The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World (reissued)

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His writing—an engaging melange of travelogue, economic analysis, and sheer, tactile joy in the pleasures of food—has made him a favorite among the foodie and enviro crowds alike. This is cheaper and easier than grazing cows, and it fattens them to produce the kind of marbled meat that Americans like. He reminds readers that the consequences of human choices about what to eat extend far beyond what any one individual can see. Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs-opium, caffeine, and mescaline-and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief.

This problem is especially acute in a country with endless food choices—many of which are highly processed and far removed from their natural origins. Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating.For example, Big Organic sometimes requires even more fossil fuels than industrial farms to combat the inefficiency of producing a huge amount of food without using chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

Salatin sneers at “Big Organic,” which he considers to be just as bad as the industrial food system. Written with the clarity, concision and wit that has become bestselling author Michael Pollan’s trademark, this indispensable handbook lays out a set of straightforward, memorable rules for eating wisely, one per page accompanied by a concise explanation. As the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley, Pollan is cultivating the next generation of green reporters. The dilemma—what to have for dinner when you are a creature with an open-ended appetite—leads Pollan (Journalism/Berkeley; The Botany of Desire, 2001, etc.Pollan sets out to trace major American food sources like corn, which he follows from one end of the food chain to the other in a journey that takes him from farms to fast-food restaurants. Many of the organic farmers Pollan encounters developed their political ideals from the radicalism of the 1960s, which saw small-scale, sustainable farming as a way of maintaining a healthy relationship between humans and the world around them.

Food scientists are hard at work creating new and more complicated uses for corn all the time, illustrating how the industry is driven by the economic needs of food companies and manufacturers, rather than the best interests of its human consumers, the animals, or the planet. Michael Pollan’s Food Rules began with his hunch that the wisdom of our grandparents might have more helpful things to say about how to eat well than the recommendations of science or industry or government. is born on a ranch in South Dakota, and he is sent to a feedlot in Kansas at the age of six months, where he is fed a corn-based diet. He also becomes skeptical of vegetarianism, a movement which steadily gained ground beginning in the 1970s, as a result of increasing ethical and environmental concerns about the eating of meat. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on.Although much of the food on the industrial-organic chain is more recognizable and traceable than fast food items derived from the purely industrial chain, what goes on behind the scenes is still often harmful to the environment. The meal that concludes this section is takeout from McDonald’s and includes among other foods a serving of Chicken McNuggets.

His farm guru is Joel Salatin, an independent-minded small farmer who runs Polyface, his small family farm in Virginia. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed reciprocal relationships similar to that of honeybees and flowers.Eating a dinner prepared from Whole Foods-bought ingredients, Pollan weighs the evidence that organic food is more nutritious and flavorful against the cost of flying his organic asparagus into San Francisco from Argentina in January.