Food Read: The Omnivore's Dilemma

There's so much fantastic "foodie lit." out there! This past summer I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. I was a little behind in reading it (Dilemma came out in 2006 and Pollan's next book In Defense of Food was published in 2008), but I'm so glad that I didn't give in to my desire to skip right to Defense. I'm a city girl at heart, but this book made me want to farm. While I found it in the Sociology section of my local book store, Pollan is actually a professor of journalism by trade. His writing can be very convincing, despite the slight feeling of sensationalism that peers through here and there, undoubtedly due to Pollan's passion for his subject, as well as the surreal realities of the subject itself. In the book, Pollan follows the three primary food chains, starting with industrial farming, then organic farming, and, finally, hunting and gathering. The book was an eye-opener for me not only in its portrayal of modern food production (I will never, ever look at factory farm chicken the same way again), but also in its exploration of alternative methods of food production. Pollan's discussion of the effects of a surplus of cheap, subsidized corn on our diet (thanks to high fructose corn syrup and corn-based additives, corn has made its way into almost every processed food we eat), our environment (a fertilizer-induced "dead zone" the size of New Jersey now exists in the Gulf of Mexico), and even our cattle (cows are built to eat grass, not corn, remember?) is chilling. But equally adrenaline-inducing is his discussion of an alternative to industrial agriculture, Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, a place where the natural systems, instead of machinery and chemicals, create efficiencies that can only be described as symphonic. This book not only got me thinking about where my food comes from, but also moved me to make changes in the way that I eat. For that reason, I highly recommend The Omnivore's Dilemma, and look forward to reading In Defense of Food within the next couple of months.