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The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy Used: $11.23
You Save: $15.72 (58%)
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Rating:  471 reviews
Sales Rank: 3375
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 464
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.6
ISBN: 1594200823
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.12
EAN: 9781594200823
ASIN: 1594200823
Publication Date: April 11, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The bestselling author of The Botany of Desire explores the ecology of eating to unveil why we consume what we consume in the twenty-first century
"What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't-which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as America confronts what can only be described as a national eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with an atavistic vengeance. The cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet has thrown us back on a bewildering landscape where we once again have to worry about which of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. At the same time we're realizing that our food choices also have profound implications for the health of our environment. The Omnivore's Dilemma is bestselling author Michael Pollan's brilliant and eye-opening exploration of these little-known but vitally important dimensions of eating in America.
Pollan has divided The Omnivore's Dilemma into three parts, one for each of the food chains that sustain us: industrialized food, alternative or "organic" food, and food people obtain by dint of their own hunting, gathering, or gardening. Pollan follows each food chain literally from the ground up to the table, emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the species we depend on. He concludes each section by sitting down to a meal--at McDonald's, at home with his family sharing a dinner from Whole Foods, and in a revolutionary "beyond organic" farm in Virginia. For each meal he traces the provenance of everything consumed, revealing the hidden components we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods reflects our environmental and biological inheritance.
We are indeed what we eat-and what we eat remakes the world. A society of voracious and increasingly confused omnivores, we are just beginning to recognize the profound consequences of the simplest everyday food choices, both for ourselves and for the natural world. The Omnivore's Dilemma is a long-overdue book and one that will become known for bringing a completely fresh perspective to a question as ordinary and yet momentous as What shall we have for dinner?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 466 more reviews...
 The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals December 2, 2008
Andrew Medsker
It will change the way you think about food. I will never look at a can of corn the same way.
 Omnivore's Dilema-Moral Confusion November 30, 2008
DC (Mars, PA)
I found Michael Pollan's book to be quite informative and interesting. The strength of the book was the detailing of much of the modern food chain and our dependence on but a very few staple items, namely corn and soy, to supply a very high percentage of our caloric needs. The percentage of our total caloric needs ultimately supplied by corn is quite amazing. There are many interesting facts that should make readers much more interested in a more varied diet, and making sure the food they eat is as nutritional as it should be. The weakness of the book was in Pollan's assertion that "humans invented morality", but he was in moral turmoil over the morality of killing/eating meat. If you honestly believe that matter plus time pus chance = you, it's hard to see how this turmoil emerges. Only if morality is not invented, but objective, does the issue of how we treat animals have any moral force. The author appears to reject this underlying true objective morality all the while wringing his hands over what he ought to eat, and how we treat the animals we raise conforms to a true objective morality. He obviously doesn't believe that "humans invented morality". I guess that's just the moral ambiguity you need to get on the New York Times Books of the year list. We should obviously be as kind as possible to the animals under our care, and we should, as Pollan asserts, make our food chain as transparent as possible, which would affect a positive change in that direction. The first step in trying to figure out what we should do is trying to figure out if there is anything we should do. There obviously is-but the author cannot get you there.
not so much what we eat, but WHO WE ARE November 27, 2008
Len (Connecticut USA)
Like any really great natural history, The Omnivore's Dilemma is not so much about what we eat, but who we are. The book has three main sections - highly-processed (corn-driven) food, local/organic food and self-caught food.
The first part on processed food is a thoughtful expose of how culturally removed we've become from the vast majority of the food we consume - removed from its irresponsible calorie content, desensitized to the lives of the animals we consume, and out of touch with its underlying often senseless economics. Like with Morgan Spurlock's "Supersize Me", your perspective on McDonald's will be forever changed.
The second part of local/organic food is more uplifting. Pollan shows the difficult, but also bright future, for organic and local eating. The lesson seems to be if government got out of the way of small producers, they could blossom and grow more significantly.
The third part - hunting and foraging for one's own food - is a wonderful look at the joys and moral conflict of catching one's own food, from the perspective of doing it for the first time. Pollan's reflections on the grace of nature's bounty are thoughtful and grateful.
The author concludes with a short meditation on what's he's discovered researching how we eat. The ending seemed terse, with much left unsaid, but is still satisfying.
I listened to The Omnivore's Dilemma unabridged on audio CD narrated by Scott Brick. Brick gives a fine performance, confident but questioning, appropriately humble for the author's ambitious search and thoughtful reflections.
I especially recommend this book to anyone in the food and beverage industry.
 Purchased but not available November 24, 2008
Robert N. Marshall Jr. (Chattanooga, TN)
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
I was disappointed that the book was offered for purchase, but several days later, I was informed that I would reeive a refund because it was not available from the vendor. No offer was made to suggest the book from an alternate source. I had always assumed that if a book was listed, it would be available, and that the listing would be removed when there were no more to be sold.
Rethinking Food November 24, 2008
A. Luciano (Lowell, MA United States)
As omnivores, this book proposes, our lives are complicated by the question of what to eat in this landscape of plentiful food. The author starts with the most common options--processed supermarket foods and fast food. Tracing these meals backward, he finds an unbelievably tangled system that urges farmers to grow vast amounts of unneeded corn at low prices that are then subsidized by the government. Getting rid of this excess of corn then becomes the driving force behind factory farms, where animals are kept in deplorable conditions and pumped with antibiotics to keep their bodies from breaking down.
Pollan's investigation of mainstream organic farms didn't paint a much better picture, despite the assumption that organic animals are better treated.
Moving toward smaller farms, though, Pollan finds an entirely different attitude, a respect for animals and the rhythms of nature.
Pollan finishes off his quest with a hunter-gatherer mission, and he experiences the difficulty and satisfaction of killing and scavenging a meal from his immediate environment.
I liked the details of this narrative, and the way the facts of factory farming were presented in a way that made the situation clear without seeming to be overly sensationalized. I also liked that Pollan discussed in detail his thoughts about vegetarianism and the reasons why he chose not to go that way, even after seeing how animals were killed and prepared.
Before reading this book, I had a vague idea of the meat industry, of course. Reading this book clarified the situation for me, though, and made me start thinking about the sacrifices I might be willing to make in my own life and my own budget in order to eat more fresh and local foods.
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