Title: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Author: Michael Pollan
# Pages: 450
Published: 2006
Rating: 3 1/2 stars
I read this one for another book club. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that I listened to this book for a family book club. I’m glad I listened to it–I don’t know if I would’ve gotten through the first bit if I hadn’t been stuck in a car with only this book to listen to. I was even driving through Nebraska while listening to the section on corn, which seemed like fortuitous timing.
Pollan describes the journey our food takes before it is consumed. He splits the book into three main sections: industrial, pastoral, and personal. In the industrial section, Pollan takes the reader on a journey centered around corn. He visits the corn fields in Nebraska, a cattle ranch, and a feedlot in Kansas. He talks about why farmers get subsidized for their crops, and how our country got in the position where farmers don’t get paid what their crops are worth. To finish off this section, Pollan discusses how corn has permeated the diet of the average American.
The second section, pastoral, focuses on organic food. Pollan talks about the influence of grass-fed proteins and how the push for organic food is not as effective as it was meant to be. What began as a desire to avoid pesticides and other harmful chemicals, and likely an effort to support local farmers, turned into shipping organic food thousands of miles in refrigerated trucks, compounding the energy needed to get one’s food. Pollan visits a chicken farm that is supposed to be “cage-free” and “free-range,” but the results of his visit will surprise you. He then visits another free-range animal farm
In the third section, personal, Pollan regales the reader with tales of his experience as a hunter-gatherer. It becomes clear that this is no longer a realistic way to try to live or eat for most Americans. Pollan emphasizes that it is important for people to think about what they are eating and to consider all of the costs involved in a meal: financial, ethical, political, environmental.
Favorite Quotes:
“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”
“Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.”