evolutionary history, when eating meant that one had to discover, collect, and process a meal by their own hands.

I don't mind saying that this book makes me want to convert my backyard into farmland and that I began actively looking for opportunities to fish, hunt, and forage locally. Pollan makes convincing arguments, but is also an infinitely likeable guy. Pollan rarely preaches and he admits to enjoying the convenience that industrial foods provide. That Pollan is more of an everyman makes the listening experience more enjoyable, relatable, and helped me feel as if I could make some changes to my diet that would be more sustainable.

Books about food aren't for everyone, but this one makes a case for being one everyone should read or, as in my case, listen to. Indeed, though I love to read fiction, nonfiction seems to work best for me in audio format. Though the book is a tad older (originally published in 2006), it is highly relevant today when many of us have to decide between the slightly pricier local vegetables and the more affordable industrial greens. For the duration of my reading it made me a more conscious eater, and I have to say that I learned a lot more than expected! Be sure to check this one out!

I can't remember the last time I read a book I learned so much from. This is highly recommended for anyone who wonders about food, obesity, organic, local, vegetarian, etc. Quotes if you're interested (but I could have quoted the entire book!). I know I will never look at corn the same way, nor will I ever buy the "cheap eggs."


(On obesity)"Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest."

"Nature never puts all her eggs in one basket."

"One day Frank Purdue and Don Tyson are going to wake up and find that their world has changed. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen, just as it did for those Catholic priests who came to church one Sunday morning only to find that, my goodness, there aren't as many people in the pews today. Where in the world has everybody gone?"

(About his temporary trial of vegetarianism)"What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people."

(About mushroom hunting, just because it made me laugh) "I found myself, idiotically, taunting the morels whenever a bunch of them suddenly popper out. 'Gotcha!' I would cry, as if this were a game we were playing, the mushrooms and I, and I'd just won a round. This is not something I can ever imagine saying to an apple in the garden; there, it just wouldn't be news."

I think this is maybe my least favorite of Pollan's books, which is not saying all that much because his books are great. I think he is over-indulgent of the small farmers he meets. I agree with him about the travesty of our food production, but I'm just not convinced that all local production is better than all international production. People have been trading goods for a long time and planting crops from one part of the world in another. I don't know why it's magic to eat local. Plus, the chicken farmer that he meets seems super condescending. However, the general message that we have lost touch with how our food is produced is absolutely right. We need to understand how animals are killed and we need to know what hunting and foraging is like. His hunting story at the end was my favorite part because it felt so honest and not overly idealized.

I love food. I really love food. I believe it is one of the most fascinating cultural facts in our lives. I particularly love food that is taken as meals and then the words that gather about meals – not least that most beautiful word ‘sharing’. Because food is never better than when it is shared as ours.

Recently I was delighted to learn the etymology of the word ‘companion’. That has become my favourite way to describe the people I’m fond of. The word comes from Latin and means ‘with bread’ – that is, someone you share bread with. Isn’t that the most beautiful of metaphors?

Then again, there is food and then there is food – and this is a book about all of the various types of food available to us in this modern world of ours. It is a book that has made me think about what I eat, how I eat it and to question what can only be called the morality of food. And then it also made me think of the psychology of food and the sociology of food in ways I really didn’t expect.

The book reminded me of many other books. It reminded me of Fast Food Nation, but I think I enjoyed this more (which is really saying something). It reminded me of Orion’s Legacy too, and not just because of the hunting stuff towards the end. This guy is so engaging and interesting. And like any good meal there are general themes and flavours but also many tasty asides.

This book is structured around four meals. Before bringing us to the table for each of these meals he explains how the food got to the table too. The four meals are related to the various ways food is obtained in our modern world. Naturally, the first is industrial farming and the first meal is a McDonald’s hamburger eaten in a car that is being driven at 60 miles an hour.

Did you know that one in five meals eaten in America are eaten in a car? Isn’t that the saddest statistic you have heard today?

Recently I’ve been reading books about economics which have turned out to be very much in favour of free market economics. Essentially, they have told the story of how any interference in the operation of free markets is anathema and that the damnation thus brought about by this interference is found in the distortions that invariably cause harm to what they initially sought to protect. The story of corn farming in the USA is a horribly vivid illustration of the effects of the interference in the operation of market forces leading to grotesque distortions which achieve the opposite of this interference’s original intent. Industrial production of corn using fossil fuel fertilisers so that the corn can be either turned into sugar to create rivers of soft drinks or chaff to feed cows in ways nature never intended is more than just morally questionable. The lives of these cows are an unspeakable torture, made no less so by the fact we have short-circuited their lives to a mere 14 months. These animals don’t normally eat corn and the descriptions of their sufferings when they are forced to is both repulsive and infuriating. If you don’t come away from reading this section thinking, “Not in my name” I can only say you are totally lacking in compassion. This is an industry that could hardly make itself less sustainable. It is clear that it needs to be changed, in fact, it needs to be done away with.

What I liked most about this book was that it didn’t then say: organic is best, buy organic – which is what I thought was coming. In fact, he spends a lot of time talking about how ‘organic’ food isn’t necessarily ‘environmentally friendly’ food. I am one of those dags (oh, Australian slang – it actually means the shit that gets caught in the wool around a sheep’s arse, but has come to mean someone who is a bit ‘naff’, for my English friends, and ‘dorky’ for my American ones) who buys free-range eggs, not because I think they taste any better (I’m sure they don’t) but because I can’t bring myself to eat eggs from chickens that have been treated so appallingly. When I didn’t think about it, everything was fine – but once I did think about it I would rather pay the extra dollar or two so as to be able to enjoy the eggs and not feel like a Nazi prison guard. Some of what he says here about ‘free range’ chickens is also disturbing and the phrase ‘false advertising’ comes to mind.

