I feel compelled to give this book top marks, not because it I loved every second of it, and not because I agreed with every one of Pollan’s many opinions, but simply because I cannot imagine a better book about food. For a book dedicated to such a seemingly banal subject as what to eat for dinner, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is remarkably ambitious—so ambitious, in fact, that I am inclined to view my dinner with even more reverence than I customarily do.
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The titular dilemma refers to the difficulty omnivores have in choosing what to eat. A panda or a koala does not have to spare a moment’s thought in deciding that question. But for a human, capable of eating everything from fried beetles to foie gras, this choice can be dizzyingly open-ended. Traditionally, culture has cut through this infinitude of options by prescribing a typical diet. But in the United States—a place nearly bereft of culture—we have come to rely on government regulation, food science, and big industry to take the place of these traditional prescriptions. The problem, as our waistlines reveal, is that these make poor substitutes.
tt
So Michael Pollan sets out to investigate the American diet, using four meals as focal points. The first is an order from McDonalds, which represents industrial food. Unsurprisingly, it is a depressing picture. Farmers grow acres upon acres of genetically modified corn, which is itself not fit for eating, but meant to be processed into any number of food products. Much of this corn (along with soybeans) is also fed to cattle, who are not really evolved to eat the stuff, but are fed it anyway because the corn makes them fatter, faster. One of the more memorable scenes of the book is Pollan’s visit to a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation)—which is equal parts horrifying and disgusting.
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The next meal is a dinner cooked with ingredients from Whole Foods, which represents industrial organic. Pollan takes the reader through the history of the organic movement, revealing how the designation “organic” has come to be defined by bureaucrats in ways that are not necessarily meaningful. The truth, he concludes, is that many of these products are only marginally better than their non-organic industrial counterparts. After that, we get to the centerpiece of the book: Pollan’s portrait of Polyface Farm, run by Joel Salatin. Salatin uses what you might call deliberately old-fashioned, small-scale techniques to create an ultra-sustainable farm—where cows, chickens, and pigs are used to graze, clean, and fertilize the soil. He sells his products directly to customers.
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The final meal (after Pollan eats a chicken from Polyface) is one that he grows, gathers, or hunts himself. He shoots a wild pig, “hunts” some wild mushrooms, and gathers some vegetables from his garden to create what, for him, is the perfect meal. But why “perfect”? Because, Pollan says, this is the only meal he has ever had in which he knew exactly where everything came from, and what it took to get it to his table. In contrast to the meal from McDonalds, in other words—which is made out of who-knows-what from who-knows-where—the food is entirely transparent. This is Pollan’s ideal.
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In the end, then, Pollan is advocating that we eat very much how Joel Salatin wants us to: old-fashioned, and small-scale. Perhaps it would be quickest to describe him as a modern-day Rousseauian—someone who thinks that the natural is always preferable to the artificial. He argues, for example, that scientists have not truly discovered what makes soil fertile or food nutritious, so traditional practices are possibly better guides. He thinks we should eat what we can get locally, and in-season, so that we can feel a connection to the land and understand where the food came from. He is, in a word, an anti-industrialist.
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Now, that is quite an unfairly simplistic summary of Pollan’s positions. Even so, I cannot help but suspect that he is advocating something unworkable. I simply do not think that we could feed the world using farming practices like those in Polyface. And how could everyone in a major city eat locally? This is not to say that we cannot create more sustainable farms or attempt to reduce food transportation. But I don’t see this as a grand solution. Admittedly, Pollan was writing when the issue of global warming was not as omnipresent an issue as it is today. He has an entire chapter on the morality of meat-eating, for example, without mentioning what has become the primary reason for reducing meat consumption: greenhouse gas emissions.
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It would be unfair to end this review without mentioning Pollans many virtues. For one, he is a great writer, able to both paint a scene and explain a concept with style. He is also intellectually broad. During the course of this book, he weaves a story together that includes chemistry, biology, government policy, history, philosophy, anthropology, and of course gastronomy. And he is thorough. He visits an industrial cornfield, buys a cow in a CAFO, spends a week at Polyface Farm, and learns to fire a rifle and identify wild mushrooms. I very much appreciated these eyewitness reports, as I often feel myself quite disconnected from my own personal food-chain.
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In sum, if you want to think more deeply than ever before about what to have for dinner—so deeply that you accidentally start pondering the whole cosmos—then I can heartily recommend this book.

