Product Description

What shall we have for dinner? Such a simple question has grown to have a very complicated answer. We can eat almost anything nature has to offer, but deciding what we should eat stirs anxiety. Should we choose the organic apple or the conventional? If organic, local or imported? Wild fish or farmed? Low-carb or low-cal? As the American culture of fast food and unlimited choice invades the world, Pollan follows his next meal from land to table, tracing the origin of everything consumed and the implications for ourselves and our planet. His astonishing findings will shock all who care about what they put on their plate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10524 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Review
'Beautifully written and shocking investigation of what slips into the swelling American stomach entertaining and eloquent' Daily Telegraph 'This is one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in a while After you read this book there will be things you don't want to eat, ever again An honest, brilliant, troubling book. I recommend it to anyone' Evening Standard 'Convivial, creative and deeply disturbing, though he does offer hope it has certainly changed the way I think about food' Audrey Niffenegger, Guardian 'On our we-need-to-know-this reading list a patient investigation of his nation's calorie industries' Mail on Sunday

Naomi Booth, Daily Telegraph
`Compelling ... What stands out is Pollan's love of food and its
natural production'

Financial Times Magazine
`Mesmerising ... Pollan brilliantly shows how economics have
turned evolution on its head'

Customer Reviews

find out startling facts about the origins of our food
This book is very similar to 'fast food nation' in the way that it exposes the hidden mechanics of the food industry. But it does not focus solely on fast food.

The first section concentrates on the way a MacDonalds meal is produced, from its humble(?) beginnings in a corn field in Iowa, to the end product being consumed in the author's car; fascinating and page turning. The middle section concentrates on an 'organic' meal, and really opened my eyes to the idea of organic - it is not all you think it to be, and after reading this book I have reassessed what I think to be an environmentally friendly food. The last section outlines the author's search for a meal from foraging in the forests and fields around his Californian home. Fascinating again. Noone should think they know enough to pass this book by.

I gave it four stars, because the last section gets a little heavy going, but it all ties up well at the end, and worth sticking with it; I love the way that he concludes that the first (fast food) and last (foraged) meals are both two extremes and both unsustainable in the present world. MacDonalds should be saved for a 'treat' once a year and although he doesn't say it, he implies that we should all aim towards consuming locally produced, (not neccessarily organic) food that is the least 'costly' towards the environment - outlined in the meal of the middle section.

Modern North American discovers the reality behind his food
This is the most 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 totally 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." (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)

Cogent, well-written, fascinating
The Omnivore's Dilemma addresses the question: if you have the opportunity to eat anything, how do you know which things are best to eat? It delves into the food chains behind various meals, from the industrial to the pastoral.

The skills of Michael Pollan, the Knight Professor of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley, shine through in this book. It is remarkably clearly written, and addresses a broad range of perspectives and potential criticisms. It avoid preaching, which would be so easy to do with this subject, and instead presents information as information, and opinion as just that.

If you are remotely interested in what you put in your mouth, and where it comes from, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.