The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-food World

by
Michael Pollan

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The Omnivore's Dilemma

What should we have for dinner When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods might shorten your life. Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from a national eating disorder. As the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous landscape, what's at stake becomes not only our own and our children's health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth. Pollan follows each of the food chains--industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves--from the source to the final meal, always emphasizing our coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us

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Details of Book:

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Book:
The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-food World
Author:Michael Pollan
ISBN:0747586837
ISBN-13:9780747586838, 978-0747586838
Binding: Paperback
Publishing Date: -
Publisher: Penguin (May 21, 2007)
Number of Pages: - pages
Language: English

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The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-food World

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Good questions, but no solution

The Omnivore's Dilemma borrows its title from a 1970s study that observed that prehistoric man, being an omnivore, could eat pretty much everything it found in nature, but that at the same time, many plants and fungi were actually toxic. So how did man know what to eat and what not? The modern omnivore faces a different dilemma: a decent sized supermarket has more food than you can imagine, but where does it come from? What is actually in a microwave dinner? How was the cow treated that gave you your steak?

In answering these questions, Pollan dives deep into the inner workings of industrialised farming, and what he finds there, makes for some grim reading. In addition, Pollan shows that organic farming too, is often more of a marketing trick than, well, organic farming.

But The Omnivore's Dilemma is more than an attack on the agro-industrial complex. Pollan teaches us about true organic farming, discusses the ethics of eating meat and explains the surprising appeal of hunting.

Most people will be drawn to this book because of what it says about industrial farming. Pollan, like other authors, spends a great deal of time telling us what's wrong about it, and he can't resist the temptation to blame a lot of it on capitalism. You know, the line about how people really don't want to buy microwave dinners, or vegetables from Argentina, but are forced to buy them by big multinationals. What Pollan does not do, however, is come up with an alternative to industrialised farming. Earth currently has over 6 bn people and they have to be fed somehow. How to do that in a sustainable way, is the next omnivore's dilemma. Perhaps one Pollan can tackle in his next book.

A beef about food

The Omnivore's Dilemma

By Michael Pollan

A Review by the Cote d'azur

Men's Book Group

In a world where hunger is a black mark on the ruddy face of the well fed it is almost indecent to note that while millions are starving further millions are fighting obesity to the extent that dieting has become an obsession .

Do we feel ashamed as we watch TV films of flesh and bone victims of tribal warfare in Africa, people fighting for every grain of maize while their oppressors threaten to end their misery by killing them? We in the West fill our supermarket trolleys and eat well while our fellow human beings scratch the scorched earth with their fingers

Is there not a paradox in that while we feel genuine sorrow for these victims our eyes are fixated on our desire for a full belly courtesy of the vast food industry?

It is the mass production food chain system of the United States of America that Michael Pollan, author of this superb book, puts under the microscope and reveals the good and the bad points of an industry that is as streamlined as any car industry with its cow to calf philosophy.

This farming industry aims for the maximum gain from processing the herds; Life begins in the birthing sheds and usually ends some l8 months later with a market weight steer entering the kill \zone where it is stunned and prepared for market. The steer has spent all its life on a "foodlot" a giant farm production area where everything it needs to grow big and strong is provided.

The author takes us on a guided tour of a "foodlot " and he stands in a paddock with the steer he bought as an investment, Steer 534, the animal stands in the natural waste and corn residues, it has mud and excrement sticking to its skin. Unsurprisingly he says his investment did not look like a happy steer. No 534 and the thousands like him are on a modern version of an animal farm, destined for death and, already, the steer's mother has been inseminated to produce the next calf.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is beautifully written and a book of great interest that could encourage more people to become vegetarians. We all eat to live and some of us live to eat. Mr Pallon gives an analytical look at the real cost to society of our meat eating habits.

What we eat creates the dilemma: some food is good for us, some is bad. For an insect which feeds on milkweed the only problem is to find the weed. For humans the range is much wider and potentially lethal. The author has a long section on mushroom hunting which dramatically points up the dilemma. We may fear to eat the fungi at the bottom of the garden in case it is poisonous. There is also a splendid chapter on hunting that evokes the challenge and the spirit of killing and eating wild boar.