So much has been written about this book, and so much will be defined by how you feel comfortable when discussing your eating habits. Here are, in short forms, my 10 observations:

1)tIf you’ve ever wondered how much the American government is responsible for your eating by subsidizing corporations who grow corn and make high fructose corn syrup, this is a book for you! SHORT VERSION: Corn is in EVERYTHING! We committed to growing corn when we could possibly switch to many varied crops. Corn is uniform, so it’s very corporate. If you hate political reading, if you don’t want to know this stuff, or you don’t frankly care, skip Pollan’s book. (Hope you enjoy your diabetes.)

2)tYes, we know organic food is better for us. But Pollan does a great job telling us that the US family’s annual food budget has actually dropped over the last 60 years, so Americans could conceivably spend more on food (and probably less on entertainment) and help out their diets.

3)tI thought his section on Whole Foods founder John Mackey was interesting. Mackey completely concedes that he isn’t as radical as he started, that he has basically bought into the American corporate structure in order to take baby steps in supporting a business and helping people eat more healthfully.

4)tAt times, Pollan sounds a little Communist. At least, anti-Capitalist. I’m ok with that – to each his own – and I believe that American politics is all about constant discourse and adjustment.

5)tKnowing the details of a slaughterhouse was a little much for me, but then again, I have no problem killing what I eat. Which makes me unlike 97% of Americans, who like to think their meat comes fully formed in plastic packages.

6)tI love how Pollan describes the grey color of a McDonald’s burger. Funny! (I still crave Wendy’s once or twice a month.)

7)tMushroom foraging always sounded like something I wanted to do. Until I read his accounts. Mushroom foragers are crazy, obsessed people!

8)tHe’s lucky he had help at parts, or Pollan would’ve starved.

9)tI like how he concedes that there is a better way to eat meat – that you don’t have to become a militant vegan.

10)tI still wish we humans would accept that we are PART of the food chain!!! GRRR! We have canines; we have eaten meat for centuries. Our whole digestive system is built for meat! Lots of animals eat meat. We are not better than other animals that kill; the only thing that could possibly make us better is if we kill as quickly and painlessly as possible. We are the predators, and we should act as such – but with judiciousness and care. When we try to be ABOVE IT ALL – when we manipulate the environment – as Pollan excellently points out – we ruin it. “Dominion” humans create corporate slaughterhouses and run animals to extinction. Vegans treat animals as individuals to be coddled and encouraged to overproduce; soon, we’ll be overrun with deer and pumas and wild boar while we huddle eating berries from the sides of our abandoned roads (vehicles lead to road kill!) We need to accept that humans – like our predator cousins - do kill to survive, that we can be better at it, and that we are not ABOVE the food chain – as meat eaters or vegans – we are part of the system and should act accordingly. (Pollan mentions this, but doesn’t bring it home.)

For a nonfiction book, this has it all. A personal perspective as well as one from investigative journalism. The book explains the omonivore's dilemma - since we can eat anything, what should we eat? And how do we avoid that which can kill us? A koala bear, eating only eucalyptus leaves has no such worries.

The book goes from industrial food production, via organic, to own hunted, gathered & grown food. It's fascinating and horrifying. The industrial scale meat production is truly horrid. As a side note - I cringed a bit this morning. I met a slaughter house lorry that had collected bovine neighbors destined for eternal ever after driving to work. However, at least these cows and bulls have been grass fed and had a good life, according to their own creatureness up to this point. That is unusual these days. The industrial beef is fed on corn, in conditions - standing in their own waste, in crowded conditions - that make them sick. My neighbor's beef cows spend their days outside, being moved from pasture to pasture.

I would like to be a vegetarian again, but as the author explains, its sets you apart. If you are invited to a dinner, the host must accommodate for you, making you feel bad. So I eat everything set before me, but if I cook it myself, I avoid beef and swine. The fowl is from a local producer where they range outside. I will prepare reindeer, but again, these have roamed free until slaughter and thus had a good life while it lasted. Unlike bovine meat, that I can never be quite sure of. How pigs are slaughtered in this country (Norway, they are first gassed with CO2) puts me off bacon.

This book take a long hard look at the options. You can look away from how your food is produced, or you can look. And while you look, you make your choices. Of course it is not viable that everyone hunts and gathers for themselves. But maybe you can produces some of your own food? I do, with great relish. Not enough to get me through winter by any means - but my sister manages this with her suburban potato field, so I expect I too will expand.

What shocked me most in this book is the amount of fossil fuel required for a grown beef cow - a barrel. There is a huge waste of fuel in transportation as well, which is why anything you can grow or buy locally has a huge environmental advantage.

