There is nothing more excruciating than having to read a book you're uninterested in for class. I can't really say this book was a waste of my time though because i gained some useful knowledge from it and some parts equally annoyed me but what more can i expect from a book riddled with self righteous prose from an author who writes in a way that sets him up on the "right" moral pedestal? This may not have been his intention but i do not care either way. I am just glad i finished it and i hope to never be subjected to the torture of reading a book i have no interest in, for class again.

So long and good riddance!

Cosa mangiamo veramente?
E' un paradosso sentirlo dire (anzi, leggerlo) da un'amante del trash food come me, una ventiquattrenne che prima inghiotte il boccone e poi, semmai, chiede cos'è. E che a volte non vuole nemmeno saperlo.
Michael Pollan, in occasione di una visita alla Magic Valley, che a sentir lui -così scrive nell'introduzione- gli ha fatto passare per sempre la voglia di mangiare patatine fritte, decide di scoprirlo.
Nella prima sezione del libro l'autore analizza quattro catene alimentari, cioè quattro sistemi di coltivazione, produzione e consegna del cibo:
- La catena industriale riguarda la coltivazione massiva di enormi campi, soprattutto di mais e soia. Il mais (abituatevi a leggerlo in ogni salsa) è ovunque. Pollan sembra quasi un predicatore fanatico che avverta il mondo dell'avvento dell'Anticristo Mais, presente in ogni tipo di carne e uovo (perché alimento prevalente, e spesso unico, degli animali da macello), in moltissime bevande sottoforma di sciroppo di glucosio, ma anche in prodotti non alimentari. L'Anticristo Mais soverchia ogni altra coltivazione perché è più economico e redditizio, impoverisce i grandi coltivatori a vantaggio del governo, produce malattie nei capi di bestiame che dovrebbero essere allevati a foraggio.
- Analizzando la catena biologica industriale Pollan fa una critica non troppo velata alle aziende che producono cibi biologici che decisamente biologici non sono, e alle istituzioni governative che tengono tanto bassi gli standard per considerare un alimento, per l'appunto, biologico.
- Per quanto riguarda gli alimenti sostenibili locali, l'autore decide di lavorare per una settimana in una fattoria a conduzione alimentare che utilizza metodi del tutto naturali per la coltivazione del foraggio e per l'allevamento dei capi di bestiame, partecipando a ogni momento della produzione, persino alla mattanza dei polli. L'invito di Pollan è chiaramente quello di servirsi di alimenti acquistati in stabilimenti analoghi, più costosi dei cibi da supermercato ma del tutto salutari e prodotti nel pieno rispetto della natura e degli animali.
- Nel quarto capitolo, il pasto fai-da-te, l'autore vuole andare fino in fondo: preparerà una cena utilizzata con prodotti quasi esclusivamente da lui reperiti alla fonte primaria; si recherà dunque a caccia - e per farlo supererà il proprio dilemma del carnivoro, ossia: è giusto mangiare carne? -, raccoglierà funghi, proverà addirittura a estrarre il sale dalla Baia di San Francisco. Pollan, almeno per una volta, desidera essere veramente consapevole di ciò che mangia e di quel che implica l'uccisione di un animale selvatico.
Alla prima segue una breve sezione dedicata a riflessioni e consigli per tutti i consumatori.

Due, a mio parere, sono i principali problemi di questo libro-inchiesta:
1. La Y Giunti ha pubblicato un adattamento del libro integrale di Pollan (edito da Adelphi) comprensibile ai giovani adulti, cui appunto è dedicata la collana. Adesso, quel che mi chiedo io è: a che pro una riduzione? Premettendo che sono convinta che un libro del genere sia molto utile per conoscenza personale ed educazione alimentare, il teenager italiano medio non si interessa certo di inchieste alimentari, e quella fetta a cui interessano sono certa non avrà bisogno di un simile adattamento che a volte sembra un sussidiario delle scuole medie. Il modo in cui cerca di rendere più chiari concetti già di per sé semplici per uno studente -il target medio della collana- ha come unico risultato quello di farli sembrare contorti.
2. Buona parte di ciò che scrive Pollan vale per la produzione alimentare americana. In Italia di problemi alimentari ne abbiamo altrettanti ma diversi, perché non tutto ciò che importiamo viene dall'America.

Questo libro vi cambierà la vita? Assolutamente no. Mentre leggevo degli additivi chimici aggiunti ai McNugget's guardavo le foto delle crocchette di pollo e riflettevo che me ne sarei volentieri mangiate una dozzina in quel momento; durante la mattanza dei polli avevo in mente soltanto un delicato arrostino che rosolava nel forno intinto nel limone e nel rosmarino; persino leggendo il capitolo dedicato al mattatoio dei manzi, o dello scuoiamento del maiale selvatico appena catturato, tutto ciò a cui pensavo erano hamburger e costolette profumate che si doravano sulla griglia. L'intento di Pollan era quello di far passare la fame. A me l'ha fatta venire.
E adesso vado a farmi una merendina al mais.