However, his description of ‘pastoral food’ is a pure delight and possibly worth reading all on its own if you are in a hurry and don’t want to read the whole book. You know, if you are after the fast food version. Sustainable, thoughtful, inspiring – this really is the heart of the ‘lesson’ of this book and was nearly enough to make me want to go off and start a farm. It also contains what is, for me, the saddest line in the book – about the A grade students in the countryside being stolen from the farms and the D grade students being left behind to be exploited by the clever people from Wall Street and to donate lots of money to televangelists. The sad fact is that I found this sad mostly because it confirms so many of my prejudices about those who live in rural areas – it is not hard to see why Marx proposed the mass industrialisation of agriculture. It was the only way he could imagine of dragging these poor souls out of the horrendous world of ignorance and fear that clungs to them like the mud that sticks to their boots.

I think many people may feel this book looses its way towards the end – particularly where he goes off to hunt and gather his own food to prepare his final meal. That is what I thought as this part started. At least, until he got into his stride (which, as always, did not take very long). The stuff he has to say about mushrooms, for instance. is utterly fascinating. I had no idea that we know so little about mushrooms. In fact, our ignorance of mushrooms seems quite staggering. Pollan handles those on the ‘lunar’ end of the fungus world (lunar in both the figurative and literal senses of the word) with a deftness and wit that is a pure joy. If you are thinking of picking the eyes out of this book then this section is another must read.

There are very few pleasures in life that are more human than preparing a meal for the people you love. At least twice in this book he mentions Freud and sex and suggests that Freud could have better based his ideas on desire for food. I suspect that today we are not nearly as stuffed up about sex as we are about food. I learnt an awful lot from this book and had a really nice time with the author as he taught me these things – he is a very clever man and an engaging writer.

If I had lots more time on my hands I would like to write an Australian version of this book, about where our food comes from and the costs of the inputs into producing it. I would also, if I had lots and lots more time, like to spend some time learning how to find field mushrooms and to learn more about what makes these remarkable creatures tick. Did you know that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants?

And the dilemma? Well, actually, there are many, many dilemmas – between industrial and sustainable food, between eating new things and eating what you ‘know’, between conscious eating and wilful blindness. This book didn’t make the writer a vegetarian, and it didn’t make me one either – but I did come away from this book wanting to be more aware of what I eat and what the choices I make when deciding what to eat mean.

If you want to learn about the real eating disorder affecting the world – this really is a book for you.

He makes some good points but in the end, it smacks of well-off white man over simplifying an incredibly complex issue. What the book has going for it is that it's a best seller, especially to the faux-liberal, over educated set and it's at least making them THINK about where their food is coming from. What I don't like though, is that it lets them off the hook as far as accountability if they just go about buying the RIGHT kind of meat. Well, all of that free range "humane" meat goes to the same creepy slaughterhouses that the factory farmed animals go to so really, from an ethical stand point, it's no better. Oh and the USDA Guidelines on what is considered free range are ridiculous, 5 minutes ACCESS to the outdoors a day earns you free range classification. Also, the idea of getting all of your meat from nearby sustainable family farms who do their own slaughter and processing is really great in theory but then won't it become a class issue when only rich people can afford it? Oh but I guess those are the same people reading this book so it's cool.

Oh and lots of his numbers were way off...he said we kill millions of animals a year for food in this country, more like BILLIONS. I talked to a guy yesterday who worked in a chicken slaughtering line in a prison way back when and said that he was responsible for personally killing 8,000 birds a day. slicing their necks open. ugh.

Oh another positive: I did learn a lot about corn from the book and have pretty much backed away from anything made with it.

I did not finish this book; made it about 200 pages and gave up. Learning about our dependence of corn was interesting, but I was turned off by the pretentious tone and Pollan's abhorrent fatphobia. After listening to the excellent podcast Maintenance Phase's analysis of the book, I realized I needed to come back and take off a few more stars. Among other things, the podcast hosts point out that the solutions to an unjust food system cannot revolve around personal choice, especially when those choices are largely only accessible to wealthy people with the access and resources to consistently eat organic, "small farm" produce and meat. It's not really a solution to the underlying systemic issues. He doesn't discuss unfair labor practices in the food industry (many of whom are immigrants and migrant workers), even while going into detail about he horrors of factory farmed meat. There's also the issues of passing off a right-wing libertarian farmer's de-regulation views as a "quirk" and basically giving him a huge platform, while idealizing the "mom and pop" farmers of old as if there aren't other colonization issues with it. Just, lots and lots of issues here. I'm a little embarrassed that I read it. If you're going to read this, at least listen to Maintenance Phase first.

Very interesting book exploring the differences and connections between three ways of eating. Factory farming, small farming/organic and foraging. I had no idea this country floated on an ocean of corn.

For a while there I thought Pollan was going to drag me kicking and screaming into vegetarianism, but eventually he let me off the hook.

He tells you everything you never thought to ask about how the food chain works. The bad news is that no way of eating is perfect. It’s given me a lot to think about when shopping for groceries. Perhaps more than I want to think about.