I know you might not want to pick this up, in case you need to revise your eating habits. You should do so anyway. It's fascinating in its horror, and maybe it could actually lead you in a healthier direction. For your own sake - and for the sentient beings you choose to eat.

Update: The Wilson Quarterly provides a very nice slideshow of Polyface Farm, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, which plays a key role in Pollan's examination of sustainable agriculture.

            •                 •                 •                 •                 •

I thought when I started this book that a review would be superfluous—after all, it was published many years ago and has been reviewed thousands of times. But the material is provocative, and some reviews on this and similar books induce yet more thinking.

There’s certainly a lot to talk about when it comes to food. I suppose that has always been the case, but two relatively new topics have shoved their way onto the bestsellers list. Well, perhaps “two” is too limited, but it's a good if arbitrary start.

First, the health angle. There are quite a few books exploring how and why today’s food is so bad for us. Here the general idea is to examine how what-we-eat isn’t quite what-we-should-be-eating. This discussion goes in two directions: backwards, into our evolutionary development, to ask why is it we so enjoy food that isn’t good for us; and currently, looking at our consumer “preferences”: why is it our national (and, increasingly, global) diet is even less healthy than even our natural inclinations have historically made it?

The other hot topic examines the many ways in which feeding the human race has become very bad for the planet and its inhabitants, especially those we eat. Again, this can be split many ways: how simply feeding so many billions of humans taxes the planet’s resources and health; how the diets of the developed world exaggerate that effect; and how the industrial food production system further exacerbates the problem.

Threaded through both of these is the ethical problem: what should an enlightened human being be eating, anyway? And if that diet includes meat, how should we treat our meat?

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma certainly fits within the scope of all of the above, but isn’t really central to any of them. In an important sense, Pollan has written a very different book, one that very gently deals with a deeper problem. One of his few failings is that he doesn’t make this distinction evident enough: most readers will notice the similarities to the avalanche of other food-reform books, and not the differences.

After all, Pollan does investigate the factory farm system, and its horrors are quite evident. And he shows that even “organic” farming can be captured and compromised by the industrial paradigm.

But the title of Pollan’s book hints at the difference: he isn’t delivering a polemic or jeremiad; he is troubled at how the original dilemma faced by everyone has changed and sharpened in our modern world. Carnivores and herbivores don’t have any options regarding what they eat. Our dilemma, in a nutshell, is that unlike many other creatures, we are forced to choose what to eat and what not to eat. We have the advantage over other omnivores that our decision can be informed by culture and education; but we also have the burden that our decision has ethical and cultural consequences.


Pollan divides his book into three meals.

The first is how the industrial “food system” gathers raw materials and manipulates them into “products”, such as a typical McDonald’s Value Meal, or a Weight Watcher’s frozen dinner. Corn, it turns out, plays an astonishingly larger role in this process than one might expect; so much that even a meal that notionally contains no corn might still actually draw the vast majority of its original caloric energy from that heavily domesticated tropical grass. He illuminates the effects of such a factory system on the welfare of cattle, for example, or political and economic distortions induced, or the amount of petroleum required, but he doesn’t come across as preaching — just informing.

(My favorite tidbit from this section was a reminder of the astonishing way corn becomes the source of so many of those other ingredients in processed food: “Natural raspberry flavor” doesn’t mean the flavor came from a raspberry; it may well have been derived from corn, just not from something synthetic. Only a tiny number of additives are actually derived from petroleum—so far...)

The second meal is derived from a small farm that depends, as far as can be managed, solely on solar energy via plants. Specifically, grass plays the central and foundational role in an integrated and carefully orchestrated ecosystem of farm animals. Every “output” is transformed into an “input” elsewhere; cow manure left in a field, for instance, becomes the growth medium for insect larvae (yeah, fly maggots) that are eaten by chickens, whose droppings then become fertilizer for yet more grass.

The bucolic atmosphere and almost complete lack of industrial inputs makes us consider this form of pastoral farming pre-modern, but the ecological management is so information-intensive that it is also post-industrial. This is clearly an approach that is better for people, for animals, and for the environment... but had its own share of problems. This kind of farm is called a “Management-Intensive Grazing” operation, and the orchestration is almost overwhelming, and requires such a high degree of daily commitment that it is difficult to imagine this becoming more than a niche player in the globe’s food production. Furthermore, getting the food to consumers is another task that has found no easy solutions. Direct farm-to-consumer connections can be found in some areas, but not many. Farmers markets, CSA and the like are exciting developments, but don’t easily scale up to support large and widely distributed populations.

