Last week’s review, French Women Don’t Get Fat, took a magnifying glass to the culture of eating in France as a remedy to the bad habits that have come to define eating in North America. This week’s review, The Omnivore’s Dilemma turns the lens another degree and exposes the gritty details of North America’s food system. Author Micheal Pollan visits feedlots and factory farms, learns to hunt, tries on vegetarianism, purchases a cow, and slaughters chickens in this eye-opening critique of the way we eat.
“Somehow this most elemental of activities—figuring out what to eat—has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help,” writes Pollan, “How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?” The book follows four meals from the roots to the final product, beginning with a McDonald’s meal to go, gobbled in a car along the California freeway; a repast of commercial organic goods purchased at the Whole Foods supermarket chain; a dinner based around chicken from an exemplary Virginia farm that gives its pesticide-free fowl free-range and then some; and a meal of wild pig and truffles hunted and foraged by Pollan himself.
The journey of each meal uncovers surprising truths. To understand where the beef in his Big Mac comes from, Pollan has to first unravel the complicated, and very political, history of corn in the United States. Before roasting a chicken from Virginian Joel Salatin’s farm he has to learn how to grow delicious grass and respect the laws of nature. And what seems like an effortless choice of organic, free-range eggs in a Whole Foods ends in the discovery of a new trend in food marketing. ‘Supermarket pastoral,’ as Pollan dubs it, is the food industry’s clever, new way of painting idyllic farm scenes on the packaging that contain products that in no way respect the original concept of organic.
Prepare to squirm and, quite possibly, change the way you eat. But also, prepare to be entertained, enlightened, and acquire a new respect for the basest and perhaps most complicated of our needs: food.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma (as well as Pollan's most recent book, In Defense of Food) is available at Munro’s Books and Barbara Jo’s Books for Cooks. Click here to learn more about Micheal Pollan's work.
ISBN 9781594200823
reviewed by Katie Zdybel
