Omnivore’s Dilemna

In Omnivore’s Dilemna: a Natural History of Four Meals (2006), reporter Michael Pollan follows “the food chains that sustain us, all the way from the earth to the plate.” The book represents investigative, and participatory, journalism at its best, as Pollan tries to understand what he terms the “American paradox–that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed byt the idea of eating healthy.”

The author of Botany of Desire buys steer number 534 from a rancher in South Dakota to understand how the industrial food system produces the hambergers destined for MacDonalds’ happy meals. He learns to hunt wild pig in Northern California to prepare what he describes as his perfect meal, “a dinner prepared entirely from ingrediants I had hunted, gathered, and grown myself.”

Pollan introduces the reader to research psychologist Paul Rozin coined the term “omnivore’s dilemna in a 1976 paper to contrast:

“The omnivore’s existential situation with that of the specialized eater. . . The koala bear doesn’t worry what to eat. But for onmivores like us (and the rat) a vast amount of brain space and time must be devoted to figuring out which of all the many protential dishes nature lays on are safe to eat.”

Pollan traces the rise of industrial agriculture in the years following World War II to one crop, a hybrid of zea mays, and he describes “How this peculiar grass, native to Central America . . . came to colonize so much of our land and bodies.”

Read more about Omnivore’s Dilemna, or purchase the book, by going to the Vagabond bookshelf at Powell’s Books.