The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | 
| Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  409 reviews
Sales Rank: 57
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0143038583
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.12
EAN: 9780143038580
ASIN: 0143038583
Publication Date: August 28, 2007
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Product Description
A New York Times bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner? Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain uswhether industrial or organic, alternative or processedhe develops a portrait of the American way of eating. The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 404 more reviews...
 How we should eat May 5, 2008
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.
 Too Many Words May 3, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
 changed the way i think and eat May 2, 2008
"TOD" is not an easy read, and a takes a bit of time to get into, but it's incredibly absorbing. I learned a ton -- about where our food comes from, how it's made and processed, and how "organic" isn't really all that "organic" or necessarily good for the planet. Reading this book has changed my food choices for the better and really made me think about what I eat and select.
I'll tell you this -- I haven't had McDonald's in 9 months, and will never eat there again, not even in an emergency. (This healthy choice owed to this book, + the documentary "king corn," which features Pollan; and "Super Size Me" and "Fast Food Nation," which I also highly recommend.)
Buy this book, and eat healthy!
Not much to add... May 2, 2008
I have really nothing to add that wasn't already covered in earlier reviews, except to say that I too am absolutely absorbed by this book, it's informative, interesting, relevant and the writing style is simply captivating. I can't put it down!
What's for dinner, Mr. Pollan? April 30, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Pollan's book takes a dry and somewhat elitist look the state of the human diet and more specifically, the American diet. He investigates three meals (I'm not sure where the fourth one from the subtitle came from), fast food, organic, and a hunter/gatherer meal. What he finds is interesting and thought-provoking, much of which supports the findings I wrote about in The Evolution Diet: we are extremely removed from what we were designed to eat.
The author's personal experiences make up the majority of this lengthy book, and his interactions with some of the characters in the food procurement industry is insightful if drawn out. The section on the hunter/gatherer meal was the most appealing (naturally), and despite the glaring flaw of 'preparing a hunter/gatherer meal', it was freer from contradiction than the other sections. Pollan rightly attacks the socialism that has led to a national food industry that pumps unrecognizable processed material into our stomachs, but he fails to notice that Roosevelt's socialism is just as detrimental as Nixon's. As Pollan quotes an interesting farmer Joel Salatin in the book, "You can't regulate integrity".
Pollan doesn't commit to a diet plan for the reader--he admits that the extreme meals (fast and slow) should only be an annual ceremonial meal--but the stories that he conveys will no doubt lead the reader to a healthier lifestyle. For specifics on that healthier lifestyle, please feel free to reference The Evolution Diet, mentioned above.
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