Hoooooly crap I hated this book. Philosophically, I understand what Pollan was trying to do here. Boiled down, here's the thesis: we are too far removed from the mechanisms that create our food and, as such, we have no idea what we're eating and, if we did know, we'd be shocked and outraged and disgusted (and hungry, b/c we would stop eating much of it). Technology has drastically changed farming and ranching, which in turn has drastically changed the way we are supposed to live on this world (and the way that the world operates around us). We are toying with things we don't understand, and the consequences will be dire. Repent! Repent you there food sinners!

ok, so maybe I'm being just a touch dramatic. But, I really can't over-emphasize how painful it was to get through the last two hundred pages of this book. Stop repeating yourself! Just...stop it! Corn is bad. I get it. Ok, the USDA is in the pockets of big business. Understood. Chickens and cows have a miserable existence. Okay...though, I mean, they're chickens and cows...did they ever have a great existence? Like, in the state of nature, do we ever really think chickens are happy? They're chickens.

Look, I like the fundamental message. I agree that we need to educate people on the future danger of putting junk in their body and the danger that messing with ecology is likely to result in. But...just do it with less self-aggrandizing and make it shorter. For the love of God, remove yourself just a little bit from the story. Just a bit. Like a 100 pages worth. Or 200.

Recommended for friends and family of Michael Pollan

Truly an eye-opener! I absolutely loved the first part of the book about the industrial agriculture. I would've never thought that our humble 'corn' is actually the tyrant of mono-culture farming. Farmers went broke, took a huge debt, taking side jobs driving trailers and depended on their wife salary for the sake of planting corn.

Animals (cow, pig, chicken) got ousted from the farm and pasture and cramped into CAFO a.k.a. concentration camp for animals, where they live their short miserable life. First, they were fed food (corn or dubious meat-by-product or whatever cheapest feed available) that is making them sick and making us who eat them sick (mad cows anyone?). Second, they were cramped as much as physically possible, resulting in stressed, depressed, and psychotic animals (often resorting to self-mutilation or cannibalism). Third, they were doused with much antibiotics and medications (because their living conditions made them sick) and hormones and whatnot (to fatten them as much as possible) with who knows what side-effects that might cause for us (antibiotic-resistant bacteria for example).

Taking the stand against industrial agriculture were small farms, like Polyface farm owned by Joel Salatin. If CAFO were hell for animals, then Polyface farm must be its heaven. There were so many good things about this farm, suffice to say, if I could buy from there (or any other place that practice sustainable agriculture), I would certainly do so.

The last part of the book about hunting and gathering was the part that I liked the least. Too many pages rambling on and on about the ethics of killing animals. It's a weak finish, but the first two parts of the book was definitely worth reading!

Wow, it seems like a lot of people didn't notice that this kinda sucked! Weird. It read to me like he wrote The Botany of Desire, decided that that framework- a loose structure in which he can just talk alternately interesting and totally self-serving shit for a whole book- and figured he'd give it another go, but this time as his MAGNUM OPUS. And I was pretty into it, for the most part, but in a lot of the parts where he thinks he's being super even-handed, he's actually often being a boring middle-aged white liberal dude with boring tenured college professor politics. I mean, have you read the part in this book where he decides that animals shouldn't be killed, declares himself a vegetarian, gets stressed out, decides that being a vegetarian is stepping on your friends' toes, then says a bunch of total fucking nothing for twenty minutes (I listened to the audiobook- which, by the way, makes this book sound super preachy even if it isn't, because of the narrator's tone of voice) and decides that vegetarianism isn't a viable way of life? Even though, I don't know, something like a million billion people have been living that way for pretty much forever? Just admit it, Mike: you like eating meat, don't want to make the effort to stop, convinced Peter Singer to concede that, sure, if you're going to eat meat, it's better to eat meat that's been ethically raised and slaughtered (aduh), and decided that that settles it: Pete Singer said you don't have to be a vegetarian, so let's just-

