I feel like I have to start out by saying that I love Michael Pollan's work, so this will not be an entirely unbiased account. The Botany of Desire is one of my favorite books; it definitely informed, if not inspired, many of my attitudes toward food. Thus, I approached reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, with some trepidation, because I imagined it would possibly have a similar effect. I was not wrong.
Michael Pollan follows four meals back to their sources, food chain-style. He writes that he originally considered three meals, but the more he looked at 'organic' food the more he discovered a vast difference between local, sustainable farming, and industrial organic (a la Whole Foods). Along the way he considers fundamental questions about how we decide what to eat, and how to eat.
I'm sure that you can find reviews of this book written by much better reviewers than I, so I'm not going to talk about what's in it so much as the changes that I'd like to make in my eating habits based on what I found there. Please note that this isn't a book full of scare-tactics and lecturing. It's an extremely honest, well-considered work that makes you think simply because Pollan himself is thinking so deeply and so brilliantly.
The biggest change I'd like to make is to be more mindful of the food I eat; not just how it tastes (although that's important, too; too frequently I find myself eating for fuel rather than for enjoyment), but where it comes from. As you might have guessed, it was the 'industrial organic' chapters
of The Omnivore's Dilemma that hit me the hardest. We have been trying to eat mostly organic
food, but we have been relying on the chain stores to do it for us.
As I've mentioned on this blog before, we've joined a CSA for produce, which is a good first step. We're also trying to find local dairy and meat sources. Unfortunately, these are not year-round solutions, so there's going to have to be some sort of compromise. Limiting processed food is probably a good way to go, as is some rigorous checking up on the companies that we do end up buying from.
If you're thinking this sounds crazy ambitious, you're probably right. It's inconvenient, expensive, and a lot of hard work. I don't know how much I'll actually be able to go through with, but I do think it's worth trying and it's worth doing. As Pollan reminds us, nothing (except sunlight) is really free in agriculture, it's just a question of who pays.