I liked Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma so much that I searched goodreads reviews for reasons not to like it.

Let me explain.

Whenever a really influential book like this comes out, there's a pretty reliable pattern that follows. There's the newspaper "toast of the town" effect, followed by bland and ubiquitous morning TV interviews, and, if you're lucky, an innocuous appearance on Oprah, probably followed by a massive boost in sales. However, there is usually a fairly large group of people absolutely pissed off by the book (or film) because it simplifies or overlooks some crucial matter or matters.

I'm aware that Pollan made it all the way to Oprah, and I didn't want to be what some call an "Oprah sheep," but I just couldn't hate The Omnivore's Dilemma no matter how hard I tried.

Pollan goes into quite a bit of detail throughout the book, but in a general way, we could say that he examines the American supermarket and notices that it seems to present food in a way that is detached from the production of food, particularly the natural processes on which food production relies. Pollan examines how food is produced and explores three "food chains" -- the industrial, the pastoral, and the personal. If food production was a spectrum, then the industrial (monoculture, feedlots, preservatives, processed foods, and international shipping) and the personal (hunter / gatherer) would be at opposing ends. Although Pollan acknowledges that a hunter/ gatherer model is an unrealistic way to feed a country, he points out that it has the benefit of connecting the eater to what we might call the ecology of food. So try to move closer to the personal, "conscious" method of eating by finding an alternative food chain.

What does this spectrum mean for us? Organic food does not rely on pesticides or antibiotics, but it is closer to industrial than the personal because it's shipped around the world. Buying food from a local farmer moves us closer to personal since we have some idea of where our food comes from. Meat eaters that have actually seen the animal they're eating die -- or how it dies -- are closer to the personal end of the spectrum. Veggie eaters that eat from the supermarket are closer to the industrial. If nothing else, I can say that I never thought of food in quite this way until I'd read this book.

In fact, there are a lot of ways that I've never thought about food until I read this book. Pollan clearly has a passion for discussing food and he also has the ability to turn what are often quite obviously contrived experiments into enjoyable reading.

I said that I was struggling to find someone that hates The Omnivore's Dilemma, but I wasn't entirely unsuccessful. My wife is sick of hearing me talk about Michael Pollan. So if you hated the book and would like to convince me that it's awful, my wife will surely thank you for your kindness.

In the meantime, I thought The Omnivore's Dilemma was fantastic.

From the very beginning, Omnivore’s Dilemma, it had me thinking a lot about my childhood. I grew up on my grandparents’ farm in MN, where we had draft horses, cows, chickens, a garden filled with vegetables, apple trees and rows upon rows of corn. I learned how to take an ear off the stalk at a very young age – probably around the same time that I learned how to bale hay – because across the farm from the rows of corn, we also had a field of alfalfa and wheat. While my grandpa grew corn to sell to buyers like Blaney and Stauffer, we didn’t feed the corn to our animals – they received baled hay of alfalfa and wheat, or at the grass in the pasture they roamed every day. I always figured it was because my grandpa didn’t want our animals eating his potential profits, but after reading OD, I wonder. Unfortunately my grandparents are no longer around to ask.

What I sometimes think is ironic, is that while there are over 60 of us, not one of us stayed on the farm, even though the farm never really left us.

In my family, we are gardeners – whether we are tending a flower garden or a vegetable garden – we are growing some of the food that will be presented at our tables. Hunting was always a big thing in my family as well. My grandfather taught his children and grandchildren at an early age how to shoot a gun, but never expected anyone (I am not a hunter, but know how to shoot a gun) to hunt if they didn’t want to. What he did teach us was that you ate what you killed. Hunting and fishing (another thing we did a lot of) was not a sport, it was a way of life – it was a way to feed our family.

While I liked this book for the memories of childhood lessons it conjured for me, it also helped to remind me of my ideals around food. Ideals that have become lax of late. One example: I made all of my daughter’s food when she was a baby. She did not partake in any pre-made food, and was a vegetarian until she was about two years old. I am not sure when my desire to feed her naturally ended, but now she eats processed food when I feel busy – processed food that I sometimes cannot pronounce the ingredients much less figure out where it came from. With many things (I am looking at your Twinkies) we have a rule that if you can’t pronounce it you don’t eat it, but this goes out the window when I am too busy to make a homemade meal.

Pollan, without ever preaching, without ever scolding, reminds the reader that we owe it to ourselves and to our families to know where are food is coming from. I felt this was a very well written book – both in its content and writing. It is a book that will make you stop and think about what you are putting in your mouth.

If you eat, you should read this book.

