The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals Paperback – August 28, 2007

I almost never write reviews, but after the amount of time I devoted to reading this book and the gratefulness I have to Mr. Pollan for researching and sharing his knowledge and wisdom within it, I feel obligated.The book is well organized into Contents of 3 Parts: Industrial (Corn), Pastoral (Grass), and Personal (Forest). I have no idea why "Personal" was chosen over the term Hunter-Gatherer, as that was what he was going for. You may have picked up on that the Contents are in reverse chronological order, a timeline from current to pre-historic. In case you are wondering what "A Natural History of Four Meals" refers to, it is those three aforementioned Parts with Pastoral being subdivided into Big Organic/Industrial Organic and Small/Local organic. Pollan's admirable and ambitious goal is to figure out how our food in the USA gets from earth to plate in each category.Part I - Industrial has a lot of eye-opening information in regards to farming, ranching, and the science. Even with all of that great information I found it the hardest part to get through as Pollan beats the metaphorical horse to death lambasting the industrial food system. I didn't make it through Part I the first time I tried reading it 10 years ago and now I can see why. Even though it is the shortest of the 3 parts there is a redundancy and negativity where I felt it should have been edited down even further.Part II - Pastoral is the longest of the 3 parts and was my favorite part of the book. I grew up on a farm/ranch and some of the descriptions and emotions that he conveyed took me right back onto my family farm. I don't think it would be much of a reach to assume Pollan a lefty/liberal city slicker having grown up in the New England, moved to California and teaching at Berkley, but in his writings of the "grass farmer" Joel you can tell how much respect and admiration he has for the man even though their personal and political beliefs may be worlds apart. I also thought Pollan's critique and DILEMMAs he posed in this section led to some of his best writing in the book.Part III - Personal was a excellent conclusion to the book, though it does have a completely different tone to it. The first two Parts (Industrial and Pastoral) are an examination of the US food system. This last part is Pollan doing his best to recreate the hunter-gatherer food lifestyle while living in urban California, in hopes that it will add to the big picture he painted for us in the first two parts. As someone who grew up on a farm hunting it was refreshing to have a novice from the city, who likely looked down on us in someway, dive fully into the hunter outdoorsmen experience to understand our way of life. I'd be proud to buy Mr. Pollan a beer congratulating him on his first successful hunt. I also found the chapters on the mysterious mushrooms and preparing the food educational and entertaining. Angelo in particular seems like pretty cool, kickass dude.A few critiques:Mr. Pollan frequently uses personification when talking about plants and their evolution, like when he makes statements that corn chose us as much as we chose it. That's not how it works and I found it to be a distracting and annoying repeated offense.Finished in late 2005, the book could use an update on the farming end. The farmers had a nice run for a stretch, lets say 2009-2015. Things have turned really ugly in both the cattle markets and commodity markets since then. It would be nice to see an update of why things turned around for the better, then flipped again. And we could always use a few more wise words from Mr. Joel Salatin.Looking forward to reading and reviewing "In Defense of Food".

I listened to this book on audio after it was recommended by a friend, and I'm glad I did. I hope you will purchase it and read it, too! The first thing to know is that the author is such a good storyteller that he teaches writing at Harvard. To dissect and tell the very complex story of the USA food system, he uses four case studies (consisting of four meals) as a framework to examine the overall system in the United States through which food is produced, regulated, subsidized, packaged, distributed, marketed, and sold in the USA. The four meals he uses to dissect and analyze this system bring it down to earth in a practical way that enables one to understand it. The four meals consist of (1) a fast food meal consumed by his family, (2) an "organic," "natural " meal using the ingredients purchased from a high-end retail grocery chain, (3) a meal produced by a farm family that grows virtually everything they eat, and (4) a meal in which he attempted to mirror the type of food a hunter gather might have been able to obtain by foraging and hunting their own food. For each of these meals, he examines each ingredient used and traces that ingredient back to its ultimate origins. When I say ultimate origins, I mean for example not just the cow in the slaughter lot for the McDonald's hamburger, but the corn that fed that cow, the systems by which the corn farmer produced the grain, the USDA agricultural subsidies that resulted in the production of that corn, the transportation and delivery systems ... you get the drift. He uses this example to examine an extremely complex system and a way that makes it understandable and digestible. Best of all, it's not ever boring. He tells the story In such a way that you feel like you get to know the people involved and their stories, why they do what they do, what their challenges are, and what rewards are. And then for each meal, he describes what it was like to eat it, which is kind of fun too. For the fast food meal, he and his family drove while they ate it, since it was supposed to be "fast" and "on the go" (my words). For the second meal, the organic meal, he discusses the initial movement for sustainability and how that got co-opted by big business and the USDA, so that the term "organic" got to be controlled by industry and now no longer means what a lot of people think it does. Instead, the requirements for being called "organic," are so complex that small farms are shut out, and the huge operations that have grown to meet the demand for "organic " are just about as industrialized as the industrial agriculture described in the fast food restaurant meal. The third meal, originating from a sustainable family farm that grows all its own food and produces all its own fertilizer, is the most intriguing for me personally. It discusses the challenges faced by that small family farm and ways they have Ingeniously worked around outrageously cumbersome USDA agricultural regulations that are designed to control excesses of industrial farms but which are also applied to the tiniest of family farms without regard for differences in scale or farming methods. For the last meal, he reveals his credentials as an amazing home cook, when he describes the feast he prepared for his guests after he participated in a hunt to kill a wild boar and roast it. I hope my description hasn't included too many spoilers, because the information in the book is extremely worthwhile and worth your read and your time and your consideration as you think about the sources of your food, the nutritional value of food, how to become a more ethical consumer of food, and importantly, to be aware of our overall food system and ways that it really needs to be completely restructured , including especially restructuring of USDA agricultural policy, if the US food system is to be come responsive to human nutritional needs and sustainable for the future.