Despite the big choice we consume vast amounts of corn/maize not only because it is widely used as cattle food, but also because this ubiquitous product appears in hundreds of products, particularly in processed food. Fed on corn, fattened with hormones, irradiated, it is not difficult to see how and why mad cow disease can threaten the herds. Fruit and vegetables are dosed with pesticide and herbicide, their growth stimulated with artificial fertiliser, a product of the petrochemical industry. The fertiliser is then washed off the land and pollutes ground water, rivers and even the sea.

The Cote d'Azur Men's Book Group asked if it is safe to eat this food. Worries can be assuaged by using organic farming products but then, what does organic mean? Can it exist side by side with industrial farms? Price is an issue too but the real price of meat is hidden by subsidies. The food industry encourages the even greater consumption of processed food in order to achieve growth and higher profits. Result? Obesity.

Here in Europe we have European Community farming rules. Should the feeding of hormones to fatten cattle be forbidden? Should there be stricter rules on genetic modification? Would be then find ourselves in a trade war with the USA?

Where does one find morality in all of this? Sad to say, one cannot see a shred of morality except to understand that the farmers will say they take great care of the animals, feed them, clean them, cure their ills. In the old days many small farmers knew their animals by name. Today the Bertha or Louise of long ago is merely a number.

Modern methods cannot be said to be cruel, or can they? If battery hen breeding is not cruel, then what is inhuman? Anything, it seems, goes in the pursuit of money.

This has always been so and morality in the States appears to go hand in hand with the Big Buck culture. One wonders if, when the author was told that his investment, Steer 534 had been executed and would soon provide nice marbled steaks on a plate,he felt remorse or pain.? Ah, now there is a real personal dilemma!

Mr Pallon, the man from Berkeley - known to local residents in California as berserkly- also reveals that the"foodlot" can cause suffering because cows are designed to eat grass yet they are fed corn. This often results in acidosis, swelling of the rumen, the beast's two stomachs. It is painful and can be lethal Treatment is a water hose down the throat! No gain without some pain!.

George Orwell would not have recognised today's animal farms but he might have again concluded that two legs are bad and four legs are good.

End

A perfectly cut dish

An elegantly and thoughtfully written book on the modern food industry that feeds us. Pollan demonstrates a refreshing openness, sharing how his journey through mass produced, organic, and hunter-gatherer food systems affects him without ever sinking into sentimentality - even when shooting a wild pig his insight into what it means to be a hunter is superb.

Without doubt one of the best books on food that I have ever read and one that will withstand the test of time, if for no other reason than the issues he covers of where our food comes from, how it is produced and what that might mean are as relevant today as they ever have been.

Wake Up Call

Like An Inconvenient Truth, The Omnivore's Dilemma is a wake up call to the realities of the present day and a warning that our current lifestyles are unsustainable.

The Omnivore's Dilemma brought to mind another book--the classic, The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition)by John Steinbeck. Published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath took place during The Great Depression. I recently re-read the book and was struck by how connected to the earth most Americans used to be.

In the past two hundred years, America has gone from a mostly rural population to a country where the majority of the nation lives in cities, suburbs or exurbs. In "the olden days,"people farmed, hunted and fished; they made their own clothing, food and shelter. People were attached to the land and to nature. In The Grapes of Wrath we see how many farming families in the Midwest were forced out of their homes. Through one character's experience, we are shown how the pain of leaving his beloved land and home was so devastating that it literally killed him.

Contrast that to how disconnected so many of us are to the food we eat, the environment and the welfare of animals today. We actually need a book to tell us where our food comes from!

I finished this book with a renewed commitment to growing my own vegetables and for purchasing as much food as I can from local farmers.

