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

Brilliantly researched, structured, and written, this book's greatest strength is bringing a personal and emotional perspective to what could have been a very dry and preachy topic. Chock full of good quotes and strongly worded points, this book about food politics manages heart and even suspense in the bargain. Highly recommended to anyone who eats.

This book highlights how four different sorts of meals (fast food, organic, alternative, and self-hunted/gathered) could conceivably be brought to the table. The author essentially traces each meal to its origins and while doing so reveals a lot about how we eat and how we don't.

I found the first section, which really focuses on industrial farming, to be absolutely fascinating from the standpoint of how revealing it is. Our food really is so far removed from nature at this point it's a little scary. And clearly that's what Pollan wants you to think. But he never hits you over the head with the message. You are left to draw your own (inescapable) conclusions. Let's put it this way, if you are a fan of big government, you won't like what show more Pollan has to say. I'm not, and I did.

The section on organic and alternative farming were also enlightening. Let's just say that supermarket organic isn't everything you might have thought or hoped it would be. And while alternative farming sounds a whole lot better, Pollan managed to ensconse himself on the farm of a crazy guy which renders the whole section pretty humorous.

The last section I found to be the most dull of the book as Pollan attempts and only partly succeeds to create a meal out of things he has hunted and gathered himself. It seems a bit more like a vanity project than anything yielding real insight.



Pollan is clearly an outstanding journalist, and that makes this read interesting and enjoyable while being extremely informative. However, this isn't a really easy read. I could see how some portions would be boring to some people - - but if you bear in mind that we are talking about our FOOD supply, I found it easy to stay engaged. show less

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes about how our food is grown -- what it is, in fact, that we are eating. The book is really three in one: The first section discusses industrial farming; the second, organic food, both as big business and on a relatively small farm; and the third, what it is like to hunt and gather food for oneself. And each section culminates in a meal -- a cheeseburger and fries from McDonald's; roast chicken, vegetables and a salad from Whole Foods; and grilled chicken, corn and a chocolate souffl? (made with fresh eggs) from a sustainable farm; and, finally, mushrooms and pork, foraged from the wild. The first section is a wake-up call for anyone who has ever been hungry. In the United States, Pollan show more makes clear, we're mostly fed by two things: corn and oil. We may not sit down to bowls of yummy petroleum, but almost everything we eat has used enormous amounts of fossil fuels to get to our tables. Oil products are part of the fertilizers that feed plants, the pesticides that keep insects away from them, the fuels used by the trains and trucks that transport them across the country, and the packaging in which they're wrapped. We're addicted to oil, and we really like to eat. Oil underlines Pollan's story about agribusiness, but corn is its focus. American cattle fatten on corn. Corn also feeds poultry, pigs and sheep, even farmed fish. But that's just the beginning. In addition to dairy products from corn-fed cows and eggs from corn-fed chickens, corn starch, corn oil and corn syrup make up key ingredients in prepared foods. High-fructose corn syrup sweetens everything from juice to toothpaste. Even the alcohol in beer is corn-based. Corn is in everything from frozen yogurt to ketchup, from mayonnaise and mustard to hot dogs and bologna, from salad dressings to vitamin pills. "Tell me what you eat," said the French gastronomist Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "and I will tell you what you are." We're corn. Each bushel of industrial corn grown, Pollan notes, uses the equivalent of up to a third of a gallon of oil. Some of the oil products evaporate and acidify rain; some seep into the water table; some wash into rivers, affecting drinking water and poisoning marine ecosystems. The industrial logic also means vast farms that grow only corn. When the price of corn drops, the solution, the farmer hopes, is to plant more corn for next year. The paradoxical result? While farmers earn less, there's an over-supply of cheap corn, and that means finding ever more ways to use it up. Is eating all this corn good for us? Who knows? We think we've tamed nature, but we're just beginning to learn about all that we don't yet know. Ships were once provided with plenty of food, but sailors got scurvy because they needed vitamin C. We're sailing on the same sea, thinking we're eating well but still discovering nutrients in our food that we hadn't known were there -- that we don't yet know we need. We've lost touch with the natural loops of farming, in which livestock and crops are connected in mutually beneficial circles. Pollan discusses the alternatives to industrial farming, but these two long (and occasionally self-indulgent) sections lack the focus and intensity -- the anger beneath the surface -- of the first. He spends a week at Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley, a farm that works with nature, rather than despite it. Salatin calls himself a grass farmer, though his farm produces cows, chickens, eggs and corn. But everything begins with the grass: The cows nibble at it at the precise moment when it's at its sweetest and are moved from pasture to pasture to keep the grass at its best height. Their droppings fertilize the grass, and the cycle is under way. There's a kind of lyrical symmetry to everything that happens on this farm. Even the final slaughtering of chickens is done quickly and humanely, in the open air. It isn't pleasant, but compared to the way cattle are fattened and slaughtered in meat industry feedlots and slaughterhouses, it is remarkably reasonable. We needn't learn how to shoot our own pigs, as Pollan does; there's hope in other ways -- farmers' markets, the Slow Food movement, restaurants supplied by local farms. To Pollan, the omnivore's dilemma is twofold: what we choose to eat ("What should we have for dinner?" he asks in the opening sentence of his book) and how we let that food be produced. His book is an eater's manifesto, and he touches on a vast array of subjects, from food fads and taboos to our avoidance of not only our food's animality, but also our own. Along the way, he is alert to his own emotions and thoughts, to see how they affect what he does and what he eats, to learn more and to explain what he knows. His approach is steeped in honesty and self-awareness. His cause is just, his thinking is clear, and his writing is compelling. show less

