What I've Read: The Omnivore's Dilemma

Better than just about any documentary on how your food is prepared and where it comes from, The Omnivore's Dilemma kills it in the first third of the book, giving detailed accounts to the uses and ubiquitousness of America's greatest food source, corn.

I am a foodie and I care a lot about where my food comes from. After years of reading and watching and learning, I'm much wiser about caring about the food I eat. I can't say that Michael Pollan's book converted me to a vegan lifestyle. Thankfully, that is not it's goal. Really, it's goal is simply to give you more to think about and how to approach your food decisions wisely.

Yeah, I shop a lot at Whole Foods, and Pollan makes convincing arguments that this is not always the smartest thing to do: "Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley or organic cut flowers from Peru doesn't mean we should do it, not if we're really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism." Being just as serious about food as I am about being green, this thought and the subsequent ones about choosing smarter was quite enlightening.

The book doesn't hate on American eating as much as it does on the people who just make poor choices or decide to ignore the issue of choice altogether. America is an industrial eating mechanism, and it's what is causing so much of the problem. "What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat."

I think the strongest lesson I learned from the book was to pay more attention to shopping at farmer's markets and what is fresh and in season when I am shopping at Whole Foods. Another strong thing that I took away from the book is to treat food like I have the environmental choices I make: I should be willing to pay the premium at farmer's markets and Whole Foods for cleaner, safer, chemical-free food options. "Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest."

He certainly poised good questions about why it is that we will spend premium amounts of money on cars or clothes or TVs to get the best on the market, but when it comes to food we search for convenience and cheap, and this is the probably the singular choice we make for our health three or more times a day, every day of our lives. I completely see the point of his argument that we need to take what we eat as seriously as we do other aspects of our lives, and that convenience and expectation of low prices have clouded our vision of what eating should be.

So I'm trying to follow his simple plan to smarter, better living: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”