The Omnivore's Dilemma
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| Author | Michael Pollan |
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| Language | English |
| Publisher | The Penguin Press |
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Publication date
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2006 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 62290639 |
| 394.1/2 22 | |
| LC Class | GT2850 .P65 2006 |
| Preceded by | The Botany of Desire |
| Followed by | In Defense of Food |
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is a nonfiction book written by American author Michael Pollan published in 2006. In the book, Pollan asks the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. As omnivores, the most unselective eaters, humans are faced with a wide variety of food choices, resulting in a dilemma. Pollan suggests that, prior to modern food preservation and transportation technologies, this particular dilemma was resolved primarily through cultural influences. These technologies have recreated the dilemma, by making available foods that were previously seasonal or regional. The relationship between food and society, once moderated by culture, now finds itself confused. To learn more about those choices, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us; industrial food, organic food, and food we forage ourselves; from the source to a final meal, and in the process writes a critique of the American way of eating.
Noting that corn is the most heavily subsidized U.S. crop, Pollan posits that it has successfully changed the diets in the U.S. of both humans and animals. In the first section, he monitors the development of a calf from a pasture in South Dakota, through its stay on a Kansas feedlot, to its end. The author highlights that of everything feedlot cows eat, the most destructive is corn, which tends to damage their livers. Corn-fed cows become sick as a matter of course, a fact accepted by the industry as a cost of doing business.
In the second section, Pollan describes the large-scale farms and food-processing outfits that largely satisfy surging demand for organic food, using Whole Foods as a proxy. The author aims to demonstrate that, despite the group's rhetoric, the virtues on sale often prove spectral. The “free-range” chicken on offer, it turns out, hails from a confinement operation with a tiny yard, largely unused by the short-lived birds. Pollan also accuses large-scale organic agriculture of “floating on a sinking sea of petroleum” by analysing that a one-pound box of California-produced organic lettuce - that contains 80 food calories - requires 4,600 calories of fossil fuel to process and ship to the East Coast. He adds that the figure would be only “about 4 percent higher if the salad were grown conventionally.”
One of Pollan's major arguments about the organic farming industry is that it creates an unrealistic pastoral narrative, giving people the false idea that, by definition, organic products come from picturesque open pastures.
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