When I was a kid, my grandfather grew string beans and tomatoes in a planting box on his balcony 23-stories above a major elevated highway interchange in Brooklyn. My sister and I would smirk as my grandmother proudly stated "Your grandfather grew these himself," as she ladled the limp, brownish-green string beans on our plates. My mother had better luck growing bumper crops of green beans in the Connecticut soil of our backyards as well as all the vegetables necessary to make a delicious spaghetti sauce.

Reading The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) by Michael Pollan it occurs to me that these may be the only meals I've eaten that don't come from the chain of industrial monoculture. And even then both my grandfather and mother relied on the show more seeds and fertilizers sold by big agribusiness. Pollan's conceit in this very important book is to trace the chain of events leading to four very different meals:

• a fast food meal from McDonald's


• an "organic" meal from the industrial suppliers of Whole Foods


• a meal from a "beyond organic" symbiotic farm in Virginia


• a meal made entirely of food gardened, foraged and hunted by Pollan himself

For the fast food meal, the central crop is corn grown in sturdy rows and harvested with industrial efficiency. While corn may not obvious in many meals it is a key ingredient in feed for cattle (even though by nature they eat grass) and corn-derived additives and foodstuffs are the integral to many foodstuffs (especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup). Pollan demonstrates how this industrial form of agriculture is destroying the earth through overuse of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides. The corn products and corn-fed beef are less nutritious than they would be otherwise, not to mention the incalculable suffering of the feed lot. Plus industrial agriculture's reliance on government subsidies and fossil fuels adds a great cost to this supposedly cheap crop.

By comparison, the "big organic" meal from Whole Foods is tastier and more nutritious by comparison. Organic farmers proudly proclaim that they're protecting the earth by not using fertilizers and pesticides. Yet by following the agribusiness industrial model, these farmers are still creating unsustainable food networks whether they're unaware of it or simply greenwashing. Pollan points out the energy required to import out-of-season goods from distant regions plus the additives used to preserve them. Free range animals rarely live the pastoral live imagined by organic food lables and instead are not all that different from the non-organic factory farms.

Pollan spends a week on a farm of a farmer whose philosophy goes beyond organic and into the symbiotic relationships of plants and animals. While he calls himself a grass farmer, he's raising cattle and chickens as well in innovative ways where each being supports the cause of the others in a cruelty-free way. The farm also serves only local customer, the importance of food networks where buyers know their suppliers are stressed. While this philosophy is critiqued as inefficient and elitist, Pollan illustrates how it is in fact more efficient in food production as well as cost when the hidden costs of agribusiness are added in. The benefits to plants, animals, and humans are high as well.

Finally, Pollan creates a meal himself from his garden, finding mushrooms with some of Northern California's most obsessive foragers, and hunting for wild pigs. At one point in this section Pollan experiments with vegetarianism using as a way to debunk animal liberationist theologies. This is the one section of the book I had trouble with since as a vegetarian myself I feel Pollan tied together all vegetarian philosphies with the most extreme adherants and the benefits of vegetarian lifestyles weren't given a fair shake.

I looked forward to reading this book because I previously enjoyed reading Pollan's Botany of Desire. Like that previous work, this book is written in Pollan's engaging style that is both alarming and compelling without being preachy. The Omnivore's Dilemma is worthy of the hype it has received and I recommend reading it. Anna Clark of Isak sums it up best: "This is an astonishing, engaging, hilarious and revelatory book that should be required reading for every American. At least every American that eats."

