The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. (Book Website.)
There are books you read because you see them on the shelf and think hey, that could be interesting and pick it up. And then there are books that you read because you keep hearing about them from everyone else who has read them. This book fell squarely into the latter category for me, and I’m a little embarassed to admit that this gave me pretty low expectations; I half-expected a fad diet plan, a nostalgic journey though our ancestors’ eating habits, or another author railing against fast food and high fructose corn syrup to the already-converted.
I’m thankful to say that the book was none of these things. It is, in fact, four books, if you ask me. And here they are:
Book 1: Industrial fast food. Pollan writes extensively about corn in all its forms, about how we’re effectively made of the stuff, about why it is used to make almost all of our processed food, and about the implications this has for the planet and ourselves.
Book 2: Industrial organic food. A somewhat unexpected analysis of the organic food industry–how it started, what it used to mean for food to be “organic,” what it means now, and some of the tradeoffs that are made at the farm to get the green USDA Organic sticker you see on the box.
Book 3: Polyface Farms. Pollan visits a very unusual farm that rotates crops, grasses, and animals through a patchwork of formerly poor farmland to produce animal products (mostly) in a way that is perhaps the most natural and sustainable counterpoint to the industrial mechanism outlined in the first chapter.
Book 4: Hunting and Gathering. A rather more personal narrative about the author’s experience hunting and gathering himself, including a discourse about the ethics of eating animals, during which he quotes heavily from leading philosphers; and a discourse about hunting them, during which he leans heavily on the poets.
The writing style is absolutely splendid. Some will find Pollan’s prose to be a bit pretentious and rambling–he has a flair for the melodramatic and poetic and sent me running for the dictionary a number of times–but the book’s very well-researched and dense with information and thoughtful observations.
This book distinguishes itself from the huge (and quickly growing) pile of books about food because the author gives the reader no specific advice about what to eat, aside from some mostly-implied suggestions to avoid overprocessed food and choose local or sustainably farmed items when you can. Instead, he just asks that readers think about what he occasionally refers to as the “full karmic price” of their food, not just its sticker price at the grocer’s, and that we think about the whole story of the food we eat, from farm to plate, and the context in which it is eaten.
I can’t recommend this to anyone who wants quick answers about what to eat. But it’s a great book if you want to know how to think about what you eat–not in terms of calories or the latest and greatest super-nutrient of the day but in terms of what it actually means to eat that thing.
And that’s something I don’t think we do enough.