Rare is the book that educates, enthralls, convicts, and changes the reader as does The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan [The Penguin Press, 2006, 450 pp.]  Put simply: it’s a darn good book.  To simplify Pollan’s subject, however, is to disregard his entire project: delving into the utter complexity of our relationship with food.
In three main sections, Pollan, now a journalism professor, tells the story behind four particular meals he eats.  In order, these meals are a McDonald’s fast-food dinner consumed (in American style) while driving a convertible down the highway, an “organic” home-cooked meal supplied by Whole Foods, an uber-local meal made up of ingredients from a remarkably sustainable farm in Virginia, and a meal consisting almost entirely of foraged or hunted foods gathered near Pollan’s house in northern California.  However, the descriptions of the meals themselves, though nice enough, are not the meat of the book.  Instead, it is the backstory, the fascinating truths of the food systems that provide these meals, that is the book’s greatest strength.  As Pollan puts it early on, the question of “What should we eat” cannot be addressed without also asking, “What am I eating?” and “Where in the world does it come from?”  In 450 pages, Pollan begins an answer.
We could all guess the McDonald’s meal is rather unhealthy and totally unsustainable, but what I didn’t know before reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma is to what extent these products–and our food systems in general–are based on corn.  Indeed, of the McDonald’s meal Pollan posits, “if you include the corn in the gas tank…the amount of corn that went into producing our movable fast-food feast would easily have overflowed the car’s truck, spilling a trail of golden kernels on the blacktop behind us.”  The book is built upon Pollan’s brilliant description of the industrial nature of America’s food system, almost all of which is predicated on cheap ubiquitous inedible corn.
As fascinating as the discussion of corn truly was–did you know that 60% of our corn stock goes to feeding livestock, that a typical family farm can feed the equivalent of 129 people, that a typical box of breakfast cereal is four cents of commodity corn processed and sold for four dollars–even more interesting is Pollan’s description of the rise of the organic movement originally intended to supply Americans with local, healthy, sustainable products but which now, largely, has been co-opted by the American industrial empire.  Tracing some organic Whole Foods products back to their source and interviewing the organic farmers–“organic” at least, according to the USDA–Pollan describes the possible health benefits of some organic foods with the broader question of sustainability and scale in mind.  Pollan does well to carry out this daunting task with an informative rather than preachy tone.  He comes across as a storyteller, a relayer of complicated and daunting facts, who largely lets the reader judge the best response to his work.  As the title suggests, how to proceed morally, ethically, is a dilemma, one which he describes rather than prescribes.

Another section of the book “Pastoral: Grass” consists, in large part, of a description of how grasses are used (or not used) in farming.  Specifically, Pollan recounts in engrossing detail, his week-long visit to Polyface Farm, a remarkably sustainable farm in Virginia.  Though the farm produces a significant amount of produce  (chicken, beef, eggs, rabbits, etc.) Farmer Joel a self-described “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic,” primarily understands himself as a “grass farmer” since grass–its diversity and health–is the key to his sustainable farm.  Alternating between riffs on Polyface’s history, the complexity of grass, and the how-to of sustainable farming, Pollan closes the section with comments from Farmer Joel’s loyal customers, some of whom drive for hours to purchase the “chicken that tastes more like chicken” from a farmer they know and trust.  Pollan even gets to work on a mini chicken processing assembly line beside Farmer Joel, his trusty interns, and a few helpful neighbors.  The journal of Pollan’s week at Polyface would have been enough to make the book a fascinating read, but how he subsequently describes the larger questions of sustainability, local agriculture, and “the non bar-code people” makes his time at the farm a fruitful field-trip indeed.
Finally, in “Pastoral: The Forest” Pollan squeezes in ruminations on the ethics of vegetarianism, vegan lifestyle, several stories of hunting and foraging expeditions, and a detailed description of a gourmet and almost completely foraged meal.  This last supper with characters from Pollan’s northern California foraging pursuits is noteworthy, perhaps, but a slightly disappointing end for such a riveting read.  Pollan is so careful not to instruct the reader how to eat that he can become overly discursive about his four meals.  This is the book’s conceit, I suppose, one that leaves me questioning, but which is perhaps exactly as Pollan’s hopes.
Pollan is so careful–perhaps, too careful–to invite the reader to process the omnivore’s dilemma oneself.  I would have welcomed an occasional barb at the industrial food industry or lapsed organic hippies or even a faint suggestion of Pollan’s view of an ethical way forward.  That said, one cannot truly invest in the process of reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma without beginning to mull over the bitter dilemma oneself.  And maybe this is Pollan’s goal.  As Pollan quotes Wendell Berry, “We are what we eat eats.”  This realization raises more questions than it answers, but they are worthwhile questions on which to chew.