Online resources mentioned in the text:

• Eat Wild


• Eat Well Guide


• Slow Food International

Favorite Passages

It's difficult to control the means of production when the product you're selling can reproduce itself endlessly. This one of the ways in which the imperatives of biology are difficult to mesh with the imperatives of business. -- p. 31

I've oversimplified the story a bit; corn's rapid rise is not quite as self-propelled as I've made it sound. As in many other "self-made" American successes, the closer you look the more you find the federal government lending a hand -- a patent, a monopoly, a tax break -- to our hero at a critical juncture. In the case of corn, the botanical hero I've depicted as pluck and ambitious was in fact subsidized in crucial ways, both economically and biologically. There's a good reason I met farmers in Iowa who don't respect corn, who will tell you in disgust that the plant has become "a welfare queen." -- p. 41

For corn has been exempted from the usual rules of nature and economics, both of which have rough mechanisms to check any such wild, uncontrolled proliferation. In nature, the population of a species explodes until it exhausts its supply of food; then it crashes. In the market, an oversupply of a commodity depresses prices until the surplus is either consumed or it no longer makes sense to produce any more of it. In corn's case, humans have labored mightily to free it from either constraint, even if that means going broke growing it, and consuming it just as fast as we possibly can. -- p. 56

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is the ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer. -- p. 84

I'd always thought of trees and grasses as antagonists -- another zero-sum deal in which the gain of the one entails the loss of the other. To a point, this is true: More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild. -- p. 225

A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have 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. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty. -- p. 318

Author : Pollan, Michael.
Title : The omnivore’s dilemma : a natural history of four meals / Michael Pollan.
Published : New York : Penguin Press, 2006. show less

In my head I re-titled this the "Privileged" Omnivore's Dilemma. Even though I disagreed with some of Pollan's conclusions or assumptions, I very much enjoyed his telling about his own journey and discovery of the food he eats and where it comes from. At least he did acknowledge that he was looking at the issue from a point of privilege.

This isn't meant to be a treatise on the "right" way to grow/raise food, it is meant to shine a light on what is and take a look at it to see if there isn't a better way. To know where our food comes from and how it is raised, what goes into producing it for our tables. There isn't a farmer I have known (and I was raised on a farm and live in farm country) who wouldn't agree with that.

If anything was show more missing from this book, it was the many smaller farmers around the country who work their whole lives to raise food because they love their land. In fact, Pollan gave the impression there were only the mega farmers and the small organic local farmers. I understand, he was going for the extremes and making a point, but he really gave an uninformed picture of the many hard-working men and women in America on smaller farms. In fact, he described them as uneducated, greedy fools. My father, my brothers, my sister, her husband, their children, and most every farmer I know has been to college and are some of the most intelligent people around. People who not only have book smarts, but also understand practical living, the land, the plants, animals and weather. You have to be smart these days in order to navigate the business aspect of farming, not to mention the nutrients, climate, and other requirements of whatever crop you are raising.

That offense aside, I did enjoy this city boy's journey to find out where his food came from, and the last chapters on his experience hunting and gathering were quite entertaining. I think he understood his own hubris in the matter. As a girl who grew up among hunter-gatherers as well as farmers, I found his experiences entertaining.

Will this change the way I eat? I doubt it, because I already have chosen to eat only food I can identify, not highly processed "flavored" food. I do go to the Farmer's Market because I want to encourage local people to grow food. I will also buy food at the grocery store because life is hard and I don't need one more thing to burden my load. Sometimes a person just has to make life simpler. I am not worried about the baby greens in a box. I think it is a miracle that humans have figured out a process to grow and harvest them and make them available to people in cities or far-flung locations so that we too can have delicious salads. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Once in a great while, I read a book that I am sorry to reach the end of. This is one such. The topic is so interesting; the information so rich; the telling so entertaining. Pollan opens up some both new vistas and darkened closets concerning the foods we eat. And he does it without an alarmist or judgmental tone. His approach is thoughtful and thorough. Yes, he does come down eventually on some particular positions. But he does so lightly, personally. His goal is not to convince you to join him in a particular food camp. He just wants you to approach food considerately, meaning: consider the food you eat, and what it means to you and the world.
I made an exception to my rule about giving 5 stars on a first reading.