Theo Logos's Reviews > The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Human beings are omnivores. But because we are omnivores, we have very little built in instinct that tells us which foods are good for us and which aren’t. That’s the dilemma; we can eat anything, but how do we know what to eat?

So that’s the dilemma. And while some cultures have long standing traditional diets to help them solve this problem, Pollan notes that modern Americans don’t have any strong food traditions. We are surrounded in supermarkets and restaurants with a staggering number of food choices without any clear directions what foods are best for a healthy life.

Here Michael Pollan takes on this dilemma by identifying, investigating and informing on four separate food chains available to us. For each of this groups, he prepares and serves a representative meal — the industrial food meal, the industrial organic meal, the beyond organic meal, and the hunter gatherer meal.

Though we are all familiar with the products of the industrial food industry, its sources and methods are purposely kept in the shadows. Pollan rather uncomfortably illuminates those shadows. He identifies corn as the foundation block of industry food — present in almost everything we eat, including our meat (cows, chickens, hogs, farm raised fish all are fed corn) and he explains why this is a problem, and how it hurts farmers, the environment, our health — almost everyone and everything other than the couple of industrial food giant corporations who profit from it.

Pollan serves a meal purchase at McDonalds and eaten in his car to illustrate the industrial food chain.

See those chicken nuggets in the freezer case? They’re really corn wrapped up in more corn. The chicken was fed corn, the batter is made from corn flower, the starch that holds it together is corn starch, the oil it was fried in was corn oil.

Pollan next examines what he calls industrial organic food. He explains how organic food evolved from the hippy back to the land movement into the profitable and industry controlled market it is today. The organics that you buy in your Whole Foods Market mostly come from the same major food conglomerates as does the rest of our food. Regulations on what is considered organic is so lax that TV dinners can be called organic. Pollan does acknowledge that these foods are grown without the use of harmful chemicals, which is a good thing, but otherwise the picture he paints of Big Organic is rather grim. The meal he makes to illustrate this food chain is sourced from Whole Foods.

The final food chains Pollan examines are far more encouraging, but also far less available to most of us. He takes us to a farm in Virginia that calls itself beyond organic, and that represents the picture most of us have of what organic food ideally should be. Unfortunately, this farm’s philosophy of keeping food local prevents it from shipping its food, so unless you are lucky enough to live close to it (or one like it), well, too bad for you.

Pollan ends with the least practical food source — hunting and gathering. He acknowledges its impracticality for most of us, but includes it mostly as a base line of how most of our ancestors fed themselves. He actually hunts a wild boar in Norther California for the hunter gatherer meal he serves.

He finishes the book with useful tips on how to eat best in this culture dominated by industrial food:

Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or with ingredients you don’t recognize or can’t pronounce.

Don’t eat anything containing high fructose corn syrup.

Buy real food. To make sure you’re buying real food, get your food from the outside perimeter of the supermarket, and try to avoid the middle isles.

Don’t buy or eat anything that doesn’t eventually rot