The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Book Review: The food we eat - Thoughts, questions, effects worth pondering
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of those rare books that gets a person thinking seriously about topics not usually pondered: How has our food system, in just a few decades, developed into today's industrial, factory-fed, subsidized corn-based model? What are the costs and consequences of the model? Who pays them? Why is our system usually portrayed as the only viable means to feed ourselves? Who's in control? Is organic any better?
"Dilemma" is engaging and readable, the type of book you'll find yourself mentioning and recommending to friends, even if you're among the majority of Americans (like me) who puts more thought into the gas we put into our cars than the food we put into our mouths.
There are indictments here of the industrial food system, the politics, special interests, and marketers that brought the system to its dominate role, and the price-obsessed consumer who buys into the system asking no questions. There's also a clear explanation that gives many of us our first awareness of how petroleum-dependent our food system is. We are, in a real sense, eating petroleum when we eat many food products because synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are manufactured from oil and gas.
The book also gives insights into the environmental costs today's over-fertilized, monospeciatic, concentrated feed-lot systems have on the land, water, and air. It's not a pretty picture. And the questions Pollan raises about animal ethics are important, leading the reader to ask himself whether choices I make in the grocery are consistent with my views on how animals should be treated. For example, the usual supermarket egg is produced by a chicken that "lives" its entire productive life in a horrendous cramped cage. Just so we can buy eggs for 79 cents/dozen.
This book was a pleasure to read. Even if it turns out that all the numbers he cites arn't exactly accurate, or that there are other views to counter the points he makes (and there are), there's a lot here to get one thinking, and maybe change the way we make our food choices.
The only flaws I would mention are that it could've benefited from better editing to tighten it up, especially the foraging section. One chapter includes at least twenty quotes from a philosopher of hunting. Enough! And there is a place or two that the same points are repeated.
All in all an important book.
Book Review: One of the Best Books of the Year!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is both well-written and thought-provoking, without being preachy. The author points out that Americans have become disconnected from their food sources. Everything just materializes in the grocery store and is consumed without a thought as to where the food comes from, or the impact that our consumption of that food has on ourselves and the rest of the planet. The author examines the origins of a McDonald's meal, an Organic Meal, an integrated Farm Raised Meal and a Hunter-Gatherer Meal and tries to trace the impacts of each. Although I grew up on a farm myself and hunted for food when I was young, I'd almost forgotten the ramifications of my dietary choices. This book elegantly reminded me of things I had almost forgotten. Is a chicken raised on a farm where it is free to roam better for you and the world than one raised and slaughtered in an industrial farm? Is it ethical to eat meat at all? How should we consider the use of petroleum in terms of the global cost of raising corn?
This book is not about telling you what you should and should not eat. It is about allowing yourself to develop your own answers to questions that many don't want to think about. This is the best book I've read this year.
Book Review: SECOND HELPINGS, ANYONE?
Summary: 5 Stars
As we are reminded, humans are the only beings that have such a vast plethora of choices when it comes to food. After all, squirrels chatter happily upon finding a nut and a robin tugs determinedly on a worm. But, just think of our menu - vegetarian, fast food, frozen dinners, blender whirled energy drinks, everything from Tootsie Roll Pops to tofu. And therein, according to author Michael Pollan lies our dilemma. He posits that deciding what we will eat is an inevitable cause for anxiety. And, nowhere he continues are there more anxious people than in our country.
We suffer from what he refers to as "our national eating disorder," citing such roller coaster effects as diet crazes, the avoidance of a specific food because it has been deemed bad for us, and the fact that obesity is on the rise from shore to shore.
Pollan is both intrepid and amusing as he details why the question of what we should put in front of us has become so complex. Dividing his narrative into three parts, he escorts listeners on a walk through each of the food chains that keep us going - industrialized food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage for ourselves. We go to an Iowa cornfield, to a farm in Virginia and, yes, to those golden arches, MacDonalds. Along the way we follow the trail of what we eat from its source to our tables.
With intensive research and entertaining prose Pollan (The Botany of Desire) has created a fascinating look at the truth found in we are what we eat. Scott Brick delivers an animated easy-to-listen-to voice performance. As always, he's one of the best audio book readers to be found today.
