The Omnivore's Dilemma

What set off the sea change? It appears to have been a perfect media storm of diet books, scientific studies, and one timely magazine article. The new diet books, many of them inspired by the formerly discredited Dr. Robert C. Atkins, brought Americans the welcome news that they could eat more meat and lose weight just so long as they laid off the bread and pasta. These high-protein, low-carb diets found support in a handful of new epidemiological studies suggesting that the nutritional orthodoxy that had held sway in America since the 1970s might be wrong. It was not, as official opinion claimed, fat that made us fat, but the carbohydrates we d been eating precisely in order to stay slim. So conditions were ripe for a swing of the dietary pendulum when, in the summer of 2002, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story on the new research entitled What if Fat Doesn t Make You Fat? Within months, supermarket shelves were restocked and restaurant menus rewritten to reflect the new nutritional wisdom. The blamelessness of steak restored, two of the most wholesome and uncontroversial foods known to man bread and pasta acquired a moral stain that promptly bankrupted dozens of bakeries and noodle firms and ruined an untold number of perfectly good meals.

So violent a change in a culture s eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating. But then, such a culture would not feel the need for its most august legislative body to ever deliberate the nation s dietary goals or, for that matter, to wage political battle every few years over the precise design of an official government graphic called the food pyramid. A country with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for the quackery (or common sense) of a new diet book every January. It would not be susceptible to the pendulum swings of food scares or fads, to the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutrient and the demonization of another. It would not be apt to confuse protein bars and food supplements with meals or breakfast cereals with medicines. It probably would not eat a fifth of its meals in cars or feed fully a third of its children at a fast-food outlet every day. And it surely would not be nearly so fat.

Nor would such a culture be shocked to discover that there are other countries, such as Italy and France, that

do mean everyone. The Austin Chronicle

As lyrical as What to Eat is hard-hitting, Michael Pollan s The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals may be the best single book I read this year. This magisterial work, whose subject is nothing less than our own omnivorous (i.e., eating everything) humanity, is organized around two plants and one ecosystem. Pollan has a love-hate relationship with Corn, the wildly successful plant that has found its way into meat (as feed), corn syrup and virtually every other type of processed food. American agribusiness monoculture of corn has shoved aside the old pastoral ideal of Grass, and the self-sustaining, diversified farm based on the grass-eating livestock. In The Forest, Pollan ponders the earliest forms of obtaining food: hunting and gathering. If you eat, you should read this book. Newsday

Smart, insightful, funny and often profound. USA Today

The Omnivore s Dilemma is an ambitious and thoroughly enjoyable, if sometimes unsettling, attempt to peer over these walls, to bring us closer to a true understanding of what we eat and, by extension, what we should eat . . . It is interested not only in how the consumed affects the consumer, but in how we consumers affect what we consume as well . . . Entertaining and memorable. Readers of this intelligent and admirable book will almost certainly find their capacity to delight in food augmented rather than diminished.   San Francisco Chronicle

On the long trip from the soil to our mouths, a trip of 1,500 miles on average, the food we eat often passes through places most of us will never see. Michael Pollan has spent much of the last five years visiting these places on our behalf.   Salon.com

The author of Second Nature and The Botany of Desire, Pollan is willing to go to some lengths to reconnect with what he eats, even if that means putting in a hard week on an organic farm and slitting the throats of chickens. He s not Paris Hilton on The Simple Life.   Time

A pleasure to read.   The Baltimore Sun

A fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You ll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again . . . Pollan isn t preachy; he s too thoughtful a writer and too dogged a researcher to let ideology take over. He s also funny and adventurous.   Publishers Weekly

[Pollan] does everything from buying his own cow to helping with the open-air slaughter of pasture-raised chickens to hunting morels in Northern California. This is not a man who s afraid of getting his hands dirty in the quest for better understanding. Along with wonderfully descriptive writing and truly engaging stories and characters, there is a full helping of serious information on the way modern food is produced.   BookPage

The Omnivore s Dilemma is about something that affects everyone.   The Sacramento Bee

Lively and thought-provoking.   East Bay Express

Michael Pollan makes tracking your dinner back through the food chain that produced it a rare adventure.   O, The Oprah Magazine

A master wordsmith Pollan brings to the table lucid and rich prose, an enthusiasm for his topic, interesting anecdotes, a journalist s passion for research, an ability to poke fun at himself, and an appreciation for historical context . . . This is journalism at its best.   Christianity Today

First-rate . . . [A] passionate journey of the heart Pollan is . . . an uncommonly graceful explainer of natural science; this is the book he was born to write.   Newsweek

[Pollan s] stirring new book . . . is a feast, illuminating the ethical, social and environmental impacts of how and what we choose to eat.   The Courier-Journal

From fast food to big organic to locally sourced to foraging for dinner with rifle in hand, Pollan captures the perils and the promise of how we eat today.   The Arizona Daily Star

A multivalent, highly introspective examination of the human diet, from capitalism to consumption.   The Hudson Review

What should you eat? Michael Pollan addresses that fundamental question with great wit and intelligence, looking at the social, ethical, and environmental impact of four different meals. Eating well, he finds, can be a pleasurable way to change the world.   Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness

Widely and rightly praised The Omnivore s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals [is] a book that I kid you not may change your life.   Austin American-Statesman

With the skill of a professional detective, Michael Pollan explores the worlds of industrial farming, organic and sustainable agriculture, and even hunting and gathering to determine the links of food chains: how food gets from its sources in nature to our plates. The findings he reports in this this book are often unexpected, disturbing, even horrifying, but they are facts every eater should know. This is an engaging book, full of information that is most relevant to conscious living.   Dr. Andrew Weil, author of Spontaneous Healing and Healthy Aging

Michael Pollan is a voice of reason, a journalist/philosopher who forages in the overgrowth of our schizophrenic food culture. He s the kind of teacher we probably all wish we had: one who triggers the little explosions of insight that change the way we eat and the way we live.   Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse restaurant

Michael Pollan is such a thoroughly delightful writer his luscious sentences deliver so much pleasure and humor and surprise as they carry one from dinner table to cornfield to feedlot to forest floor, and then back again that the happy reader could almost miss the profound truth half hidden at the heart of this beautiful book: that the reality of our politics is to be found not in what Americans do in the voting booth every four years but in what we do in the supermarket every day. Embodied in this irresistible, picaresque journey through America s food world is a profound treatise on the hidden politics of our everyday life.   Mark Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror

Every time you go into a grocery store you are voting with your dollars, and what goes into your cart has real repercussions on the future of the earth. But although we have choices, few of us are aware of exactly what they are. Michael Pollan s beautifully written book could change that. He tears down the walls that separate us from what we eat, and forces us to be more responsible eaters. Reading this book is a wonderful, life-changing experience.   Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet magazine and author of Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise