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: You Don't Know What It Is, Do You, Mr Jones?
Summary: 4 Stars
Well...I found this book by Michael Pollan to be quite a thought provoker. While it won't necesaarily change your life, it well might - and how many books can you really say that about? I will say this is a book you all should read. If you have the interest, enthusiam and curiosity about food to come to this forum you have the perfect raw material to consume this very well written book.
I don't want to spoil the book by providing too much rehashing of the narrative. But the big theme is that food has become a very "industrialized" industry and does not much resemble nature in it's original state. This has multiple implications including nutrition, pollution, ethics and TASTE.
Pollan explores some alternatives to the "industrial" approach including an extended look at the "organic" food business and an interesting, albeit impractical, look at being a "hunter/gatherer".
Overall this book demands you give a higher level of THOUGHT into what you are eating and raises your awareness. It is not a preachy book filled with PETA ranting or other condemnations typical of the genre. He is pretty balanced in his views.
This may have hit me more in a personal "perfect storm" kind of way. I live and travel massively through Asia and the Middle East and I've been reading lots of books lately about America having lost its way somewhere - still driving 4 ton SUVs with $135 oil and whistling past the global warming graveyard. With this election coming up it's hard not to look at our position and feel a touch of despair - reviled around the world, in debt beyond belief (as individuals and as a country) and largely unaware (or suspicious) of the progress other countries are making at warp speed. I combine that with the personal introspection of making more money in a week than my father ever made in a year and feeling somehow unsatisifed still and I start to wonder - where is this all going? And then I read this book and had to factor my food into the equation! It all seems like going back to simpler values and lifestyle might not be a bad direction. Maybe it's typical "mid life" stuff for this 46 year old. I still love the US and have an unshakable confidence in it - but we are capable of much better than we have been achieving of late.
Sorry to inject my personal musings into a book review - but they did impact my experience of the book. In any event - this is a book well worth reading...I guess that's my main point!
Book Review: Look Out!
Summary: 4 Stars
Reading this book might change the way you view the world and the food we consume. If you are not ready for a shift in your thinking, you are not ready for this book. I would have given it 5 stars but the writing style lags a little. The content, however, makes up for it.
Yikes! What hath modern man wrought???
Book Review: Ignorance was more bliss - but still you should read this
Summary: 5 Stars
What a fascinating book. I'm a consultant who travels and eats out a lot, and I considered myself to be a casual foodie. Let's just say that ignorance may be bliss with regards to where the edibles come from, the definition of organic, the nasty details of slaughter houses, etc. I also found the background information on farmer incentives and economics interesting (particularly in the wake of the current prices of wheat). I feel I should have known much of this, but I didn't - and I found it to be great reading. I liken this to "Kitchen Confidential" in some ways (in terms of value of content for foodies, not tone). Eating is a part of all of our lives, yet we take the proverbial making the sausage part for granted. As an aside, I got the Kindle edition and found that the price was better than what I found in local bookstores.Book Review: How we should eat
Summary: 5 Stars
Omnivore's Dilemma is a wonderfully written book which covers all aspects of food in today's world. Michael Pollan starts by taking a close look at industrial agriculture from the view point of Corn. A plant that is tailor made to our mass production, fossil fuel dependent agricultural ways. Corn farmers benefit from government subsidies that guarantee the farmer a minimum price per bushel. This has led to an overproduction of corn which has further led to corn based products inundating nearly every food shelf in today's supermarkets. Our farm animals are also raised on diets consisting largely of corn. Yet industrial corn farming, as the author explains, causes much harm. The rich fertile soil in the Midwest is eroding at a rapid pace. The fast growth of corn requires copious quantities of fertilizer in addition to insecticide. Chemical fertilizers seep into the streams and rivers and have caused an immense zone deplete of Oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico. Industrial farming methods have also increased our dependence on fossil fuels. By some estimates, one calorie of corn requires on average ten calories of fossil fuel before it reaches the consumer.
Michael Pollan discusses how we raise meat in this country. Take the millions of steaks served all across the country every day. The cattle slaughtered were mostly raised on a CAFO(Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) on a diet that evolution ill suited them to eat. A diet consisting largely of Corn. The Angus cattle spend most of their lives on lots devoid of grass or vegetation and full of eye irritating dust. They spend their lives ankle deep in their excrement and require antibiotics and anti parasitic drugs to survive until slaughter. They suffer from acidosis of the rumen, an organ evolved to break down the cellulose in grass. The E-Coli that sicken so many Americans every year are of a strain that adapted to survive in the now more acid rumen and which now can survive our acidic stomachs to make us sick.
Michael Pollan contrasts this form of agriculture to a farm in Virginia that raises chickens(broilers and eggs), and Cattle on only grass. The cattle feed on luscious grass kept that way by rotating the cattle from one area of the pasture to another to avoid overgrazing. The chickens feed on the grass and insects attracted to the farm life. The grass benefits by the natural fertilizer these animals provide. The farm is as productive per acre as an Industrial farm yet there are no hidden costs. No animal suffering, fertilizer runoffs, government subsidies, and the carbon footprint is far less.
Although the author does not devote a chapter on health and food, the health implications of how we grow our food is a common theme throughout the book. The organic food industry is talked about in length. The origins of the term 'Organic' as well as how that term has now been co-opted by large industrial food producers thanks in large part to the federal department of agriculture. The book slips into the esoteric realm of philosophy of food on more than one occasion, but the forays are usually brief and welcome.
How to grow food for 300 million people is immensely challenging. Especially since we're all so used to such a varied diet year round (strawberries in January). Yet there are costs to the way we grow our food that are not paid at the supermarket register. These hidden costs are in the form of environmental damage, governmental subsidies sought by a very powerful farm lobby, and even national security costs in having a food supply so dependent on fossil fuels supplied by foreign countries. Eating local, the author strongly suggests, could be a viable alternative. Expenditure on energy for transportation would be significantly cut, and a firsthand knowledge of where and how the food you consume would be gained. This might seem like a small benefit but the author argues that this could potentially be positivelytranformative in the quality of the food we eat.
Although this isn't a diet book, you can't help but change your eating habits after reading this book. I learned a great deal. I highly recommend it.
Book Review: Too Many Words
Summary: 2 Stars
I eagerly opened this book and plunged into a morass of words. How many does it take to complete a thought. Couldn't the author have read and applied Zinsser's book "On Writing Well" before tackling this meaty subject?
The content is right on, but the message was obscured by the prose. Too bad. I would have liked to have finished it, but by the time I read a complete sentence or paragraph, there so many modifiers and conditional phrases, I lost the main point. I found it boring because of that.
If someone edited this book, pulled out the content buried within and tightened his writing, Mr. Pollan could have made his point much better.