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A Natural History of Four Meals
Penguin
April 2006
464 pages
ISBN: 1594200823
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Self-Help Diet
The bestselling author of The Botany of Desire explores the
ecology of eating to unveil why we consume what we consume
in the twenty-first century "What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another
this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide
choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the
omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless
potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what
is safe, and what isn't-which mushrooms should be avoided,
for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as
America confronts what can only be described as a national
eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with an
atavistic vengeance. The cornucopia of the modern American
supermarket and fast-food outlet has thrown us back on a
bewildering landscape where we once again have to worry
about which of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. At
the same time we're realizing that our food choices also
have profound implications for the health of our
environment. The Omnivore's Dilemma is bestselling author
Michael Pollan's brilliant and eye-opening exploration of
these little-known but vitally important dimensions of
eating in America. Pollan has divided The Omnivore's Dilemma into three parts,
one for each of the food chains that sustain us:
industrialized food, alternative or "organic" food, and food
people obtain by dint of their own hunting, gathering, or
gardening. Pollan follows each food chain literally from the
ground up to the table, emphasizing our dynamic
coevolutionary relationship with the species we depend on.
He concludes each section by sitting down to a meal--at
McDonald's, at home with his family sharing a dinner from
Whole Foods, and in a revolutionary "beyond organic" farm in
Virginia. For each meal he traces the provenance of
everything consumed, revealing the hidden components we
unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for
particular foods reflects our environmental and biological
inheritance. We are indeed what we eat-and what we eat remakes the world.
A society of voracious and increasingly confused omnivores,
we are just beginning to recognize the profound consequences
of the simplest everyday food choices, both for ourselves
and for the natural world. The Omnivore's Dilemma is a
long-overdue book and one that will become known for
bringing a completely fresh perspective to a question as
ordinary and yet momentous as What shall we have for dinner?
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