OH MAN after the vegetarian part- we are about three quarters of the way in at this point- Mike decides that he's going to be a hunter, so he writes two hours (it is a trip for me to listen to a book because I do it so rarely, but I am driving across the country and it is a wide country) of the most florid, masturbatory prose I have ever had the privilege of consuming in any medium. ON and ON and ON and ON about the great natural dance, and how probably when you shoot an animal it releases THC (the active ingredient in marijuana; a cannabanoid, which is a science word!) into your brain, 'cause it sure feels like getting stoned. And the beauty of how time slows down when you look through a rifle sight, and how now he is better than people who hunt in their real lives. Thanks for that, Mike. Also thanks for your total lack of solutions for people who can't afford or don't have access to organically grown local fuckin cows that got to play dress-up whenever they wanted up until Temple Grandin killed them. Actually, thanks for your total lack of solutions to anything (besides 'get your friend to clean the pig you shoot,' SPOILER).

It's just... The Botany of Desire was pretty fun! You do better when you tell me about Johnny Appleseed, Michael Pollan, than you do when you try to tell me how to eat. Also I know you did it first but Eating Animals does a better job of explaining about how animals are tortured in american corporate agriculture. The student has become the teacher! O-oh!

It's important to understand the state of US agriculture. This book is full of such information and it educated me.

However, Fast Food Nation did nearly as good a job, the major exception being Pollan is a better literary writer, while Eric Schlosser is a better, and more honest journalist. Get it?

Michael Pollan is an excusitarian (tm Colleen Patrick-Goudreau), and this romantic nonsense about the animal's beautiful sacrifice just makes it easier for omnivores to (pardon me) swallow the fact that they are eating the flesh of non-human animals.

Disgusting.

I am not enjoying this book and it is not what I thought. For me, the author needs to get to the point and stop rambling. I'm having to use all my brain cells to process THE POINT. Not a light read. Author's writing style doesn't mesh with my brain wiring. No go for me. Disappointing. Moving on.

If i could think of this book as a meal, then indeed Michael Pollan is a marvelous cook. He writes well, vividly and convincingly.As dense and informative as it is, the book doesn't make me feel bloated, but nourished :] I can't remember the last time I have discussed a book so many times, with so many different people. Chapter 17 on the ethics of eating animals is just mind-blowing and alone can make this book a worthwhile read.i can't resist talking about it before anything else.

I've tried to become a vegetarian a couple of times and have always eventually lapsed back into eating meat. The main reason I would ever become a vegetarian is environmental, the huge amount of energy expended in producing and preserving meat. I've always found the ethics of eating meat hard to defend on the moral basis. And it's fascinating to see a person do it convincingly like Pollan. Pollan starst with Peter Singer's argument against eating meat. A wonderfully simple but powerful idea: "if possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose?". Leaving aside the problematic question of how we define animal "intelligence", there is no debate as to whether animals can suffer. And if we have extended equal rights to women, minorities, homosexuals, should we and why don't we extend these rights to other species? ouch. most people, like me, when faced with this question and thinking about it seriously, either look away or become vegetarians. it is difficult to reconcile our instincts to eat meat and the moral implications of it. but Pollan shows us that those are not the only two alternatives.

He argues that while animals rightists have always stressed the suffering of animals due to our meat eating habits (although we have rather slim evidence of exactly what goes on in the brain of a pig about to go to heaven, (or hell?)), they have also failed to acknowledge that humans are capable of giving animals a decent and happy life. and "happy" in this case means the ability to do what they would naturally do, either pigs rooting around in the dirt, or cows wandering on pastures. "to think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to miscontrue that whole relationship-to project a human idea or power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species."

as he points out, domestication is an evolutionary development. domesticated animals have a much higher chance of surviving than in the wild, compare dogs and wolves for example. they therefore evolve to serve human benefits, winning our favor, in order to be provided with shelter and protection. they probably don't like being killed very much, but if that gives them a longer life and a much better chance to spread their genes to the next generation, they would much rather be with us than be in nature. "predation is not a matter of morality or of politics, it, too, is a matter of symbiosis. from the point of view of the individual prey animal predation is a horror, but from the point of view of the group-and of its gene pool-it is indispensable." That is exactly the point that most animals rightists miss. they concern only with individuals, but nature doesn't work that way, no matter how cruel that might sound. nature is about maximizing the survival of the whole species. our morals were developed to help us function as a healthy, cooperative society, but it is rather irrelevant to what should happen in nature.

