The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Title: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Author: Michael Pollan
Rating: 1/5
Since Michael Pollan is the name in food science non-fiction, I was anticipating that The Omnivore’s Dilemma would do something spectacular to make me think in a new light or teach me some interesting food facts to add to my growing internal database or even realign my entire world view. I didn’t go in asking for the latter, really. Just that I foresaw it as a possibility. I mean, this guy has been regaled with heaps of praise and awards for this feat in food so it must be damn impressive, right?
This big daddy of national food criticism is divided into three sections so I will now divide my rating by each one so you’ll get a better understanding of my reading experience here:
Part one: 4 stars.
Part two: 3 stars.
Part three: 0.5 stars.
And now for the actual review portion. I will start with the positives: I learned some new things about corn and I found out that chicken nuggets have lighter fluid in them. (Awesome.) This was part one which was aptly titled “corn”, so the one good part of this book won’t be hard for you to miss. Corn, guys. Corn is in everything. Corn is probably in the nail polish that is on my fingers as I type this. Corn is in you right now, dear reader, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Anyway, what irked me throughout the entirety of this little journalism venture was Pollan’s purple flowery what-the-hell-is-this-even-doing-in-non-fiction writing style.
“The cow opens her meaty wet lips, curls her sandpaper tongue around the bunched clover like a fat rope, and with the pleasuring sound of tearing foliage, rips the mouthful of tender leaves from its crown.”
A direct quote, my friends. Pollan likes to describe things in overabundant detail. He especially likes to describe in overabundant detail things that don’t actually matter. If you trimmed down all of the times he waxes poetic over landscape you would be left with only two thirds of the original novel. Don’t be afraid to trim that excess, Ms. or Mr. Editor. I walked into the non-fiction section for facts, not overly wrought descriptions of nature.
The book started sagging along in part two. This one is filled with a lot of the above mentioned trivialities and with stories about Pollan’s stay on an organic farmland which is actually a lot more boring than it sounds-my unapologetically animal loving self just enjoyed the idea of a happy farmland. You would think, given that I’m an unapologetic animal lover who does things like not eat meat and skip out on dissecting rabbits in senior year anatomy, that I would have been thoroughly squicked by Pollan’s descriptions of killing chickens. But since it had been awhile in the book since I had uncovered a new interesting fact about “our national eating disorder” I could only gaze over the passages in mild interest. What was this book about again? Did I buy a book about food culture in America or did I buy one about Pollan’s internal musings on the social experiments in his life?
Oh, speaking of internal musings and social experiments-hi, part three! Part three had the privilege of grating so badly at my nerves that I actually dove into my bag for a pen to start sullying the margins with notes. (I held off, though.) Part three was nothing more than a practice in self-indulgence. Some highlights include:
1) Conflating the societal necessity of eating meat with the societal necessity for sex.
2) Some self-congratulating stories about hunting and foraging and making a dinner and seeing a picture of himself and realizing some mystical truths from these experiences. It was remarkably like a written version of the person that comes back from their vacation with two hundred photos that they shove under people’s noses though, really, no one else gives a damn. I bought this book for information on eating habits in America, not so I could read your mundane descriptions of searching for pigs and mushrooms.
3) Pollan in turn labeling himself a vegetarian (because he decides he’ll try giving up meat for a month for the purpose of telling us all what it’s like to live a sad meatless life) and a hunter (especially when he and his “Virgil” are dressed in hunting clothes and the other people at the store give them a “wider berth”). Reading these passages felt to me like the person who will buy some taper candles and read a spell book and claim to know all about what it’s like to be a Wiccan.
4) The fact that Pollan infuriatingly acknowledges that vegetarianism might just be better for creating his ideal food system and then hems and haws over it and ultimately handwaves the idea with something I interpreted as, “Well that just can’t be right because I like meat.” Come on now-if you’re going to set up your point like this and even confront it then don’t back down with some half-assed explanation.
Ultimately Pollan muses on a lot and ultimately changes nothing about his own life in accordance with his “findings”. I mean, he still eats meat and shops at Whole Foods and eats fast food even though he says within the book that these are all bad things that are inhibiting us. If the researcher can’t bother to learn from his own research than why should the reader? Were we supposed to take something away from this?
5) At one point Pollan spends half a page indulging in his overly flowery descriptions, this time on the subject of hunting. He included this jarring little tidbit: exquisitely alert. Excuse me? It’s perhaps the worst turn of phrase I’ve ever encountered in a book taken seriously by the public. But what infuriated me was when immediately afterward, Pollan spent four paragraphs lampooning the fact that he just those ridiculous hunting descriptions.
You know what, Pollan? I agree. It was ridiculous and gratuitous and if you seem to realize that then means that you strike it from the novel instead writing meta for three-fourths of a page. When I’m editing a story and I come across a paragraph that’s just stupid I highlight and delete instead of lampshading with “LOLOL u gaiz, you see what I did thar?”
6) No, you can’t say that you know for a fact that an animal doesn’t have a concept of death. In fact, you’re not allowed to make any assumptions that you know sure what goes on in an animal’s mind. You are not the Cow Whisperer.
7) All of the realizations and conclusions are fine so long as you’re privileged and upper class. Did you know the world would be a better place if we all just bought our food from small and locally owned farms? Yeah, it probably would be. Good luck with getting everyone to fit the possible demographic.
If you want food science books that focus on the issues of the country rather than those of the writer, check out Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.
