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From Publishers Weekly
[Signature]Reviewed by Pamela KaufmanPollan (The Botany of Desire) examines what he calls "our national eating disorder" (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."Pollan's narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets.Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted.This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go hunting with Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota. (Apr.)Pamela Kaufman is executive editor at Food & Wine magazine.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
"What should we have for dinner?" asks Pollan in the opening of this unique history of four meals--from McDonald's fare to personally hunted wild pig. Award-winning narrator Scott Brick--truly one of the best in the business--takes the listener on a mesmerizing adventure to find some answers. The investigation could have bogged down in Pollan's exhaustive details, but Brick captures each experience with a tempo and emotional coloring all its own. From the comedy of gobbling Chicken McNuggets while speeding down a highway to the deliberately paced tension of stalking and killing a wild pig, Brick gives each story a distinctive voice--and taste. M.T.B. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
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Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shocking, Enlightening, Empowering,
By
This review is from: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Paperback)
In this comprehensive book, Michael Pollan presents many of the grisly details of the industrial food system which dominates North American society. While many readers may have encountered stories of animal abuse, genetically engineered foods, and irresponsible agri-business/ government partnerships, this book ties all the threads together in a somewhat bleak picture of current food market conditions. Alternately though, Pollan presents a variety of options that conscious consumers may choose to empower themselves in their culinary choices, while supporting local, sustainable farmers. The highlight of this book is the introduction to the innovative, post-modern farming techniques employed by Joel Salatin and others like him. This author presents a problem, and is refreshingly responsible enough to provide solutions.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Modern North American discovers the reality behind his food,
By
This review is from: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Paperback)
This is the most basic culinary detective book. In modern America, Michael Pollan wonders what to eat: "... imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found it's way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost."
Of course most North Americans can't answer these questions in any self-satisfying way, so Pollan sets off on the case. He journeys through the belly of the food industry beast -- to the massive government-subsidized corn plantations of Iowa, the huge cattle feed lots and the slaughterhouses. He visits the plants where trainload after trainload of corn is refined into the chemical components of processed food, and then he takes his family to McDonalds. Searching for alternatives to totally explore, Pollan visits large-scale organic plantations. He works for a spell on an organic family farm in Virginia, helping to slaughter the chickens for his next gourmet meal. And last he goes whole hog back to the hunter-gatherer days, searching for mushrooms and shooting a wild pig in the forests of Northern California. The whole experience yields tons of great stories, and the kind of good common sense I can't resist quoting: "A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximise efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which have historically 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 cruelty." (p. 318) But aside from the politics of soil and animal abuse, Pollan ends up with some damn fine meals, eaten with friends he makes along the way: "Was the perfect meal the one you made all by yourself? Not necessarily; certainly this one wasn't that. Though I had spent the day in the kitchen (a good part of the week as well), and I had made most everything from scratch and paid scarcely a dime for the ingredients, it had taken many hands to bring this meal to the table. The fact that just about all those hands were at the table was the more rare and important thing, as was the fact that every single story about the food on the table could be told in the first person." (p. 409)
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What's For Dinner?,
By
This review is from: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Paperback)
Or an even better question is 'what is dinner made of?'. Michael Pollan brings to us his journey to find the 'perfect meal'. In the process of his search, he debunks several myths about the industrial agriculture that produces the majority of food at your local supermarket. One of the more revealing discoveries is that buying 'organic' is pretty much the same as your ordinary industrial agriculture, sometimes grown right next to the regular supermarket foods.
While Pollan does go on to describe a meal entirely hunted and gathered (mostly but not entirely actually), he concludes to eat this way in our modern world is virtually impossible. So, we basically have no choice other than to eat what is available in the supermarkets and 'organic' food stores which after all hasn't decreased the average lifespan. Ultimately, while corn-fed animals may not be as 'clean' as grass-fed animals, it won't make much difference in how long you live. The book is very well-written and Pollan's research is extensive. His mix of documented research and first-hand accounts is what makes the book so credible and insightful.
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