Update 5/23/2010 Terrific piece by Michael Pollan in the NYRB June 10, 2010, "The Food Movement, Rising" in which he reviews five books: Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities, All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?, The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society, Eating Animals

I am beginning to wallow and bask in the mire of food politics, subject of Pollan's piece. It's interesting to read the comments section after any article dealing with meat or vegetarianism. One can almost see the participants spitting on each other. It's like watching Mormon fundamentalists defend polygamy to the College of Cardinals. To quote Troy Duster (from Pollan's piece) "No movement is as coherent and integrated as it seems from afar, and no movement is as incoherent and fractured as it seems from up close." And as we learned from OD, food is all politics from the huge changes initiated by the Nixon administration to bring down the price of food to Michelle Obama's efforts to change the way kids eat. As long as there is government to promote the interests of one group or another, there will be these kinds of battles, but I doubt any of us would wish the total absence of regulation desired by Joel Salatin - except maybe Rand Paul.

It's an interesting communitarian movement, perhaps a throwback to the sixties, but one that appeals to both right and left: the desire to localize and remove oneself from the larger society. That is largely what I meant when I referred elsewhere to Pollan's book as a Libertarian Manifesto. In his 2006 book Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, ... America, Rod Dreher identifies a strain of libertarian conservatism, often evangelical, that regards fast food as anathema to family values, and has seized on local food as a kind of culinary counterpart to home schooling.

Major editing 5/23/2010 about half the content identical to my review of Foer's Eating Animals.

minor editing 4/16/10

Let's see, things we can't or shouldn't eat: butter, steak, meat, spinach because of the salmonella (or maybe it's only the organic spinach that gets contaminated), apples because of the alar, salt, sugar, fat, any food not bought at a farmer's market, any food bought at a non-union grocery, any food bought at a chain, any food that's not organic, any food that's labeled organic by the USDA because their standards aren't strict enough, kosher food, non-kosher, non-grass fed beef (and now we've learned that grass-fed beef is salmonella contaminated, too -
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12...,) pasteurized milk, raw milk, etc. etc),

This issue seems to engender as much animosity as whether communion should be allowed to non-Catholics. Factions abound, each with a slightly different take on the issue: those who believe eating meat is immoral; those who believe eating meat from factory farms is immoral; those who believe eating meat is immoral because it's environmentally unsound; those who believe eating meat is bad for your health; those who believe eating meat is fine; those who believe eating some kinds of meat is fine; those who believe eating meat is immoral because animals are sentient beings; and those who think the issue is cultural rather than moral or environmental. How to reconcile these views and where does each of the authors take a stance. All of these views represent a moral position, i.e. a personal one in which the believer needs to persuade others of the necessity of adopting his view to the exclusion of the others and convince that not to do so will result in calamity. Up front we have to recognize that only people who have tons of food available, i.e., the rich, would even consider any of the positions.

Let me state my biases up front. I am very skeptical of any argument that proposes calamity will result if a particular position is not adopted. I am skeptical of moral arguments (not ethical ones). I believe that the most difficult decisions require choosing between grays, not black and white; that sentience as we understand it requires some form of self-awareness and we have little way to judge that in beings that we don't understand (can't communicate with) and that sentience varies tremendously across species, indeed across individuals within that species; and that pain as we understand it may be very different across animals and plants with structures. (David Foster Wallace in "Consider the Lobster" discusses scientific evidence that lobsters, because of their structure, may in fact feel a state of euphoria when being boiled rather than pain as we understand it.)

I worked on two dairy farms for several years, milking about 120 cows, both in stanchions and and parlors, dehorning calves, and shoveling shit. Contrary to Foer's claims, cows are not treated regularly with antibiotics. A test tube of milk coming out of the farmer's tank is pulled before loading on the truck, and this is tested at the plant before being mixed with the rest, and if any suspicion of antibiotic is found, the entire load is dumped and the farmer loses the value of the entire load. We were meticulous about dumping milk from any treated cow (usually for mastitis) for the required period before selling it. Those who think drinking raw milk is the answer are asking for trouble. We did, but that was probably stupid. Besides that I saw what was in the strainer sometimes. None of that milk is tested and come on folks, there's a good reason why we started pasteurizing milk. It saved a lot of lives. I don't have any experience with feedlots, but I do know that stress on animals is to be avoided at all costs as it slows the rate of growth, cuts profits, and leads to disease.

It's impossible to discuss these books in a vacuum, and I need to start out by making clear several assumptions:

1. Humans are omnivores biologically and, in fact, only very recently (say about 10,000 years ago) began to farm grains for food. Before that we were hunter/gatherers relying primarily on meat and berries.

2. Everything is interconnected. Just not eating meat will not even begin to address the issues of environmental degradation. Computers, roads, cars, pets, travel, ipods, plastics, toilet paper, etc., all have their downsides. If Foer and Pollan and Berry et all choose to emphasis one aspect of life and deliver broadsides against that particular activity that's fine as long as we understand that limiting that activity will have a minuscule effect on the environment. More effect would be had if all the hand-wringers stopped flying about the country wasting fuel and polluting the environment, just staying put. Problem is that apocalyptic thinking and lecturing is very profitable.

3. Environmental activism is very much a white, rich, western game. People who have no money and who live a hand-to-mouth existence can't afford to choose. The best way to promote conscious environmental action is by raising living standards around the world. It also reduces the rate of population growth.