The final meal described is definitely pre-modern; in fact it is an attempt to recapture a pre-industrial mode of eating. Pollan did his best to personal gather all of the ingredients for a meal, including gathering wild mushrooms, harvesting produce and fruit, and hunting wild boar. That last effort brought the omnivore’s dilemma back to the fore again, as he struggled to consciously reconcile his meat eating with his liberal culture and modern critiques of the ethical treatment of animals. He reluctantly abstained from eating meat while he dealt with this, even going so far as to discuss the issue via email with Peter Singer, the contemporary philosopher most associated with animal rights and veganism. In the end, he concluded “What’s wrong with eating animals is the practice, not the principle.”

In examining the vegan choice, he points out that even there the practice can get in the way of the principle. Harvesting grain — even organic wheat — is typically done with a combine: a large machine that will frequently shred field mice and other small critters that get in the way. Modern agriculture is problematic for everyone, not just liberal omnivores.


Pollan never solves the dilemma for us. None of these three approaches will solve the problems we face in our attempt to both feed billions of people and keep the planet and our consciences happy. What differentiates The Omnivore’s Dilemma is how Pollan personalizes the problem. We can eat better—we almost can not eat worse—and we must eat better. But our personal choices create our food culture, and none of these choices are simple. Unfortunately, almost all of us prefer to avert our gaze and let “the market” decide for us.

(3.5) I made the mistake of reading this a decade after its publication, which means I already knew most of its facts about industrialized farming and the insidiousness of processed foods, especially high-fructose corn syrup. I found Part I to be overly detailed and one-note, constantly harping on about corn. The book gets better as it goes on, though, with Pollan doing field research at Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in Virginia to compare large-scale organic agriculture with more sustainable grassroots operations. As Salatin puts it, “You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.” A McDonald’s meal may be cheaper than an organic/local one, but that price tag doesn’t take into account the environmental toll of cheap beef and corn.

Pollan’s assessment of the ethics of eating meat is not quite as thorough as Jonathan Safran Foer’s (in Eating Animals), but he does a good job of showing all sides of the issue, and is honest about his own difficulty in killing for food – a chicken at Polyface, and a wild pig he shot in the forests of California to produce a mostly foraged local feast. My favorite section of the book was about foraging for this final, “perfect” meal. He captures how I’ve always felt about foraging: “this felt more like something for nothing, a wondrous and unaccountable gift.”

This would make an excellent, comprehensive introduction to where food comes from for people who have never given it much thought. But then again, the people who need it most would probably never pick up a dense 400+-page book by a liberal journalist.

I'm satisfied to buy my food from the supermarket and not worry about where it came from. So the prospect of tracing the American human food chain to its origins seemed akin to taking bitter medicine for me. But I wanted to be a well informed world citizen so I started this book with some apprehension. Fortunately, I found the author to be a entertaining story teller. I found the last quarter of the book especially entertaining where the author tells about his experiments with being a hunter-gatherer. However, the underlying message of the book is a serious one that everybody should hear. The book teaches the reader compelling lessons about what we are actually eating and what the costs of our choices are in terms of our dependence on oil, the toll on the environment, and the health of our bodies.

Here are some questions answered by this book:
1. Why does a typical US citizen have a higher percentage of carbon atoms in their body that originated in a corn plant than a typical Mexican? (Despite the fact that Mexican's eat a lot of corn tortillas and Anglo-American's eat a lot of wheat bread.)
2. What does "Free range chicken" mean? How free and how large was the range?
3. Is "industrial-organic" an oxymoron? Or what does "organic" mean?
4. Why would being a "grass farmer" be considered by some to be a revolutionary way of farming?

This book was published in 2006, so the prices for corn, wheat and soybeans have risen significantly since then due to the increase in demand caused by ethanol production. So some of the things said in the book about corn prices are a little dated. But fuel and fertilizer prices have risen also, so the overall discussion about the profitability of farming is still probably correct.

Изключително популярна книга, за която много хора казват, че ги е "шокирала с разкритията си", но мен не ме впечатли ни най-малко.

Да, предполагам, че ако си нямаш никаква идея както от здравословно хранене, така и от това от къде идва храната ни, описанията на индустриалното фермерство и производство на повечето храни могат да те стреснат.

