The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World (reissued)

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Pollan learns to forage for chanterelles, goes fishing for abalone, picks cherries from a local tree, fava beans from his garden, and procures wild yeast to use in bread. His farm guru is Joel Salatin, an independent-minded small farmer who runs Polyface, his small family farm in Virginia. Singer is a utilitarian, meaning that he believes the most ethical action is the one that maximizes “utility”—in the case of animal rights, maximizing the happiness of animals and avoiding hurting them. Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan—whose number-one New York Times best sellers include The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind—offers his latest, provocative look into the profound ways that what we eat affects how we live.

Because he is engaging directly with his food, he has to grapple with more basic questions, like the ethics of killing and eating animals, and the methods by which humans decide what foods are edible in the wild, particularly in the case of mushrooms. Pollan finds that this movement morphed into a booming industry as it became increasingly popular and mainstream. Due to its efficiency as a plant, and its diverse utility for food, alcohol, and fuel, corn (species name Zea mays) has evolved alongside people very successfully, changing itself to meet human needs.

Pollan combines ecology, biology, history and anthropology with personal experience to present fascinating multiple perspectives. Pollan has served as the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism since 2003. Thus began a singular adventure into various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists.

The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. Pollan’s perfect meal is completely inefficient and unsustainable as a consistent practice, however—the other end of the spectrum from the unsustainable fast food meal. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings.Sinclair’s book exposed the brutal and unsanitary conditions in the American meat industry, drawing public attention to a previously under-scrutinized sector of the newly industrialized and prosperous American economy. Chosen by the American Horticultural Society as one of the seventy-five greatest books ever written about gardening, Second Nature has become a manifesto for rethinking our relationship with nature. In tracing four different modern food chains and their resulting meals, Pollan explores the web of connections made by food. is born on a ranch in South Dakota, and he is sent to a feedlot in Kansas at the age of six months, where he is fed a corn-based diet.

Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. There isn’t an answer to how Americans ought to eat, but Pollan ends by emphasizing that food is a person’s most direct engagement with the natural world. The author’s extraordinarily labor-intensive final meal provides a perfect contrast to the fast-food takeout of Part I.In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed reciprocal relationships similar to that of honeybees and flowers.

He also becomes skeptical of vegetarianism, a movement which steadily gained ground beginning in the 1970s, as a result of increasing ethical and environmental concerns about the eating of meat. Pollan explores the American food system by focusing on four different meals that are representative of three food chains: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. Although it is also difficult to follow the progress of a single cow, Pollan purchases and visits a steer named 534. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato.Pollan sets out to trace major American food sources like corn, which he follows from one end of the food chain to the other in a journey that takes him from farms to fast-food restaurants.