4. My very strong bias is that the only practical solution to the myriad number of problems is technological. Some examples: algae oil is already being used successfully mixed with Jet-A by Continental Airlines and the results are a reduction in carbon-footprint of 60-80% and fuel efficiency of 1-2%; production of methane gas as an energy source (very clean burning) from large factory-farms, something not possible if the animals are parsed out in smaller farms where runoff occurs in large quantities, etc., etc.

5. We quite naturally tend to read and find books and data that support a preconceived opinion and avoid those that present an opposing view.

6. My other bias is that I'm very sympathetic to vegetarianism, not veganism, for I love my bread and butter and cheese way too much. I milked cows for several years, churned my own butter and would gladly have turned several fresh heifers into instant hamburger had I been able to after wiping their manure off my face. (If you've ever milked cows you know exactly what I'm talking about.)

NB: I have a problem with beliefs that are so strongly held that believers think they have to claim apocalypse will result if their beliefs aren't adopted by everyone. The Inuit diet consisted of meat alone and meat taken from what is clearly a sentient animal. To suggest they adopt a western, citified, cereal diet is wrong and ridiculous.

This is why one of my heroes is Norman Borlaug who virtually single-handedly began the green revolution that increased wheat yields spectacularly (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/pe...). He DID something, unlike the Paul Ehrlichs who just ran around making a fortune proclaiming the sky is falling. ALL of Ehrlich's predictions have been wrong because of people like Borlaug.

I find the definition of what constitutes sentience to be worse than muddled and mixing up moral issues with that and environmental concerns makes the issues even murkier. There are clearly differences in "sentienceness" from one species to another (no one would argue that a snail has the same level of consciousness as a dog) and whether that should play any part in deciding what to eat or not makes an interesting debate. Personally, I wish the discussion would leave the realm of "morality" with its concomitant religious overtones and focus on the more rational (IMHO) environmental concerns.

I very much enjoyed Pollan, much to my surprise. (I actually listened to this and while Scott Brick is one of my favorite readers, he was all wrong for this book. Way too pedantic sounding.) A very interesting book with tons of detail (which I like) displaying the symbiotic relationship we have with corn and fossil fuels, a very destructive relationship, but one that nevertheless has allowed us to feed many, many more people than would have been possible otherwise. Ultimately, something will have to change, we cannot continue to use 1.5 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food. Pollan emphasizes the mono-culture of corn but the same problems exist with the banana and other crops. In order to ship food to where it's needed requires products that mature at the same time, don't bruise easily, etc. He also shows that virtually all the food we eat has been genetically modified, if not at the gene level, certainly through seed selection, chosen for productivity , disease resistance, and a variety of other qualities.

I learned that in order to increase yields the nitrogen that was added was in the form of ammonium nitrate which existed as a surplus after world war two, no longer needed for explosives. That nitrogen leaches off the ground, into wells, (blue baby syndrome, too much nitrogen cause respiratory issues,) and into the water supply in other ways. (As an aside, no one around here uses much of that, preferring anhydrous ammonia injection directly into the soil with presumably much less runoff.)

I do have some issues with his very limited perspective on industrial farming, which he never defines, by the way. My neighbors, family farms all, farm thousands of acres. At what point does the size become optimum? Families run feedlots, too. My veterinarian has 40 steers in a feedlot. Is that a factory farm? They have the same conditions, the same feed, etc., as the larger feedlot a few miles away. It's almost as if Pollan had decided that farming on a grand scale was apocalyptic and then pulled together data to support his view. His data with regard to corn prices are woefully out of date. Just check commodity prices over the last five years. His choice of George Naylor must have required considerable searching in order to find someone who thought just the way he did.

The history of price supports and the switch under the Nixon administration from a "loan" program to direct payments was something I had completely forgotten and had no idea how much influence it would have on corn production. On the other hand, Butz's intent was to increase production to take the heat off Nixon following the huge increase in food prices as the price for corn had increased so dramatically.

All that being said, there's a lot of useful information, particularly with regard to government policy, and lots of fuel to support the libertarian side of the equation. There is no question that our over reliance on fossil fuels will get us into serious trouble very soon.

A final comment. All of the recent food books could only have been written by a society that doesn't have to worry about where its next meal is coming from.

The problem we have is scale. Wrigley just changed their gum wrappers from the little foil wrap to paper and thereby saved the equivalent of 60 million cans of aluminum. There's the problem in a nutshell

Fun trivia: the corn plant has 32,000 genes, more than humans. Astonishing. (Knowledge Magazine Mr/Apr 2010)

Journalist Michael Pollan has a reputation for writing books that people don't just like, but whose very lives get permanently changed because of reading them; and I can attest that this exact thing has happened to me after reading my first book of his, the extraordinary 2006 guide to modern food practices known as The Omnivore's Dilemma. In it, Pollan imagines three typical meals a contemporary American might eat -- one of fast food, one of Whole Foods-type groceries, and one literally put together through foraging and hunting -- then over the course of 60,000 words shows us exactly, step by minute step, how the ingredients in each meal can be traced back and back until finally reaching a point of a living plant being grown in the ground somewhere, then building us back forward again by showing exactly what happens to that plant step by step as it makes its way from the farm to eventually our mouths.

