Book Review: Omnivore's Dilemma
Well, it only took me a whole year after buying this signed book to actually read it! (and I'm glad I finally did!)
On the whole, I found the book throughly engaging and thoughtful. Michael Pollan was at his best exploring and describing the meals he consumed, and Pollan was at his least-best trying to describe a consistent philosophical model to explain the underpinnings of each of his meals. It was in these latter parts of the book that Pollan was more polemical, and frankly, a bit less interesting to read. Overall though, the book is important for bringing these topics to wider audience, and demonstrating how a whole host of complicated issues and values all fold into each other.
As a colleague, Cara, puts it, Pollan's nemesis is industrial corn. And Pollan goes a long way towards skewering it...but he also demonstrates the profound difficulties alternative agricultural methods face to deliver similar volumes with better values to our urban-industrial eaters. Drawing together production, distribution, and consumption - Pollan pursues a concerned everyman's analysis of our food through four meals:
1. A McDonald's Happy Meal
I was particularly loved the part where after trying a table-napkin calculation of how much corn was going into his Happy Meal eaten at 65mph in an ethanol-cut gasoline-powered car, he decided to take samples of his meal to a mass spectrometer. The results: "In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of a mass spectrometer, to be the meal of a far more specialized kind of eater. But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn's koala."
2. An "industrial organic" meal purchased from Whole Foods
I particularly respected how Pollan engaged the real difficulties of this ethos, the shortcomings of vegetarianism, and the honest statements by those in the business who recognize how much they have become like the conventional large-scale agriculturalists they once vehemently opposed in their farm co-op experiments away from the world and the mass market.
3. A biodynamic meal from Polyface Farm in rural Virginia.
Clearly Polyface impressed Pollan tremendously, and the fact that Joel Salatin was very much living his beliefs. On the other hand, Pollan's deft hand brought out a reality to Salatin's Jeffersonian vision of agricultural pastoralism that seems impossible to square with the demands of hungry cities just a few hundred miles away, let alone global demand.
4. A meal completely hunted, gathered, and cooked by the author with a little help from his friends.
To Pollan's credit, he engaged the 'hunter porn' he was initially suspicious of, and made no dainty veils for the serious personal ethical compromises hunting, killing, and 'dressing' the kill meant for him.
All in all, a profoundly honest (and he acknowledges some of the compromises he made along the way) investigation of America's relationships towards food.
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Next Book now reading: World War Z. :-)
On the whole, I found the book throughly engaging and thoughtful. Michael Pollan was at his best exploring and describing the meals he consumed, and Pollan was at his least-best trying to describe a consistent philosophical model to explain the underpinnings of each of his meals. It was in these latter parts of the book that Pollan was more polemical, and frankly, a bit less interesting to read. Overall though, the book is important for bringing these topics to wider audience, and demonstrating how a whole host of complicated issues and values all fold into each other.
As a colleague, Cara, puts it, Pollan's nemesis is industrial corn. And Pollan goes a long way towards skewering it...but he also demonstrates the profound difficulties alternative agricultural methods face to deliver similar volumes with better values to our urban-industrial eaters. Drawing together production, distribution, and consumption - Pollan pursues a concerned everyman's analysis of our food through four meals:
1. A McDonald's Happy Meal
I was particularly loved the part where after trying a table-napkin calculation of how much corn was going into his Happy Meal eaten at 65mph in an ethanol-cut gasoline-powered car, he decided to take samples of his meal to a mass spectrometer. The results: "In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of a mass spectrometer, to be the meal of a far more specialized kind of eater. But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn's koala."
2. An "industrial organic" meal purchased from Whole Foods
I particularly respected how Pollan engaged the real difficulties of this ethos, the shortcomings of vegetarianism, and the honest statements by those in the business who recognize how much they have become like the conventional large-scale agriculturalists they once vehemently opposed in their farm co-op experiments away from the world and the mass market.
3. A biodynamic meal from Polyface Farm in rural Virginia.
Clearly Polyface impressed Pollan tremendously, and the fact that Joel Salatin was very much living his beliefs. On the other hand, Pollan's deft hand brought out a reality to Salatin's Jeffersonian vision of agricultural pastoralism that seems impossible to square with the demands of hungry cities just a few hundred miles away, let alone global demand.
4. A meal completely hunted, gathered, and cooked by the author with a little help from his friends.
To Pollan's credit, he engaged the 'hunter porn' he was initially suspicious of, and made no dainty veils for the serious personal ethical compromises hunting, killing, and 'dressing' the kill meant for him.
All in all, a profoundly honest (and he acknowledges some of the compromises he made along the way) investigation of America's relationships towards food.
---
Next Book now reading: World War Z. :-)