Pollan charges that this very embraced and apparently self-righteous "ideology" is a product of an urban society which has lost touch with nature. A friend of mine told me that he took his children to a slaughterhouse to see how pigs are killed because he believes that if we want to eat meat, we should be able to face the morality involved in it. that, i think, is a respectable viewpoint. the children were slightly disturbed but it didn't stop them eating meat. this father is probably an exception in our society. most of us probably have never raised a cow and seen a cow. our meat comes from nice little packages that never remind us of that it comes from something that used to have a brain and can suffer. when i asked my NZ friends why people no longer eat animal organs, like we do in Vietnam, they stared at me with disturbed looks. but really, when you think about it, offal is very nutritious, and there's little reason why we can accept eating meat, but not kidney, heart, or brain. i suspect the reason is the viscera brings home to us the fact that what we are eating used to be quite similar to us, which means, having eyes, lungs, heart. and we are so scared to face that reality that we get rid of it altogether.

the second reason is that once the meat production process is out of sight, we have lost the traditional rituals justifying the act of killing and governing the slaughter of animals. the disappearance of these old practices gives way to the brutalization of animals to the extent that the animals become so sick that we have pretty much run out of anti-biotics.

but that is not the same as to say that we can eat meat carefree without any moral consideration. given the fact that our food chain has become increasingly industrialized and heavily dependent on fossil fuels, we do have a moral obligation to care about the health of nature, i.e, the condition of the soil, the health of the animals we eat, the impact of animal farming on the environment. I can't agree more with him that while we don't need or arguably shouldn't give up our meat consumption, we should at least make sure that the way we eat is sustainable and the animals we eat are treated decently. the way that animals are treated in most farms is quite despicable. and i bet that if we had a chance to look at it, most would quite happily choose to be vegetarian. giving animals a humane treatment does not only give us a clear conscience but really serves our benefits as well. who would not want to eat a healthy chicken instead of a disease-ridden one? recently, when a documentary about the treatment of pigs in battery farms in NZ was broadcast on TV, the public displayed outrage at what they saw and have pushed quite vigorously for legislation prohibiting cruel treatment of farm animals  see here. i don't know of progress elsewhere. i like the idea that once the public know about what's happening to what they eat, they can make a difference.

most of the rest of the book deals with corn and how our (meaning American) food chain has been reduced to a monoculture of soy and corn. they are present in something like 75% of the processed food products on the market. 40% of the calories a Mexican eats comes from food. if you think that's quite astonishing, then apparently American have overtaken Mexicans to be kings of walking corns. corn became the winner in the competition to be human's favorite crop because of its capacity to store a lot more calories than other species. the invention of fertilizers (interestingly made widely available by the surplus ammonium nitrate after the war) made growing corn so incredibly efficient that corn gradually replaced all other crops. and in the 1950s, feeding cattle on feedlots was cheaper than on grass, enabling the farmers to build massive chicken factories. livestock farmers went out of business because they couldn't compete with giant factories. fertilizer was a mixed blessing because the soil fertility shifted from reliance on the sun and a careful rotation of crops, to fossil fuels. we might like to think that fertilizers make agriculture a lot more efficient, but in fact, we expend twice as much energy to produce corn than when we relied on nature. and that's not to mention the huge cost of environmental pollution.

when corn got cheaper and cheaper, the Nixon government stepped in to subsidize it, encouraging growing even more corn of lower nutritional quality and sparking the beginning of agribusiness. the excess corn finds its way into most processed energy-dense foods and feeding livestock. getting rid of this huge amount of excess energy contributes to obesity and an impoverished food culture. it makes good economic sense to dump excess corn on cattle, but biologically, they evolved to eat grass, and being forced to eat something they are not supposed to eat has caused grave problems. in a shit hole with piles of waste, polluted air and water and no space to even wiggle their tails, the only way these cows can survive is to swallow humongous amounts of anti-biotics.

that sounds quite depressing, but the organic industry doesn't really hold a torch toward a moral utopia as we would hope. Pollan points out that the organic industry has diverged exponentially from its original ideals in the 1960s, and is now not so much better than the establishment. they consume a huge amount of energy to transport their products across the country, most "free range" farms mean that the chicken has a palm-sized window to look at the sun 5 minutes a day. real organic farmers have a hard time to get their products on the market because of government regulations. to me it seems like America's unsustainable food consumption is perpetuated by a cycle of ignorance and government intervention. so much for laissez-faire capitalism.