Along the way, then, Pollan gives us an astute history of the post-war industrial agricultural industry; explains why exactly corn is the overwhelming number-one crop now grown in America; gives us the horrifying reasons that most cattle and chicken have to be fed so many antibiotics in order to merely survive under such harsh industrial conditions; demonstrates why in a middle-class consumerist society these conditions have to happen in the first place (that is, because if cows were still grown in the humane way they were in an agricultural society, a McDonald's hamburger would cost $30, and the American people would riot); shows through personal field trips what exactly the difference is between "cage-free," "free range" and "pastured" eggs, and why one of these options is infinitely better than the others; details why the term "organic" on a food label can mean vastly different things depending on the company and circumstances; and shows through illuminating first-hand experience why we are no longer a hunter-gatherer society (namely, because it's exhausting, inefficient, and makes people run the risk of sometimes going entire weeks at a time without finding anything edible to eat).

Easily the most interesting book I've read in a decade, The Omnivore's Dilemma has permanently changed the way I now shop for groceries, knowing as I now do so many more details about what each label on a package means, and how different growing circumstances can often literally mean a difference in the resulting food's nutrition (just for one example, how Pollan scientifically proves here that eggs from chickens that are allowed to roam freely on farmland are literally better for you than eggs grown from chickens kept in cages); and although I haven't completely given up fast food, certainly every hamburger I now buy makes me ponder the indescribably monstrous and cruel circumstances by which that cow lived its life, which has already influenced just how many hamburgers I buy in general. (It also makes me understand a lot better why there will always be people around in any society who are more than happy to perform that society's most inhumane tasks, such as rounding up undocumented immigrants, ripping their children away from them, and throwing them into concentration camps while openly laughing in their faces...but that's neither here nor there, I suppose.)

To tell the truth, the only reason I read this in the first place was because I was waiting for the day in early June that Pollan's newest book came out, a 600-page whopper called How to Change Your Mind that looks in exhaustive detail at all the latest 21st-century research into the connections between psychedelic drugs, mindfulness, meditation, mental health, what MRIs can teach us about what we've traditionally called the "soul," and a lot more. That book is now finished too, and was just as fascinating as The Omnivore's Dilemma, so keep an eye out for my write-up of that in another couple of weeks.

UPDATE 1: I find it utterly fascinating that the only negative reviews here of this book are from vegetarians, who are so upset at Pollan's conclusion that humans as omnivores are perfectly capable of eating meat, they're willing to dismiss every single other vegetarian-friendly thing he has to say. (Ultimately Pollan is pro-vegetable in this book, despite concluding that meat is indeed an edible substance that humans find edible.) A huge part of this book is all about how the politics of any given age has a huge influence over our opinions on the supposedly "scientifically objective" subjects of diet and nutrition, and the vitriolic negative reviews of the book by militant vegetarians here simply proves his point all over again.

UPDATE 2: After reading other people's reviews, I agree with something I saw a lot of people mention; that a clear sign of how much I loved this book is that people at Twitter eventually got sick of me constantly tweeting about it while I was reading it. Be prepared to drive your friends and spouse crazy!

Has served to overcome my general revulsion of journalists mascarading expose as scientific truth (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell or Thomas Friedman). Well worth reading, though a second, scientific perspective (read "not Schlosser") would be a good companion to fill out what this book offers.

---Finished: I take back what I said, what I thought was gearing up to be analytical and thought provoking really unwound over the course of the book. Pollan comes off a lot more like a homespun wisdom-spewing grandma than someone with an arguable thesis, at least as he presents it in this book. I'm not saying that his thesis is not credible, it's just that he doesn't package the book with tools to know one way or the other. He could have made the same case for making sure you get your daily dose of moon rocks each day, and if he were able to strike the same nerve he strikes with this book, have gotten the same effect. I thought the book would redeem itself when Pollan hunted his own meal. Instead he prepares it like a girly man. His pig kill is ambiguous, he allows himself to use whatever kitchen supplies he already had in the house, he "forages" for cherries in some stranger's tree, and he requires a friend to dress and prepare his pig for him, as well as bring much of the actual food to the final dinner. In the end, much was conjectured (some of which was interesting enough to earn the book two stars) but the only thing I learned was that we eat a lot of corn and that Michael Pollan is a nancy-man sham.
Read this book!

I started into this worried it was going to force me into vegetarianism, that I was going to read some passage about calves born into rancid waste, and a blue light somewhere in my brain would turn green and a gag reflex would accompany the thought of meat moving forward.

...Which speaks either to my penchant for pessimism, or the ominous relationship we have to our food chain, where we _don't_ really want to know how food got there, we just want to eat it.

But read the book I did, fearful to encounter that meat-snatching passage within the book. Thankfully, Pollan is not an alarmist, but rather a quite methodical inquisitor about the roots of our food. It sounds kind of..esoteric, but he makes it fascinating, like a great humanities teacher he tells the larger story of food: of why we grow so much fricking corn in America, and how it's bad for almost everyone involved: ourselves, our diet, farmers in other countries.

