Inundated with fads, diet crazes, conflicting nutritional information and a deepening disconnection from the food we consume, has resulted in what Michael Pollan refers to as America’s national eating disorder. A country that can’t decide between a high-calorie, additive-filled take-out dinner or a home-cooked organic meal. Pollan warns that there are things in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals that might ruin the reader’s appetite, but that the “…book is about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasures that are only deepened by knowing”.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma takes the reader on a powerful ride through the food chain from corn field to feedlot to organic farm to killing chickens, gutting a boar and finally cumulating with a hunter/gatherer’s feast with friends. Even the most seasoned foodies will enjoy reading this in-depth look at the North American food system — arguably, for all its wealth and resources, one of the most unhealthy food systems on earth.
Pollan argues that the lack of connectivity, and even accountability, plays an important part in the subsequent eating habits of most North Americans. The farmer doesn’t know who is eating his industrial corn and the shopper doesn’t know how their steak was raised.
We eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we are eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.
Pollan visits the factory farming feedlots and reports back that 60% of American’s industrially grown corn crop is fed to the country’s 100 million beef cattle – the ultimate in fast food. An animal that used to take 2-3 years to prepare for slaughter now takes less than 14-16 months. Big business has found out it is cheaper, and quicker, to feed cattle subsidized corn than to allow the herbivores their natural diet of grass. Add in the mixture of estrogen, antibiotics, chicken, pig and fish blood products and fat, with the deliberate sedentary lifestyle and you have a factory farm system designed to extract the maximum return regardless of the fossil fuels consumed, resources utilized or suffering to the animal.
A food-related sickness permeates all the 1500 pounds of food each North American consumes every year.
It is no wonder, America, the world’s largest consumer of beef, is suffering from a national eating disorder. But it is not just the beef; it is the food-related sickness that permeates all the 1500 pounds of food North Americans eat each year. It is the cornification of the food system, fast food lifestyle, a disconnection from the farmer, the miles an ingredient travels from farm to plate (usually about 1500 miles), the creation of storied foods (food with a pleasant story to mask the often unpleasant reality, i.e. cage-free vegetarian hens living in a pastoral green field), highly industrialized organic farming, pesticide use, the amount of resources used (the food industry burns nearly a fifth of all petroleum consumed in the USA – almost as much as automobiles do), factory farming and animal cruelty (no other culture on earth raises and slaughters its food animals as intensely and brutally as the Americans), all operate to create a system of food lacking in connection, sustainability and nourishment. Pollan explains, “…we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we are eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world”.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma is the definitive, riveting modern guide to the American food system.
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Visit: http://www.michaelpollan.com/
Publisher: Penguin Books
450 Pages
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