growing so much corn might seem to make good economic sense. we must admit that it's quite remarkable that this is the first time in human history, we can produce food so cheaply and so abundantly. but this is the thing that has always not sat right with me about economics. that it hides all the expensive external costs involved in the process: environmental degradation, costs to the government in terms of subsidies, a huge consumption of fossil fuels, public health and malnourishment. so in fact, eating cheap corn is very expensive.

so the key question is WHY is America doing all these things that defy logic? to summarize the whole story in one word, I'd say efficiency. feeding corn to livestock is so much cheaper and easier than grass (don't have to wait for grass to grow). and it supports a legion of other industries: the chemical and biotech industries, the food industry, the oil industry, pharma, agribusiness. If we keep in mind that hunter-gathers didn't become agriculturists out of choice, but because they depleted the animals they were hunting, it makes me worry what will happen to us when we deplete our soil and degrade our environment so the same disastrous extent. the food price riots in 2007/8 give us a glance at how depressing such a world would be.

but this book isn't just depressing, it's enlightening and inspiring. it shows us that there ARE alternatives to the status quo: eat local, subscribe to a farm you know, and as he says in "In defense of food", then simply "eat food, not too much, mostly plants". I find Michael Pollan a remarkable writer, very humble and articulate. I can't recommend this book too highly.

I learned a lot from reading this, and my outlook on an omnivore's diet has completely changed. It is impossible not to appreciate the author's painstaking attention to detail as well as his passion for food.

While my mind wandered at certain parts, such as the fungi search, I was surprisingly interested with the industrial effect on food and what it really means to construct a meal from the earth.

Bullet Review:

In this day and age, there are hundreds of ways to answer the question "What am I eating for dinner tonight?" These range from the nearby McDonald's and Burger Kind to the supermarket to the local farmer's stand. Michael Pollan takes a look at four ways to have a meal - one industrial meal at McDonald's, one organic meal from Whole Foods, one local meal from a farmer's field, and one completely "homemade" meal made from hunting and foraging.

I must say, the first 300 pages are riveting, absolutely enthralling! I kept putting aside fiction to read this book, it was so good! However, when I hit the chapters on hunting and foraging, I found my interest severely waning. I really don't care at all about hunting animals and foraging for mushrooms, so keeping my attention was nearly impossible (this is why I took off a star). But the end picks up as Pollan returns to the final "perfect" meal.

This book had so much really good information - information that once again cements my desire never to eat food at a fast food restaurant ever again. If one of your New Year's Resolutions is to eat healthier, read this book to bolster that desire!!

A more accurate subtitle for this book would be “An Ecology of Four Meals.” The ecological perspective permits Pollan to focus on questions of sustainability, and social and environmental cost, as opposed to the point of purchase price visible to the consumer. His first meal is the ubiquitous fast food family meal consumed on the road with his family. It is no surprise that the meal represents a choice of convenience over nutrition. What is surprising is that the meal is based on corn, Number 2 hybrid to be precise. This USDA designated field corn feeds all industrial farm cattle and poultry. It is the epitome of successful mono-culture farming, bred to accommodate mechanized cultivation and, in its genetically engineered iteration, resistant to pesticide application. Corn is a juggernaut that affects the way livestock are raised and the way food is manufactured. Cattle receive supplements and antibiotics to tolerate the feedlot stage of their journey from farm to slaughterhouse. Some of the hidden costs? Feedlot waste cannot be recycled into fertilizer. It contains toxic levels of heavy metals, hormone residue, phosphorus and nitrogen. Public health crises of antibiotic resistance and E. coli outbreaks present new problems for the medical community. Corn by-products like high fructose sweetener, starches and oil are at the base of food technology. Consumption of fossil fuels increases as the supply chain moves from local to global. A vicious cycle of overproduction and price supports insures the economic supremacy of this commodity. Is there a sustainable alternative?