The good thing is that the book never descends into a polemic, unlike Michael Moore's work, Pollan's evenhandedness keeps the reader open to what he is saying. Nothing is extreme or revolutionary or incendiary.

I feel like this book will, in the long term, shape the way I think about food by giving me a vocabulary for considering my personal and our cultural relationship to food. He discusses how America as a nation of immigrants never developed a stable national cuisine (unlike France or Italy), and the absence of that makes us vulnerable to an endless array of fad diets (coughAdkinscough) and an overall menu that is out of balance.

There is a fascinating chapter on mushrooms and fungi, which details how they are utterly different from plants, and grow from this crazy underground symbiosis with decomposing nutrients and tree roots, taking a single drop of sugar from the tree root in exchange for processed minerals from the soil.

There is an extended look at a farm outside Charlottesville--Polyface Farm--which models itself after natural ecosystems and creates this method of rotating cattle and chickens with grass growth cycles to create this wonderful whirlwind of spreadsheets, efficiency, and microdata on growth patterns of grass.

To wit: it's better to have grass pasture surrounded by trees, because a blade of grass will burn X calories turning the face of it's blade toward the sun to receive solar energy. Planting forests around removes wind, allowing the grass to grow higher. Brilliant.

In the end, it's about food, but it's also about systems in general. It begins to feel like a universal look at the interrelationship of history and commerce, and how everything is this big interconnected fabric, but that you can begin to see some of those connections, and kind of surf those links to great personal and collective gain.

12/2007

I am a little late to the table with Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma but it is just as relevant now, if not more so, than when it was first published in 2006. The work deserves a permanent place on everybody's bookshelf.

Having been raised on a steady diet of good food as well as Diet For A Small Planet, (the original) Mother Earth News and Harrowsmith I felt confident that I was aware of the pitfalls of modern food production. But, as aware as I was, and as informed as I try to stay, my knowledge falls far short of the realities of the industrial food chain; my knowledge also benefited from an eye-wash when it came to the "organic" food industry -- industry being the operative word. If I had only sensed, before, that we were being ambushed by food producers, Pollan re-affirmed my belief that one has to go a step beyond due diligence in seeking out food that is both good for us, and for the planet.

I had not quite understood how an innocuous little grain like corn might well be one of the largest contributing factors to the end of civilization. Pollan doesn't express it in those terms specifically, but there is enough fact and implication about the uses and abuses of corn, that one can only draw such an inauspicious end to us all. Corn has infiltrated 95% of our consumptive needs [irony implied]-- from the breakfast cereal that we sprinkle in our bowls in the morning to the gas tanks that we fill at night, just before heading back to the 'burbs. It is prolific in the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the bags into which we stuff our garbage, the shoes in which we walk away, in our smugness to think we're somehow ahead of the industrial food game when we make "organic" choices.

"Corn's triumph is the direct result of its overproduction, and that has been a disaster for the people who grow it. Growing corn and nothing but corn has also exacted a toll on the farmer's soil, the quality of the local water and the overall health of the community, the biodiversity of his landscape, and the health of all the creatures living on or downstream from it. And not only those creatures, for cheap corn has also changed, and much for the worse, the lives of several billion food animals, animals that would not be living on factory farms if not for the ocean of corn on which these animal cities float. ... It's a good thing this plant can't form an impression of us, for how risible that impression would be: The farmers going broke cultivating it; the countless other species routed or emiserated by it; the humans eating and drinking it as fast as they can, some of them -- like me and my family -- in automobiles engineered to drink it, too."

We have not domesticated corn; it has domesticated us. The Day of the Triffids comes to mind in a not-so-ironic farce.

Pollan ploughs through the organic food industry just as deftly as he analyzes industrial farming. We are not as organic as we think when it costs more in energy and fuel to grow our contaminant-free lettuce. The lettuce itself may be relatively free from chemical additives, but everything else around it, sacrificed to its production, is a little worse for it, including ourselves because we bought into the lie in the first place.

With all the doom and gloom hovering just above our dinner plates, it leaves one to wonder what could possibly be left to eat. Pollan's thesis on the sustainable farms is a brilliant dissertation on what can be -- and should be -- possible to reclaim the true title of "sustainability" within our food culture. Ironically, this new, sustainable farm bears a striking resemblance to the old family farm, where everything that was eaten was grown or raised on the premises, and the rest was carefully sourced out. The irony is not lost on Pollan who has brought us full circle in our quest for a pure, unadulterated lettuce salad.

By no means does Pollan suggest we should all be gathering our pitchforks, hitching up our suspenders and heading out to the back 40 with a bale of hay to feed our ethically raised cattle; but he does give us the information on how to source out good food that is truly what it purports to be, and not just the over-processed pabulum pumped out by the giant food purveyors on either side of the "organic question".

