The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Why we chose this title

Where does my food come from?

While almost anything is available to us these days, we rarely ask ourselves where the food we consume actually comes from.

The choice of what we eat has a much larger impact than we would like to admit. 

Whether we buy a frozen meal in a supermarket, a piece of fresh fruit at the local grocer or a take away burger at a fast food chain, each of these items has its own story.

Learning more about what we eat, enables us to make conscious choices.

It allows us to be more mindful.

Book Summary

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan guides the reader through an extensive tour of food production in America, tracing a series of food chains from the seed to the table. In the harrowing first part of his story, he takes us to a massive farm in Iowa, where the formerly diverse yield of hay, apples, hogs, and cherries has given way to a vast monocultural enterprise, in which, thanks to government subsidies and a seemingly perverse set of economic principles, corn is king.

With a sparkling analysis that adroitly weaves history, science, and sociology, Pollan shows how America has bent its priorities in the service of this single crop, converting it into ethanol, the now-ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup, and even disposable diapers.

We discover how the monoculture of corn has impoverished the soil and the people who work it, how it has imperiled the health of the cattle industry (steers are naturally ill-suited to digest grain, but we feed it to them anyway), and how it has led unsuspecting consumers to trade nutrition for cheap calories. Pollan next transports us to a small, ecologically balanced farm in Virginia, where the chickens and cattle roam more freely, and animals and humans alike reap the benefits of a natural food chain based on grass.

Finally, in perhaps his most radical encounter with the world of food, Pollan resolves to prepare a meal that he has hunted and gathered by himself. As he stalks a feral pig, dives for abalone, and wonders whether that mushroom he has picked just might kill him, we rediscover food not merely as a physical source of life but as a medium for holy communion with nature and one another.

About the Author

Born in 1955, Michael Pollan grew up in Long Island, New York. He was educated at Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University, from which he received a master’s degree in English. A former executive editor of Harper’s Magazine, he is currently the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. His essays have been widely anthologized, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of five books, including A Place of My Own, Second Nature, and The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Michael Pollan lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.

Where to buy it

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