Pollan shifts his examination to the organic food movement. On the one hand there is Big Business Organic. This is one of the most valuable sections of the book. He traces the tortured language of the USDA which purports to define “organic.” He visits Cascadia Foods, founded by Gene Kahn, and traces its trajectory from organic farming to a niche agribusiness. Kahn states flatly that the organic ideal simply was not sustainable as a business model without a link to a Big Organic distribution network. A pastoral marketing narrative has sprung from this distribution chain, hiding an inconvenient truth. Organic chickens do not live their entire lives in an open range. Organic cows eat organic grain — in the same overcrowded unbucolic feedlots. Pollan concludes: “The big question is whether the logic of an industrial food chain can be reconciled to the logic of the natural systems on which organic agriculture has tried to model itself. Put another way, is industrial organic ultimately a contradiction in terms?” (p.161)

As a counter example he visits Polyface Farms, a multi-culture organic farm nestled in the Shenandoah Valley. The cattle are grass-fed for their entire lives. Careful planning prevents overgrazing any single parcel of land. A meticulous choreography of chickens, turkeys, and pigs follow demonstrating a labor-intensive but successful example of sustainable, profitable organic farming.

Pollan turns to the psychological context of eating for his final meal. The meat is a wild pig he hunted and killed. The vegetables were grown from his garden. The mushrooms were foraged under the tutelage of some veteran mushroom hunters. He even attempts to harvest his own salt from the sea with amusing results. “This year the winter rains had persisted well into spring, making the ponds deeper and less saline than they would normally be in June. So instead of scraping snowy white crystals of sea salt off the rocks, as I'd anticipated, we ended up filling a couple of scavenged polyethaline soda bottles with the cloudy brown brine. That night I evaporated the liquid in a pan over a low flame; it filled the kitchen with a worrisome chemical steam, but after a few hours a promising layer of crystals the color of brown sugar formed in the bottom of the pan, and once it cooled I managed to scrape out a few tablespoons. Unfortunately this salt, which was a bit greasy to the touch, tasted so metallic and so much like chemicals that it actually made me gag, and required a chaser of mouthwash to clear from my tongue.” (p.193-194) Fortunately for his dinner guests, Pollan turns to the safety of the salt in his pantry.

These chapters shed light on the cultural quandary we have created. Speed and convenience in both food acquisition and preparation have deprived us of the sense of anticipation. There is also the disproportionate valuation of quantity over quality. You don't have to buy at a Costco or Sam's Club to experience this. It is almost impossible to buy loose produce at the local grocery retailer. Food has been removed from an emotional context that included smells from the kitchen, a growing sensation of hunger, and an appreciation of the manual labor involved. He recaptures all of this in his elaborate banquet of foraged food. Early in the book Pollan laments the absence of a national food culture in America. “As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations each with its own culture of food, Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us.” (p.5) Here, I think he errs. Mobility has desensitized us to the idea of local food as well as the continuous hands-on learning that gets passed on in an extended family. He points out the importance of direct experience in learning how to forage for mushrooms. Despite a stack of field guides, it is the authoritative certainty of his mentors that enables him to forage with both confidence and accuracy (no one died from the mushrooms he served!)

When I began this book I was expecting a censorious examination of bad food habits. Instead, I discovered new dimensions for thinking about food. It's about sustainability and humane sourcing, nutrition and flavor, but it's also about awareness and understanding at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels. This book was the selection of our local book club.

Jurnalistul Michael Pollan încearcă să descifreze felul în care se transformă până la a ajunge în farfuria noastră mâncarea zilnică. Cu bune și mai puțin bune.
Chestia este că mâncăm din ce în ce mai puțin natural și asta se vede mai ales din primele două părți ale cărții - cele în care studiază porumbul, hrana majorității animalelor domestice (și a omului, în cele din urmă, de vreme ce, de ex, chicken nugget este ”porumb peste porumb”) și respectiv iarba, responsabilă pentru mâncarea așa-zis organică, mult mai naturală de obicei. În a treia parte a cărții încearcă să facă o mâncare doar din ceea ce se poate găsi sălbatic în natură, punându-se în rolul unui vânător-culegător (vânează un porc sălbatic, culege ciuperci, încearcă să pescuiască).
Cartea este plină de date tehnice (americane), încearcă să tragă un semnal de alarmă pentru mâncarea pe care o consumăm, de cele mai multe ori procesată excesiv, fără a cădea în ”păcatul vegetarianismului”. Interesantă, pentru cei pasionați de mâncare, de calitatea ei, pentru gurmanzi etc.