To add balance, restore a certain light-hearted equanimity, Pollan undertakes a hunting-and-gathering project in an effort to evaluate and assess what it means to be one-hundred-percent responsible for our meal, from the stalking, killing and preparation of an animal, to the gathering of fruits and nuts, a la paleo. Even this food-choice becomes its own dilemma.

The brilliant synthesis of our omnivore's dilemma in this book is by no means reductive. It offers a choice, a balance, irony, humour -- and even a solution. What more could one ask for in our search to clean our plates, our consciousness, and our consciences.

This book has profoundly changed my view on my food, and subsequently, my world. I have read many nonfiction books, but nothing was so personal as this investigation on where our food comes from. Pollan sets put to investigate four markedly different food chains, and ends up having to revise his world view, and acquire new friends in search for a profound understanding of food, nature, and humanity.

I have finished this on Feb 28, 2019. I will write a longer review when I collect my thoughts. There is plenty of food for thought (pardon the pun... did not intend it but hey, it fits.)

Ok friends, I LOVED this book. It was a little long and it kind of meandered and changed tone in the last 1/3 but it was good all the way through. This book is about the industrial food chain and the author's adventures in trying to trace where his food comes from. He researches the 3 different processes that go into 3 types of meals: an industrially produced meal (McDonald's), an organic meal (Whole Foods) and a hunter/gatherer meal (he kills/collects everything he eats for this meal). If you don't have time to read it all, I recommend Parts I and II. It is truly thought provoking.

I've always enjoyed driving through the midwest and checking out all the cornfields. They seem so pastoral and old-fashioned and wholesome. Turns out this is not so true. From what Michael Pollan writes, corn is actually a freak of nature. It probably started as a genetic mutation from grass somewhere in South America. Corn actually shouldn't be a prosperous species but it has been helped along immensely by human hands. The tassle at the top of the stalk is the male reproductive organ and the cob is the female reproductive part. Since the cob is sheated in so many layers there is little chance that the tassle's fruit can get into the cob to start the reproduction process. Somehow it worked out a long time ago and humans figured out how to grow corn. The maize of South America gave way to our current industrialized food system that relies tremendously on mass produced and genetically modified corn.

When I hear this I think- "Hmm, we eat a lot of corn-based products, what's the big deal?". Here are the reasons why this is a big deal,

1. Corn is a cheap raw material that can be turned into lots of different "foods". Industrial farms feed cattle and chickens corn because it is cheaper to store a bunch of cattle or chickens in a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) rather than letting them roam on a pasture and eat a natural diet of grass and insects (for the chickens).

2. Because chickens and cows have not evolved to eat corn, they get sick. In order to prevent them getting sick, they are given anti-biotics.

3. Corn is also used because it will fatten up the cows and chicken more quickly, which then allows the industry to kill and sell and profit sooner.

4. Industrial-sized farms use pesticides and fertilizer to grow their crops which pollute the land. The extra synthetic nitrogen that is not used up by the crop either evaporates and falls as acid rain (contributes to global warming), or it sinks down into the water table, or it gets washed away by rains into the rivers where human beings get their water.

Other key points to note:

1. Organic does not necessarily = sustainable.. You can have organic asparagus flown in from Argentina but that doesn't mean it is good for the planet. Local organic is best because it reduces our reliance on fossil fuels. In addition, just because chickens are "free-range" does not mean they actually live outside and have space to roam. They could be living in a CAFO with a little door that leads to a small patch of grass that is not sufficient for the thousands of chickens inside the CAFO.

2. The treatment of pigs is ESPECIALLY alarming to me! They are raised in CAFOs in cages suspended a little above the ground so that they can shit and it falls to the floor. The cages are stacked so the pigs are shitting on top of each other. Maybe this is fine because pigs seem to like to root around in shit however, the setup is still alarming because they do not have space to turn around in their cages. Because they are weaned from their mother in such a short amount of time (compared to a natural weaning) they have a propensity to suck and bite. They are lined up with each pig facing the next pigs rear so they chew the tail of the pig in frotn of them. The pig whose tail is being chewed oftentimes does not care because of its deplorable condition. The industry has now put into place a procedure called "tail docking"- without anesthesia they cut each pig's tail to a nub. They leave the nub there because it is really sensitive so, when confined to the cage again and the tail is bitten, the pig will squirm and try not to have it's tail bitten. I think this is absolutely horrid.

3. I am still a meat eater but I am looking for ways to find meat that is not industrially produced. I don't mind eating animals but I do not support the living/dying conditions that industrial farms provide.

READ THIS BOOK!

Thanks for reading this especially long review!

I have always been interested in food culture, though I would have never considered myself to be a “foodie” in the strictest sense. That term always carried a bit of hipster baggage to my mind. I would tend to picture modern U.S. food culture as a sort of hummus-slathered menu dominated by low-fat recipes meant to reflect the popular diet trends of the day. Those attitudes began to change for me when I was diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly food became a big deal for me, first as something that I actively avoided as my appetite dwindled and my daily routine ran to getting as many calories in my body as I could, regardless of the delivery system. As someone living with colorectal cancer, food was a tough sell for me as the disease progressed. My tastes changed and most foods that I used to love became alien to me.