Author: Michael Pollan
Rating: 1/5
Since Michael Pollan is the name in food science non-fiction, I was anticipating that The Omnivore’s Dilemma would do something spectacular to make me think in a new light or teach me some interesting food facts to add to my growing internal database or even realign my entire world view. I didn’t go in asking for the latter, really. Just that I foresaw it as a possibility. I mean, this guy has been regaled with heaps of praise and awards for this feat in food so it must be damn impressive, right?
This big daddy of national food criticism is divided into three sections so I will now divide my rating by each one so you’ll get a better understanding of my reading experience here:
Part one: 4 stars.
Part two: 3 stars.
Part three: 0.5 stars.
And now for the actual review portion. I will start with the positives: I learned some new things about corn and I found out that chicken nuggets have lighter fluid in them. (Awesome.) This was part one which was aptly titled “corn”, so the one good part of this book won’t be hard for you to miss. Corn, guys. Corn is in everything. Corn is probably in the nail polish that is on my fingers as I type this. Corn is in you right now, dear reader, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Anyway, what irked me throughout the entirety of this little journalism venture was Pollan’s purple flowery what-the-hell-is-this-even-doing-in-non-fiction writing style.
“The cow opens her meaty wet lips, curls her sandpaper tongue around the bunched clover like a fat rope, and with the pleasuring sound of tearing foliage, rips the mouthful of tender leaves from its crown.”
A direct quote, my friends. Pollan likes to describe things in overabundant detail. He especially likes to describe in overabundant detail things that don’t actually matter. If you trimmed down all of the times he waxes poetic over landscape you would be left with only two thirds of the original novel. Don’t be afraid to trim that excess, Ms. or Mr. Editor. I walked into the non-fiction section for facts, not overly wrought descriptions of nature.
The book started sagging along in part two. This one is filled with a lot of the above mentioned trivialities and with stories about Pollan’s stay on an organic farmland which is actually a lot more boring than it sounds-my unapologetically animal loving self just enjoyed the idea of a happy farmland. You would think, given that I’m an unapologetic animal lover who does things like not eat meat and skip out on dissecting rabbits in senior year anatomy, that I would have been thoroughly squicked by Pollan’s descriptions of killing chickens. But since it had been awhile in the book since I had uncovered a new interesting fact about “our national eating disorder” I could only gaze over the passages in mild interest. What was this book about again? Did I buy a book about food culture in America or did I buy one about Pollan’s internal musings on the social experiments in his life?
Oh, speaking of internal musings and social experiments-hi, part three! Part three had the privilege of grating so badly at my nerves that I actually dove into my bag for a pen to start sullying the margins with notes. (I held off, though.) Part three was nothing more than a practice in self-indulgence. Some highlights include:
1) Conflating the societal necessity of eating meat with the societal necessity for sex.
2) Some self-congratulating stories about hunting and foraging and making a dinner and seeing a picture of himself and realizing some mystical truths from these experiences. It was remarkably like a written version of the person that comes back from their vacation with two hundred photos that they shove under people’s noses though, really, no one else gives a damn. I bought this book for information on eating habits in America, not so I could read your mundane descriptions of searching for pigs and mushrooms.
3) Pollan in turn labeling himself a vegetarian (because he decides he’ll try giving up meat for a month for the purpose of telling us all what it’s like to live a sad meatless life) and a hunter (especially when he and his “Virgil” are dressed in hunting clothes and the other people at the store give them a “wider berth”). Reading these passages felt to me like the person who will buy some taper candles and read a spell book and claim to know all about what it’s like to be a Wiccan.
4) The fact that Pollan infuriatingly acknowledges that vegetarianism might just be better for creating his ideal food system and then hems and haws over it and ultimately handwaves the idea with something I interpreted as, “Well that just can’t be right because I like meat.” Come on now-if you’re going to set up your point like this and even confront it then don’t back down with some half-assed explanation.
Ultimately Pollan muses on a lot and ultimately changes nothing about his own life in accordance with his “findings”. I mean, he still eats meat and shops at Whole Foods and eats fast food even though he says within the book that these are all bad things that are inhibiting us. If the researcher can’t bother to learn from his own research than why should the reader? Were we supposed to take something away from this?
5) At one point Pollan spends half a page indulging in his overly flowery descriptions, this time on the subject of hunting. He included this jarring little tidbit: exquisitely alert. Excuse me? It’s perhaps the worst turn of phrase I’ve ever encountered in a book taken seriously by the public. But what infuriated me was when immediately afterward, Pollan spent four paragraphs lampooning the fact that he just those ridiculous hunting descriptions.
You know what, Pollan? I agree. It was ridiculous and gratuitous and if you seem to realize that then means that you strike it from the novel instead writing meta for three-fourths of a page. When I’m editing a story and I come across a paragraph that’s just stupid I highlight and delete instead of lampshading with “LOLOL u gaiz, you see what I did thar?”
6) No, you can’t say that you know for a fact that an animal doesn’t have a concept of death. In fact, you’re not allowed to make any assumptions that you know sure what goes on in an animal’s mind. You are not the Cow Whisperer.
7) All of the realizations and conclusions are fine so long as you’re privileged and upper class. Did you know the world would be a better place if we all just bought our food from small and locally owned farms? Yeah, it probably would be. Good luck with getting everyone to fit the possible demographic.
If you want food science books that focus on the issues of the country rather than those of the writer, check out Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.