The Bookworm: The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. 450 pages. Penguin Books. 2006.

Folly in the getting of our food is nothing new. And yet the new follies we are perpetrating in our industrial food chain today are of a different order. By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals food they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves food far more novel than we even realize, we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented.

Michael Pollan is unsure what to eat — again.

Actually, it’s the other way around: The Omnivore’s Dilemma is the first time Pollan employed his journalistic expertise and curiosity to answer the simple question, “What should we have for dinner?”; In Defense of Food, which I read first, actually came second.

I bought this book at Iowa Book, along with a twin copy to give my parents for Christmas. I highly doubt they’ll ever open it, or even finish it if they do (their evenings revolve around the ABC primetime schedule), but, as I always do when I give books as gifts, I hope it reintroduces them to the wonders of reading, and inspires them to pick up other books (like In Defense, which I also gave them). The cashier looked a little confused when I put two copies of the same book on the counter, and his face told me he was thinking, “What’s wrong with this guy?”

The premise of The Omnivore’s Dilemma is to investigate and unravel the predicament we’ve found ourselves — in some cases by design — regarding what to eat. Since humans have evolved to become omnivores (meaning we can eat both plants and animals), we’re given an overabundance of options when we feed ourselves. What we should eat has never been a simple question to answer, and the advent of industrialized foods, compounded by the loss of cultural and seasonal guidance, which helped generations of our ancestors sustain themselves, have complicated matters even more. In Omnivore’s, Pollan not only attempts to answer the “What should we have for dinner” proposition, but also asks what his dinner is, how it got to his plate, and what it does to him and the world as a whole.

After a short and well-written introduction, the book is divided into three sections, where Pollan investigates the different food chains sustaining us today: Industrial, Pastoral, and Personal. (I just realized that Pollan’s research regresses through the evolution of human development, starting with modern industrialization, jumping back to Neolithic agriculture and plant cultivation, and culminating with our hunter-gatherer beginnings.) As best he can, Pollan follows each food chain from beginning, whether it’s in the form of corn or grass or feral boar, to end, on his plate as a meal. His quest for information and food takes him to a corn farm in Iowa, a giant cattle stockyard in Kansas, vast vegetable fields in Steinbeck country, a management-intensive farm in Virginia, and a charred pine forest in the Sierras. He dives as deep as possible into the systems — both natural and manmade — that feed us, and each section finishes with a representative meal from each chain.

As with In Defense, Pollan’s adventures and discoveries are engaging and thought provoking. It will definitely change the way you eat and shop for food (if you haven’t already read In Defense). I don’t do the fast food, pop, or meat thing anymore, but I’m sure those who do will think twice after reading what Pollan finds out about synthesized corn and the industrial meat industry. He also has some good stories to tell: he buys a steer and tries following it to slaughter (which he can’t due to “food security” reasons), he helps kill and eviscerate chickens, shoots a wild boar, and hunts for mushrooms in the Sierras. It’s good reading, though at times, especially during the Pastoral section, I wished Pollan would move on stop dwelling on the minute of each detail.

The subtitle, “A Natural history of Four Meals,” is misleading, and I wonder if it’s something Pollan and his editors overlooked when the book was being proofed. Pollan mentions nothing about the four traditional daily meals (at least in agrarian regions, like the Midwest) — breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper — but focuses on what and how we eat in general; there’s no discussion on what and how to eat at certain times during the day, or how our ancestors fed themselves on a daily basis. As mentioned, the three section conclusions feature a meal presenting each respective food chain. Three meals. Searching through the introduction, I find that Pollan indeed writes “these three journey’s (and four meals),” but I don’t remember a fourth meal.

The text font was pretty shitty. I may have made the same complaint with In Defense, but I’ll make it again. It’s obviously readable, but its italic style is lacking; you could barely tell it was italics. It was more like slightly tilted and a little bold.

I’ve mentioned In Defense a lot during this post, and, frankly, it’s hard not connecting Omnivore’s with its successor. In Defense is mentioned on the cover as an advertising ploy, and featured in a full-page ad on the inside back cover. At lot of facts and detail in Omnivore’s are repeated in In Defense, as well. Pollan spent years writing about food for The New York Times Magazine, so no doubt the reporting he did contributed to both books.

Cool new words I learned: All descriptions courtesy my MacBook dictionary. Tope: “drink alcohol to excess, esp. on a regular basis.” Nutraceutical: “a food containing health-giving additives and having medicinal.” (“Nutraceutical” could describe just about half of all the shit you find a supermarket.) Ineluctable: “unable to be resisted or avoided; inescapable.” Grok: “understand (something) intuitively or by empathy.” Stemwinder: “an entertaining and rousing speech.” Jeremiad: “a long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes.” Antinomian: “of or relating to the view that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law.” Physiognomy: “a person's facial features or expression, esp. when regarded as indicative of character or ethnic origin.” Usufruct: “the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another's property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.”