But a funny thing happened as my treatment started to take hold and my appetite slowly began to return. I began to consciously embrace “foodie” culture with an eye towards expanding my palate and eating healthier. A big part of this ongoing effort has been educating myself on what would be the “right” things to eat given that I had a disease that directly affected my tastes and digestive functions. I didn’t want specific “diet” books, per se. What I wanted and needed was comprehensive information on what constitutes food itself, with an eye towards the science and sociology of developing better food habits and cooking techniques.

Before my disease took hold, I was a 5’5”, 165 pound ball of muscle and muffin top, still trying to fit into size 34 jeans. At the peak of the cancer, when I was at my lowest point physically, I was 106 pounds and looked like a shell of my former self. After a year and a half of treatment, I am back up to 140 pounds, due in large part to eating better and making more informed choices as to the food that I put into my body. I can thank books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” for giving me a respectable knowledge base to make those wise culinary decisions.

Author Michael Pollan has been writing about food for many years now. This book was originally published in 2006 and was one of his earlier efforts at culinary writing. The material has aged well. I do think that we have become a bit smarter as a food culture in the intervening years, but the basic information presented here is still valid and useful. I will take a moment here to caution prospective readers that Pollan’s visit to a large-scale feedlot and the rendering plant is graphic and somewhat disturbing. One can’t read these sections and not begin to question what it means to consume beef.

The premise of the text is pretty simple and the nature of the "omnivore's dilemma" can be summed up quite nicely: as creatures that can eat virtually anything, the big question can be defined as "what SHOULD we eat?” Pollan sets out to find the answer to this question by tracing 4 meals back to their sources. IN the course of the book he dissects a fast food meal, a store-bought organic entree, a "beyond organic" meal produced entirely at a polyculture farm, and a meal that he hunts and gathers (almost) entirely by himself. Along the way, he asks the reader to join him in his quest for a more thorough knowledge of the food that we eat and a better understanding of how the decisions that we make as food consumers help to shape our cultural and physical landscape.

This is an intensely interesting book, and an important addition to the bookshelf for anyone interested in becoming more "food-aware". Pollan's journey is always engaging, sometimes spiritual ("we are what we eat…." takes on a new dimension when one stops to look at it with this much depth), and occasionally frightening. He is always respectful of his cast of characters, and he is willing to challenge his own preconceptions and ideas as he gathers knowledge and experience. Note that there are no recipes to be found within these pages, nor any specific information on the art of cooking. This is a book that is fully invested in talking about food as a consumer product; what it is, where it comes from, and what the impacts and implications are when you decide to make a food consumption choice.

Michael Pollan strikes me as a fairly engaging and nice guy. I’d like to sit down to a meal with him and talk shop. I learned a lot from this book that I can actively put into practice as I seek to modify my eating habits with an eye towards maximum health benefits. Along with that I gained some ways to make more responsible choices as a food consumer, and that’s just as important as the health angle for me. I’ll be seeking out more of Pollan’s food writing.

Coda #1: After reading a number of reviews for this book, I can honestly say that this is a pretty polarizing piece of writing. A substantial number of vegetarians and vegans panned the book because of its acceptance of what Pollan would call “responsible” meat consumption. And there is no doubt that the author does indeed support the idea that eating meat can be done in an ethical fashion. I won’t rehash the arguments in the reviews here. Having a background in anthropology I can tell you that from a biological perspective humans have absolutely evolved as omnivores. Those canine teeth in your mouth didn’t appear because primates had an exclusively vegetarian diet, they are there specifically for the catching of prey and the tearing of meat. That said, we would do well as a species to eat a lot LESS meat, and there is no denying the environmental damage that is done by widespread meat consumption.

Coda #2: That idea of responsible meat consumption is central to Pollan’s ideas. But it’s larger than just meat. The whole idea here is to gain a more thorough understanding of where our food comes from and from there develop better and more responsible food habits. Modern supermarket culture has taken away a lot of the basic knowledge of food...where it comes from, how it is grown or raised, etc. Pollan states outright that we would all be better off if we once again gained a real connection to our food, one that goes well beyond opening a can or a package and dropping something into a pot to warm it up. That concept alone makes “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” valuable and worthwhile.

Coda #3: Another criticism of the book centered on Pollan himself, and the idea that the concepts in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” can only be absorbed and put into action by an affluent audience. I’m not really sure I buy this argument. It’s true that “foodie” culture seems to have a footprint squarely in a sort of urban-hipster vibe, but the fact is that lower-income folks can put any of the ideas in this book into action just the same as any other demographic. In point, much has been made in the news lately of the current regime’s idea to hand out “food boxes” in place of letting assistance recipients make their own food choices. That would mean a direct impact on the farmer’s markets who accept assistance payments. That tells me that plenty of lower-income people have learned how to make healthy and ethical culinary choices that stretch their food dollars to the max.