Ако обаче като погледнеш щанда в магазина, горе долу знаеш кои от хранителните продукти са боклуци, тая доста дълга и пълна със сензационен език книга няма какво особено да ти каже.

Относно стила и езика обаче аз имам какво да кажа, защото се ядосвам. Ще се сетите какво имам предвид - напоследък е станал модерен сред научно-популярните издания и предавания един език и начин на изразяване и поднасяне на информацията, който мога да определя само като "сензационен" - можеше да се види по предаванията по Дискавъри преди той да се превърне в риалити-шоу канал.

Казаното се представя така, сякаш се разкриват някакви големи мистерии, сякаш е нещо невероятно, невиждано, НЯМА ДА ПОВЯРВАТЕ КАКВО ЩЕ ВИДИТЕ СЛЕД РЕКЛАМИТЕ!!!

Освен, че "закача" вниманието на зрителя/читателя, в което, предполагам, няма нищо лошо, подобен начин на представяне на информацията има страничният ефект да го (зрителя/читателя) оставя с впечатлението, че наученото от него е от особено голяма важност, научна стойност и смисъл за разбирането на света.

Всъщност, по подобен начин могат и най-често биват, представяни по-скоро тривиални факти, теории и чисти предположения.

Utterly engaging and the perfect follow up to Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories. Food indeed makes a very engrossing reading.

While I read this book, I couldn't help but think about the muckrakers of the early 20th century. This book is pretty much nothing like The Jungle, starting with the fact that it is nonfiction, but its goal isn't that far away. It's telling a story about a part of our food industry that we don't normally think to ask about and painting a picture that should make us angry enough to do something about it.

And don't get me wrong, Pollan rakes a lot of really good muck. Mostly it's his interpretation of his muck that doesn't work for me.

I think the really important information comes in the first half of the book. Pollan gives us a crash course in agriculture subsidies. He compares our currently corn-focused subsidy structure to historic subsidies that were geared toward a broader spectrum of food. Then he goes into detail about what it means to live in a food chain that is designed to produce the most corn at the cheapest price. The answer? Corn is essentially in every processed food we eat. Meanwhile, corn farmers can barely keep their farms afloat because the price has been pushed down so far that they can barely produce enough product to cover their mortgages, and they dump so much fertilizer onto their fields to raise production that it ends up leeching into the water supply all the way to the ocean.

Pollan then takes the corn story to the cattle industry and gives us a pretty ugly picture of what it means to raise corn-fed cattle. We thought that corn-fed cattle were a good thing, right? It's advertised on the stickers on our steaks. Except that cow biology rejects corn. The resulting situation not only makes the lives of the cows highly questionable at best, but it presents some very real health concerns for we the consumers.

Buying organic fixes the problem, right? Wrong. Large-scale organic produce and livestock may not be what you think they are. Think your chickens are free-range? That just means they need to have access to the outdoors, which they are trained never to use. Corporate organic livestock is raised in environments little better than its non-organic counterpart, and they're probably fed corn too.

OTOH, Pollock's story actually made me more positive about organic produce. One thing that organic regulations do accomplish is requiring a use of fertilizer that is not nearly so destructive to the environment.

All of this stuff is good stuff to know. In fact, I'd like to look for some other sources of this information so I deepen my knowledge and cross-check Pollan. The place where he loses me is in his interpretation.

This book got a lot of people justifiably riled up about the quality of their food and the state of their food production. And where does Pollan direct them? To back yard gardens and small family farming operations. In large part from this book, the bourgeois Localvore movement sprang up. So if you have enough money to pay twice the price for your food or the free time to produce it yourself, then you can have the satisfaction of opting out of the flawed food chain while leaving it essentially unimproved. A whole new luxury food industry has grown up to provide local food to the Localvores. Meanwhile, the corn subsidies and all their consequences continue unabated.

The problem as I see it is that Pollan wraps up aesthetics with his practicality. Aesthetically, he is drawn to family farms where there are a lot more workers per square acre, a larger variety of produce and livestock are produced, and resources are used in a way he perceives as more efficient. The problem is that these qualities might make him feel good, but they don't actually address most of the problems he brought up in his muckraking.

One of the sections that got my goat most was a several-page indictment of Value Added. You see, when companies make breakfast cereal, they take corn, puff it up, color it, put sugar on it, and (gasp) sell it for more than the price of the corn! The horrors of those corporate money grubbers!

