(New York: Penguin Books, 2006)
Trade Paperback, 450 Pages, Nonfiction
From the Cover: Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. Will it be fast food tonight, or something organic? Or perhaps something we grew ourselves? The question of what to have for dinner has confronted us since man discovered fire. But as Michael Pollan explains in this revolutionary book, how we answer it now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may determine our survival as a species. Packed with profound surprises, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is changing the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
My Review: About a month and a half ago, I received a pretty hefty package from the writing program director at Western Washington University (I’ll be attending the grad school there in the English department and teaching Composition 101 to freshmen while getting my Master’s). Upon opening the package, I was delighted to discover that I had received a copy of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma which, under the Western Reads program, all incoming freshmen at WWU will receive a copy of, and which I—as a teaching assistant—will be using as a text in Comp 101. I dove in almost immediately, but because of one thing or another I was unable to fully devote my attention to the book (which I needed to finish before Comp Camp begins at WWU on September 14th) until recently. So, with yellow highlighter in hand I jumped in with both feet.
t was slow going, but only because since I’ll be teaching this book, I wanted to make sure I was thorough about it. The writing director sent this in an email sometime after mailing out the books and I used it as a sort of guide for going through the book:
As I get ready for the fall, I find myself thinking more about imagination rooted in reading before the act of writing. If you examine the Introduction to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you’ll see Michael Pollan framing his book in terms of a genuine intellectual problem: what should we have for dinner? He researches and analyzes an ordinary concern to reveal a complexity that typically remains unnoticed. Pollan thus provides a useful intellectual model for the kinds of complex problems we aim to teach our students to imagine and pursue in English 101. Much of what we do in the teaching of writing addresses how we get ready to write, as well as what to do once we have written. Since academic writing usually begins in learning to “make a reading,” one central task we face as teachers is to help students to reconstruct the rhetorical problems that lead the author to write in the first place.
So it was with this idea that I was reading Omnivore. This is not to say that I didn’t read it for my own edification and to help me make better informed decision about how and what I eat as I strive for better health (physical, mental and spiritual), I did … but the idea of how Pollan goes about making his argument is something that I found fascinating, because as is stated in the book’s introduction and as the director emphasized, Pollan’s book stems from a very simple question: What to have for dinner?
Pollan goes about answering this question in three ways: by tracing the industrial food chain, the organic food chain and the forager’s food chain. He very methodically traces the way food reaches our tables through these three ways and points out the advantages and disadvantages to each path, usually centering on fossil fuel usage, price, environmental impact, ethical considerations (such as animal abuse, health, working conditions, etc.), as well as the relative transparencies of each chain. In this way, Pollan is able to make comparisons between the three food chains and present the Reader with all the information that he or she needs to make their own decisions regarding how and what to eat.
I found the most interesting aspect of the book to be that Pollan does not take sides in the debate. He manages to maintain a modicum of journalistic objectivity when discussing the problems and virtues of each food chain, and in spite of his bias toward one or the other of the three, he avoids pontificating and condemning and simply presents the facts as he saw them in the fields and lets the Reader make the ultimate decision and become responsible for their own food choices. This is not to say that Pollan does not have a somewhat defeatist view of the American food culture (such as it is), he does, in some ways, one might consider The Omnivore’s Dilemma to be a jeremiad of sorts, but the book is not all “doom and gloom and fire and brimstone.” The Omnivore’s Dilemma is not a polemic against industrial/processed food or a soapbox from which Pollan harangues the masses about the virtues of organic, beyond-organic, pastoral eating or even foraging that one so often sees in books of this type. Pollan is ever the journalist at heart and presents the facts and then stands back. It really is a stellar piece of writing looking at it from this angle; Pollan, in my mind, manages to pull off the ultimate academic/journalistic writing trick: to write a first person piece and then manage to remove oneself from the writing. Pollan does it, and it is a beautiful thing. What this rhetorical trick manages to do is make the Reader trust Pollan and lends considerable credibility to Pollan’s arguments.
On a more personal note, I learned a lot not only about how and what we eat in America’s food culture, but about how and what I eat personally. Knowledge is a two-edged sword, and Pollan certainly presents knowledge in spades! It has made me a much more aware consumer. One who takes a lot more time in the supermarket than before reading Pollan’s book. I am now a shopper who reads labels a lot more closely than before (you’d be surprised how much corn is hidden in any given product). I also feel a lot guiltier for going through the drive-thru or into the supermarket, especially the big box stores. This change has been in the works, slowly, for a long time for me, though, and Pollan’s book is just one more theses nailed to the proverbial door in my global consciousness. Slow food, local food, natural food … these are all part of a change that I and my wife have been slowly implementing in our family. Eating more consciously. Avoiding processed foods. Trying to buy products that don’t contain high fructose corn syrup or red 40. Growing a garden and using our own produce. Trying to make dinner rather than just heat it up or pull it out of the bag. We’re not perfect but we’re trying to live more healthily and eat more consciously.
Pollan makes the point in the book again and again that food should not just be something we eat, but something we also think, and that is a philosophy that I am more than willing to embrace. It’s taken nearly ten years to break myself of a lot of bad consumer habits, and I’m not 100% there yet, and I’m not even sure it’s 100% possible just given the pure fact of living in America (buying a book, for example, often is an exercise in subsidizing commodity corn since the glossy book covers are made using commodity corn products), but I am willing to try. I have taken the information that Pollan presents and made some conscious decisions about what to do with that information in my life, and it all involves not just eating food, but thinking food.
Other than the fact that I took my time going through Pollan’s book, in every way is this book satisfying: it is well-written, funny at times, sobering at others, informative, discusses an interesting topic, objective and to “preachy.” In short, The Omnivore’s Dilemma has everything I look for in a nonfiction book, and something that every American needs to read. If it doesn’t make you change the way you eat, then at least it will make you more aware about the consequences of the choices you make in regards to food, no matter which food chain you choose to follow: industrial, organic or forager’s.
This review can also be found at Bryan’s Book Blog.
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