The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006)

Even though I admire the author and agree with his views on food and production, I don't need to read another long winded account on similar things. (i've his articles and another book of his that, again, I agreed with but didn't shed any new light, and was somewhat overwritten).

5Q, 3P Pollan does a great job of providing the facts of the food industry, while respecting the people involved in the industry. By describing his own emotional and moral dilemmas Pollan allows the reader to make their own decisions on what is right for them. Some of the issues in the book are disturbing and hard to get through, but the topic is relevant to everyone who eats providing for a large audience.

A book club choice. You will never look at meat in the supermarket the same way.

recommended for: omnivores & anyone interested in the state of agriculture in the U.S.

I was resistant to reading this book because I’m not an omnivore, and also I thought that Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire was brilliant and I suspected I would not feel as fond of this one, which is certainly true. He does write well, but I didn’t find that this book had the eloquence or elegance of the other.

The sub-title of this book could read: It’s Really Ok To Eat Dead Animals, Really It Is. Which I realize for most people it is. But eating flesh foods and other foods made from animals such as dairy and eggs is simply what the vast majority of this book’s readers and the population as a whole do; it’s not an unique argument.

But, I loved the fungi chapter and the corn section. The chapter on mushrooms I’m sure I enjoyed so much because a close friend of mine has told stories of her rural Indiana upbringing and of the very small morel patch they have on their property. So it was really fun for me to read about the foraging/hunting of the mushrooms, including local morels. (The author lives about 30 minutes drive from me and I recognized many of the locations in the book.) The corn section (about the deliberate infusion of corn products into just about every processed food) made me determined to cut way down on the processed foods that I often eat: the one real way this book changed me, not an insignificant one.

A good part of this (apparently beloved) book seemed to me to be the author’s belabored argument that it’s perfectly fine to eat animals. His treatise looked like his attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance (his term although I was already thinking of it like that) so that he could continue to eat in peace as an omnivore, along with about 97% of the U.S. population; being omnivorous is the dominant paradigm. Anyway, his waxing poetic over the glories of killing and eating animals did not sway me. It’s interesting that Pollan continually rebuts his own arguments, but I wasn’t convinced his questioning was as honest as he wanted it to appear, as it seemed to me he already knew the answers he wanted to arrive at about being omnivorous. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he would agree with me about that.

Some of his facts and figures were off. When he talks about tens of millions of animals killed for food in the U.S. for instance; actually, the latest figures I’ve read are 11 billion every year, not including fish. Even the call to eat locally, which I usually subscribe to, is not to be so simplified. One contradictory example I can think of (this issue is not addressed in the book) is the consuming of products (chocolate, coffee, dried fruit, nuts) from the distant rainforest, which, in my opinion, is much preferable to continuing to cut down rainforest trees, and which the natives will allow if they can’t make their living from the rainforest in other ways.

I know my philosophy is shared by a relative few, but the fast food meals, the description which was intended to highlight the large amounts of corn products in all the foods, while I found that surprising and unfortunate, it was the cow and chicken parts of the meal that disturbed me the most. And, as far as the “idyllic” Polyface Farm, I truly wonder what they could do 100% plant products grown. ( )

Nothing will ever be the same again. That's what I thought to myself about 6 pages into this incredible book. Pollan is a fabulous writer who keeps getting better. He brings to his quest for the origins of his dinner a journalistic sensibility that has no particular agenda yet pulls no punches, either. There is so much information about how we eat, and why, in this book I'm sure I've not absorbed it all. But I've grokked enough of it to have changed the way I acquire food. It's funny in parts, heartbreakingly sad in others, and ultimately, for me, transformative. My favorite line from the book is this: "We are corn's koala." Highly recommended. ( )