Look. Value Added is a core economic concept. I don't suppose Pollan expected people to pay the same amount for his book as the cost of the wood pulp used to make the paper. I suppose he wanted to be paid more for writing it than the cost of the computer he composed it on. And what's his solution to paying for overpriced processed corn? To pay more for food that comes from the right farm. So which Value Added is legitimate and which one isn't?

It seems to me that food production needs four core traits. It needs to be:

- Responsible: Producing it doesn't destroy the land, the water supply, or the consumers.
- Plentiful: There's enough produced to feed everyone.
- Reliable: Every weather fluctuation doesn't put us in danger of a shortage or a famine.
- Cheap: Affordable to as many people as possible who need to eat.

Pollan really only addresses the first of these four issues, and that in an incomplete manner. His solutions pretty much stomp on Plentiful and Cheap. Back yard gardens and family farms are not going to be able to produce enough food to feed a majority of Americans, no matter what they are willing to pay.

It's really too bad that we couldn't have directed a lot more of this food production anger toward agricultural subsidy reform instead.

Gostei muito do livro. Já tinha achado o Botany of Desire bom, mas achei este melhor. Me abriu a cabeça pra como os EUA trata o cultivo de milho, pq tem tanto e como empurram isso em todo tipo de comida. Também fala sobre criação confinada de animais, como muitos orgânicos são cultivados em escala industrial e não têm nada de agricultura familiar, entre outras coisas. Recomendo pra qualquer tipo de público.

2006. NY Times Book Review One of the 10 Best Books of the Year.

We eat every day of our lives but we don't often give much thought to what we put in our bodies. If we are what we eat, then when it comes to meat, we are what the animal eats; and when it comes to produce, we are what the plant's grown in.

There's a food chain that extends around the world and throughout evolutionary history from the beginning of man. Michael Pollan takes us on a tour of that chain and in the process gives any thinking, eating, person a new, often disturbing, view of what he/she consumes.

Organized in three sections to illuminate industrial food (corn), pastoral food (grass), and personal food (the forest), Pollan's narrative builds toward meals made as nearly as possible with ingredients and methods from each of these categories.

I double-dog-dare anyone to read this book and walk through a modern supermarket without viewing each item of food differently. And if you're like me, take your glasses, because the real information about what we buy and eat is in the small print, written in code, to disguise as much as possible what we truly consume.

The central area of the supermarket is processed food. Good luck figuring that out. (When you can't determine the identity of fifteen out of eighteen ingredients on that package of processed whatever - chances are high what you're reading - and eating - are corn derivatives.)

Around the walls, where we find the produce, meat, and fish, it would seem that the information describing the food would be more straight-forward. Good luck figuring that out, too. (Chances are every formerly living item was nourished or fertilized with corn or corn derivatives.)

Unless you plan to follow a steer or a chicken through its life cycle to see how the animal lives, and dies, and becomes the food on your plate, you have to rely on someone like Pollan to take that trip for you, document his findings, and present it as he does here.

I've read about food my entire life and tried to keep up on healthy eating without succumbing to fads, but I've never encountered such an intelligent, entertaining, and practical guide to the state of food in America today as The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Read it and eat.

This is a basic culinary detective book. In modern America, Michael Pollan wonders what to eat: "... imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found it's way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost."

Of course most North Americans can't answer these questions in any self-satisfying way, so Pollan sets off on the case. He journeys through the belly of the food industry beast -- to the massive government-subsidized corn plantations of Iowa, the huge cattle feed lots and the slaughterhouses. He visits the plants where trainload after trainload of corn is refined into the chemical components of processed food, and then he takes his family to McDonalds.

Searching for alternatives to explore, Pollan visits large-scale organic plantations. He works for a spell on an organic family farm in Virginia, helping to slaughter the chickens for his next gourmet meal. And last he goes whole hog back to the hunter-gatherer days, searching for mushrooms and shooting a wild pig in the forests of Northern California.

The whole experience yields tons of great stories, and the kind of good common sense I can't resist quoting:

"A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximise efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which have historically served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism -- the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such cruelty" (p. 318).

But aside from the politics of soil and animal abuse, Pollan ends up with some damn fine meals, eaten with friends he makes along the way:

"Was the perfect meal the one you made all by yourself? Not necessarily; certainly this one wasn't that. Though I had spent the day in the kitchen (a good part of the week as well), and I had made most everything from scratch and paid scarcely a dime for the ingredients, it had taken many hands to bring this meal to the table. The fact that just about all those hands were at the table was the more rare and important thing, as was the fact that every single story about the food on the table could be told in the first person" (p. 409).