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

I am a little late to the table with Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma but it is just as relevant now, if not more so, than when it was first published in 2006. The work deserves a permanent place on everybody's bookshelf.

Having been raised on a steady diet of good food as well as Diet For A Small Planet, (the original) Mother Earth News and Harrowsmith I felt confident that I was aware of the pitfalls of modern food production. But, as aware as I was, and as informed as I try to stay, my knowledge falls far short of the realities of the industrial food chain; my knowledge also benefited from an eye-wash when it came to the "organic" food industry -- industry being the operative word. If I had only sensed, before, that we were being ambushed by food producers, Pollan re-affirmed my belief that one has to go a step beyond due diligence in seeking out food that is both good for us, and for the planet.

I had not quite understood how an innocuous little grain like corn might well be one of the largest contributing factors to the end of civilization. Pollan doesn't express it in those terms specifically, but there is enough fact and implication about the uses and abuses of corn, that one can only draw such an inauspicious end to us all. Corn has infiltrated 95% of our consumptive needs [irony implied]-- from the breakfast cereal that we sprinkle in our bowls in the morning to the gas tanks that we fill at night, just before heading back to the 'burbs. It is prolific in the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the bags into which we stuff our garbage, the shoes in which we walk away, in our smugness to think we're somehow ahead of the industrial food game when we make "organic" choices.

"Corn's triumph is the direct result of its overproduction, and that has been a disaster for the people who grow it. Growing corn and nothing but corn has also exacted a toll on the farmer's soil, the quality of the local water and the overall health of the community, the biodiversity of his landscape, and the health of all the creatures living on or downstream from it. And not only those creatures, for cheap corn has also changed, and much for the worse, the lives of several billion food animals, animals that would not be living on factory farms if not for the ocean of corn on which these animal cities float. ... It's a good thing this plant can't form an impression of us, for how risible that impression would be: The farmers going broke cultivating it; the countless other species routed or emiserated by it; the humans eating and drinking it as fast as they can, some of them -- like me and my family -- in automobiles engineered to drink it, too."

We have not domesticated corn; it has domesticated us. The Day of the Triffids comes to mind in a not-so-ironic farce.

Pollan ploughs through the organic food industry just as deftly as he analyzes industrial farming. We are not as organic as we think when it costs more in energy and fuel to grow our contaminant-free lettuce. The lettuce itself may be relatively free from chemical additives, but everything else around it, sacrificed to its production, is a little worse for it, including ourselves because we bought into the lie in the first place.

With all the doom and gloom hovering just above our dinner plates, it leaves one to wonder what could possibly be left to eat. Pollan's thesis on the sustainable farms is a brilliant dissertation on what can be -- and should be -- possible to reclaim the true title of "sustainability" within our food culture. Ironically, this new, sustainable farm bears a striking resemblance to the old family farm, where everything that was eaten was grown or raised on the premises, and the rest was carefully sourced out. The irony is not lost on Pollan who has brought us full circle in our quest for a pure, unadulterated lettuce salad.

By no means does Pollan suggest we should all be gathering our pitchforks, hitching up our suspenders and heading out to the back 40 with a bale of hay to feed our ethically raised cattle; but he does give us the information on how to source out good food that is truly what it purports to be, and not just the over-processed pabulum pumped out by the giant food purveyors on either side of the "organic question".

To add balance, restore a certain light-hearted equanimity, Pollan undertakes a hunting-and-gathering project in an effort to evaluate and assess what it means to be one-hundred-percent responsible for our meal, from the stalking, killing and preparation of an animal, to the gathering of fruits and nuts, a la paleo. Even this food-choice becomes its own dilemma.

The brilliant synthesis of our omnivore's dilemma in this book is by no means reductive. It offers a choice, a balance, irony, humour -- and even a solution. What more could one ask for in our search to clean our plates, our consciousness, and our consciences.