it went like this:

part 1: corn - i'm stoked! lots of science and history uncovering things i didn't know, yay!

part 2: meat - okay. not a lot here i don't already know, but i read a lot on this issue. nice description of totally sustainable farm even though the guy running it is obviously a crack pot.

part 3: i do it myself! - um, whoa. what are you talking about? and who the hell are these people who live in berkley and have large walk in freezers and spend their leisure time hunting on their personal swathes of california that must be worth tens of millions of dollars? and why do i care about you wringing your very waspish hands over shooting a pig?

ooohhh...i get it now, this is where we turn food into a "delightfully" entertaining moral and philosophical experiment that 70% of the population has absolutely no chance of identifying with; instead of something that everyone has to have to live and is therefore the single commodity whose supply is most easily reformed by individual demands to address ecological, health, and safety concerns.

i see what you did there, michael pollan.

i suppose this confuses your own point well enough to mask the fact that you obviously come out this deciding to continue to eat as you always do except for special occasions? because it made you several millions of dollars, i can see why you did it. i cannot however see any reason for anyone to read it.

Human beings are omnivores. But because we are omnivores, we have very little built in instinct that tells us which foods are good for us and which aren’t. That’s the dilemma; we can eat anything, but how do we know what to eat?

So that’s the dilemma. And while some cultures have long standing traditional diets to help them solve this problem, Pollan notes that modern Americans don’t have any strong food traditions. We are surrounded in supermarkets and restaurants with a staggering number of food choices without any clear directions what foods are best for a healthy life.

Here Michael Pollan takes on this dilemma by identifying, investigating and informing on four separate food chains available to us. For each of this groups, he prepares and serves a representative meal — the industrial food meal, the industrial organic meal, the beyond organic meal, and the hunter gatherer meal.

Though we are all familiar with the products of the industrial food industry, its sources and methods are purposely kept in the shadows. Pollan rather uncomfortably illuminates those shadows. He identifies corn as the foundation block of industry food — present in almost everything we eat, including our meat (cows, chickens, hogs, farm raised fish all are fed corn) and he explains why this is a problem, and how it hurts farmers, the environment, our health — almost everyone and everything other than the couple of industrial food giant corporations who profit from it.

Pollan serves a meal purchase at McDonalds and eaten in his car to illustrate the industrial food chain.

See those chicken nuggets in the freezer case? They’re really corn wrapped up in more corn. The chicken was fed corn, the batter is made from corn flower, the starch that holds it together is corn starch, the oil it was fried in was corn oil.

Pollan next examines what he calls industrial organic food. He explains how organic food evolved from the hippy back to the land movement into the profitable and industry controlled market it is today. The organics that you buy in your Whole Foods Market mostly come from the same major food conglomerates as does the rest of our food. Regulations on what is considered organic is so lax that TV dinners can be called organic. Pollan does acknowledge that these foods are grown without the use of harmful chemicals, which is a good thing, but otherwise the picture he paints of Big Organic is rather grim. The meal he makes to illustrate this food chain is sourced from Whole Foods.

The final food chains Pollan examines are far more encouraging, but also far less available to most of us. He takes us to a farm in Virginia that calls itself beyond organic, and that represents the picture most of us have of what organic food ideally should be. Unfortunately, this farm’s philosophy of keeping food local prevents it from shipping its food, so unless you are lucky enough to live close to it (or one like it), well, too bad for you.

Pollan ends with the least practical food source — hunting and gathering. He acknowledges its impracticality for most of us, but includes it mostly as a base line of how most of our ancestors fed themselves. He actually hunts a wild boar in Norther California for the hunter gatherer meal he serves.

He finishes the book with useful tips on how to eat best in this culture dominated by industrial food:

Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or with ingredients you don’t recognize or can’t pronounce.

Don’t eat anything containing high fructose corn syrup.

Buy real food. To make sure you’re buying real food, get your food from the outside perimeter of the supermarket, and try to avoid the middle isles.

Don’t buy or eat anything that doesn’t eventually rot