Listen to this and then tuck into your supper!
- Gail Cooke
Book Review: excellent journalism, but messy bookmaking
Summary: 5 Stars
Pollan's investigations into corn, organic agriculture, and hunting/gathering/gardening are fascinating. He writes very well, and even though I've been reading on agriculture for more than 20 years, and growing a lot of food for 13 years, I learned some new things, particularly about the pervasiveness of corn in the American diet (and the reasons for that), and about the astonishing scale of "industrial organic" food production. The book is flawed, however, by numerous editorial mistakes--through much of the book, there are errors every few pages, most noticeably in subject-verb agreement. This is quite annoying and disappointing. My impression is that this sort of carelessness is becoming more and more common in publishing (because of over-reliance on computer assistance?).
Nevertheless, I recommend this book highly.
Book Review: A Flawed Masterpiece
Summary: 4 Stars
The Omnivore's Dilemma is a celebration of alternative agriculture that every vegetarian should read. Michael Pollan's account of modern-day food production is beautifully written, and demands the attention of everyone who cares about what, or who, they eat. This is easily among the most important books on food written this decade. Happily, Pollan's disgust with factory farming is clear, and The Omnivore's Dilemma is largely a quest to bring ethics into animal agriculture.
Unfortunately, the superior quality of Pollan's writing only makes the book's flaws all the more glaring. The Omnivore's Dilemma contains numerous minor and forgivable lapses:
* Pollan spends three pages writing about Omega 3s, and the potential for grass-fed beef and free-range eggs to provide this elusive nutrient. Yet he never so much as mentions flax seeds, which are by far the cheapest and cleanest source of Omega 3s.
* He writes that, "...eggs and milk can be coaxed from animals without hurting or killing them-or so I at least thought." Whatever he may have once thought, he never gets around to informing readers that every commercially produced layer hen and dairy cow-even if free-range or organically fed-is sent to slaughter.
* He even suggests that if all Americans went vegetarian, "it isn't at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline." This argument was first made by Oregon University agriculture professor Steven Davis, and has since been thoroughly debunked by Gaverick Matheny.
These lapses can easily be remedied with short rebuttals. Not so with one of the book's main and most problematic themes: the idea that one small farm in Virginia might serve as a template for enlightened agriculture. The Omnivore's Dilemma is largely a hagiography of Joel Salatin, the owner of Polyface farm. Salatin's lifework is admittedly remarkable. He's taken virtually all the overt cruelty-but alas, none of the slaughter-out of his egg, chicken, and beef operations. What's more, Salatin has found a way to raise these animals without drugs or pesticides. Through farming practices that radically depart from convention, it appears that Salatin's brand of animal agriculture enriches rather than depletes his soil with each passing year.
Most vegetarians take for granted that eating animals is akin to buying a Hummer, removing its catalytic converter, and using the vehicle to cart around nuclear waste. Pollan's book convincingly shows that animal agriculture can, in fact, operate in a way that respects the environment. For a reader who's acquainted with the staggering wastefulness of animal agriculture, it's hard not to get caught up in Pollan's account of the Polyface alternative.
What Polyface has accomplished is a genuine achievement. However, Pollan never points out that there's a reason why Polyface is plunked down in rural Virginia-hardly the heart of cattle country. This model of farming could simply never be transplanted to the arid, near-dessert landscape of America's western states-the region that produces nearly all American beef. It's one thing to practice boutique farming and to raise 50 grass-fed cattle a year on lush, rain-soaked land in rural Virginia. It's quite another to imply that Polyface could be anything like a model for transforming America's beef industry. You simply can't scale up what's happening on a 50-steer farm in Virginia to positively transform the way that more than 20 million cattle are raised in the American West.
Michael Pollan is a talented writer, and had he only put this manuscript out for proper review this book could have been a masterpiece. Despite its flaws, The Omnivore's Dilemma deserves the attention of everyone who cares about animal cruelty. Nowhere is the case for eating animal products made so persuasively and thoughtfully. Yet the book's shortcomings demand some prerequisite reading-otherwise the reader may succumb to the same lapses in thinking that overcame Pollan.
Reprinted with permission. First published by VegNews magazine, May/June 2006