Author of the award winning book,Harmonious Environment: Beautify, Detoxify and Energize Your Life, Your Home and Your Planet

Comes to grips with food better than anyone else I've ever read

The Omnivore's Dilemma is this: what to eat and what not to eat. Sounds easy, but as Michael Pollan shows this dilemma is at the heart of what both divides and joins people at the most visceral level. The dilemma is sharp because the question of what to eat and what not to eat is moral as well as nutritional. It is practical as well as esthetic. It is a question that engages all people in all cultures. It pits traditional values against modernity. There is the family that eats together a meal prepared by a family member or members, and the meal that is eaten on the run prepared by agribusiness and heated in a microwave. There is fast food and the Slow Food movement. There is the question of whether to eat meat or not, and if not, whether to be a vegetarian or a vegan or something in-between. And if we do eat meat, should a distinction be made between free range flesh and the factory kind? Should the suffering of animals spoil our appetite? We are omnivores, but in a world of so many of us, can we really continue to eat so high on the hog?

Pollan addresses these questions and many others in a courageous and uncompromising way that should gain the respect of all readers, whether they agree with his conclusions or not.

The book is in three parts, with four characteristic meals.

Pollan begins with "Industrial Corn" (Part I) and a fast food meal from McDonald's in the car. This part of the book, which could be an entire book itself--and a very good one--tells the story of corn and how it has come to dominate the American food industry. Eating at McDonald's is appropriate since their menu is dominated by products made from corn including the beef in the burgers which comes from cows fattened on corn, the corn sugar in the sodas and shakes, and the corn oil in the sauces. Eating while driving at 65 MPH is also apt since the car is running partially on ethanol made from corn.

Part II, "Pastoral Grass" is about range cattle and how ruminants turn the grass that we cannot digest into flesh that we can. It is also about the wholesale slaughter of animals in deplorable and disgusting conditions, and how these practices have redirected many people to food from sustainable and humane farming practices. Pollan gets his hands dirty and bloodied as he spends a week on a farm in Virginia harvesting and slaughtering chickens and learning how "grass farmers" work. There are two meals in this part of the book, one an organic industrial meal (from Whole Foods) and the other a grass-fed meal from Joel Salatin's Virginia farm.

In Part III Pollan shots a pig, forages for mushrooms and cooks a meal for ten from (mostly) products that he himself gathered, hunted or grew in his garden. He calls it his "perfect meal." He takes a turn at being a vegetarian and faces head-on the ethical dilemma of eating animals. He makes three strong arguments that allow him to go on eating meat. First, there is the argument of the flexitarian, that eating food is a social and cultural event that is shared with family and friends and serves as a basis for bridging cultural divides. Pollan writes, "What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience." He adds, "I'm inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners." (pp. 313-314)

Next there is the argument from evolutionary biology. "To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue...[the relationship between domestic animals and humans; it is] to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species." Pollan explains, "Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans somehow imposed on animals some ten thousand years ago. Rather, domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own." A chicken raised on a farm where it is allowed to roam free and then come to a quick and humane end is probably better off than a chicken living in a jungle or forest where its life may be shorter and more difficult.

Finally, Pollan argues that while it is the individual in human society that is the basis of moral consideration, in nature it is the species itself. He asks, "Is the individual the crucial moral entity in nature as we've decided it should be in human society? We simply may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world...(where sentience counts for little)...." (p. 325)

Pollan also confronts the food industry head on. He writes that the industrial factory farm is a place "where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, indeed where everything we've learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply...put aside. To visit a modern Confined Animal Feeding Operation...is to enter a world...[where animals] are treated as machines--"production units"--incapable of feeling pain." (p. 317)

On next page he adds, "The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever."

What Pollan confronts in this fully lived, deeply researched, and beautifully written tour de force is what is perhaps the deepest existential contradiction of life, namely that in order to live we must eat the bodies of other living things. Only fruits and nectars are given freely to us, and man cannot live on fruits and nectars alone.

Peels Back the Labels

Omnivore's Dilemma equips an eater who can eat just about everything with the knowledge to better pick and choose. To get us eaters from here to there, Omnivore's Dilemma takes what I found to be a unique approach: it focuses not so much on our food per se but instead focuses on the four production and distribution systems that create our food. Investigating the practices and effects of each system, Pollan, the author, writes mostly from first hand experience, which tends to place the reader in the midst of the corn field, feed lot, pasture, or other venue the author finds himself in. At times, because Pollan is writing from his first hand account, he tends to be sensationalistic. At others, he can wander in an academic ether, such as the chapter regarding the ethics of eating animals, that detracts from the book's message. Overall, though, the information Pollan conveys is so compelling you readily excuse these indulgences. Leaving you appreciating the book for telling you what is behind the labels on the food we buy as compared to what the marketing department is telling us.

I have never recieved the product or any communication on where it is!

I needed this book for my class which it is a required book for the class, I ordered it on the 22nd of Sept. and my other books not only came on time but early! I sent several emails to seller and no response. The book is sold out at my school's bookstore so this has cause me a extreme hardship! When I bought my book the sellers reviews were on ther higher end but in the last 30days there has been a huge drop, since the seller is having so many problems with keeping up on there end then maybe they shouldn't be allowed to sell anymore!

Reluctantly cannot recommend, but you may like it anyhow

At first, I was excited by The Omnivore's Dilemma, although aware that it was sparse on numbers and analysis. That's journalism for you. The reporting is a quick and easy read that held my interest while bashing things I didn't like and holding out hope for a better food system that would still give us access to tastey meats and fresh veggies.

However, as I read through to the end of the book, my annoyance with Pollan--writing from the perspective of a rationalist and ecologist--over his off-hand but serious references to notions like "karmic debt" combined with his inconsistent prose left me thinking I should give the book no more than 3 stars. And after reading some of the other Amazon reviews, I feel the book deserves something more like 1 or 2 stars. While I accept that journalism is intellectually thin, I expect reported "facts" to be accurate. If you read through some of these reviews, however, you will find a multidude of relevant criticisms.

In Pollan's defense, many of the negative reviews are people who weren't interested in reading about Pollan's personal experiences, and these experiences were part of the point of the book. It is a personal account, and such an approach fits perfectly with Pollan's view of ethics and aesthetics. While all of his hand-wringing over hunting, for example, is laughable for those not confined by his class biases, everyone is confined by biases and Pollan's attempt to report his own experience is acceptable.

Other negative reviews criticize Pollan for lacking depth in addressing problems or not addressing questions that interested the reviewer, such as whether or not it would be easy for corn farmers to switch to something else. But this depth in narrow analysis is not what the book aimed to do. It aimed to give unknowedgeable readers an introduction to a variety of topics related to food by way of first-person investigation. If you are already well versed in economic and ecologic problems of our food supply chain, this book wasn't written for you. If you aren't, it may be a fascinating read.

But it's the fact that the book is aimed at the general reader that makes factual problems so gross. If it were a work of fiction, Omnivore's Dilemma would be absolutely worthless since it relies on revelation for literary impact. It is only as non-fiction that it has value. So, for example, if it is true, as one reviewer claims, that he did the math and that a bushel of corn does not, in fact, contain fewer calories than the petroleum that went into producing it (as Pollan claims), that's a serious problem for the book. Pollan should have stuck to reporting what he saw rather than quoting analysis, which isn't what the book is, or could be, about.

Would I recommend this book? I guess, yes, but only because I share some of the biases that Pollan does. For example, I think it would be okay if Americans spent a larger proportion of their income on their food, but that's a personal choice. Like Pollan, my real problem with the beef industry is that I want better beef. In Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan tries to put moral spin on our joint preferences, but I can't entirely buy it.

In the end, I would have to say that Omnivore's Dilemma is something like food snob porn. If your reservations about fast food are primarily economic or medical and not gustatory, you're not going to care about this book. On the other hand, if you're willing to spend your leisure time and expendable cash to improve the quality of your diet, you may find--as I did--a wealth of small revelations that make the book a page-turner despite its drawbacks.

Omnivore's Dilemma

This book is an amazing insight into our food supply. As a result of reading it I have made dramatic changes to my diet - all for the good of the planet as well as my family's health. I'm grateful for the insight this author has provided.

Used book just as described

The book I bought from this seller came just as described, and within the specified shipping time. I would buy again.

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