I enjoyed the language and style of writing even though it was complicated and slightly hard to understand in some spots. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food, Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 28, 2012. We rely on our prodigious powers of recognition and memory to guide us away from poisons (Isn’t that the mushroom that made me sick last week?) The fact that today one so often does suggests a pretty good start on a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain. When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain—the one that now feeds most of us most of the time and typically culminates either in a supermarket or fast-food meal—I expected that my investigations would lead me to a wide variety of places. and toward nutritious plants (The red berries are the juicier, sweeter ones). Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma Chapter Summary. Yet in time, the plant of the vanquished would conquer even the conquerors. Difficult, but not impossible. It offers an insight into the whole of the food industry in the US. More than most domesticated plants (a few of whose offspring will usually find a way to grow unassisted), corn completely threw its lot in with humanity when it evolved its peculiar husked ear. It might be hard to see how, but even a Twinkie does this—constitutes an engagement with the natural world. When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you. It does take some imagination to recognize the ear of corn in the Coke bottle or the Big Mac. This is the omnivore’s dilemma, noted long ago by writers like Rousseau and Brillat-Savarin and first given that name thirty years ago by a University of Pennsylvania research psychologist named Paul Rozin. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world’s greatest success stories. One way to think about America’s national eating disorder is as the return, with an almost atavistic vengeance, of the omnivore’s dilemma. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia seized the country, supplanting an era of national lipophobia dating to the Carter administration. ), Corn won over the wheat people because of its versatility, prized especially in new settlements far from civilization. The sight of such soil, pushing up and then curling back down behind the blade of his plow like a thick black wake behind a ship, must have stoked his confidence, and justifiably so: It’s gorgeous stuff, black gold as deep as you can dig, as far as you can see. First, all the seeds in that first generation (F-1, in the plant breeder’s vocabulary) produced genetically identical plants—a trait that, among other things, facilitates mechanization. Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead. I think its a great book if you care about what you eat, where it comes from and how it was grown/raised. What that means is that Naylor’s grandson, raising nothing but corn and soybeans on a fairly typical Iowa farm, is so astoundingly productive that he is, in effect, feeding some 129 Americans. What would have been an unheralded botanical catastrophe in a world without humans became an incalculable evolutionary boon. You are what you eat, it’s often said, and if this is true, then what we mostly are is corn—or, more precisely, processed corn. Often phased out and started daydreaming when reading it, had to really try to focus in order to actually obtain the info.. A great and relatively even-handed discussion of where our food comes from, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 4, 2015, Review courtesy of subtleillumination.com, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 8, 2018. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Certainly the extraordinary abundance of food in America complicates the whole problem of choice. Measured in terms of output per worker, American farmers like Naylor are the most productive humans who have ever lived. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth. After water, carbon is the most common element in our bodies—indeed, in all living things on earth. Compromise. However, Americans mindset of “what should we have for dinner” and the poor decision making about food choices created the “omnivore’s dilemma” or what Pollan, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma calls the American national eating disorder. A mutation this freakish and maladaptive would have swiftly brought the plant to an evolutionary dead end had one of these freaks not happened to catch the eye of a human somewhere in Central America who, looking for something to eat, peeled open the husk to free the seeds. Tall-grass prairie is what this land was until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the sod was first broken by the settler’s plow. And yet the new follies we are perpetrating in our industrial food chain today are of a different order. The fact that the plant was so well adapted to the climate and soils of North America gave it an edge over European grains, even if it did make a disappointingly earthbound bread. This part of Iowa has some of the richest soil in the world, a layer of cakey alluvial loam nearly two feet thick. The Omnivore's dilemma is this: When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety. Virtually overnight, Americans changed the way they eat. June 2010; Journal of Anthropological Research 66(2):161-186; DOI: 10.2307/27820880. The story of the Naylor farm since 1919, when George’s grandfather bought it, closely tracks the twentieth-century story of American agriculture, its achievements as well as its disasters. C-13, for example, has six protons and seven neutrons. Many anthropologists believe that the reason we evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely to help us deal with the omnivore’s dilemma. Every time a stoma opens to admit carbon dioxide precious molecules of water escape. I’m not just talking about the produce section or the meat counter, either—the supermarket’s flora and fauna. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't, which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. My premise is that like every other creature on earth, humans take part in a food chain, and our place in that food chain, or web, determines to a considerable extent what kind of creature we are. Look how many different plants and animals (and fungi) are represented on this single acre of land! The scientist can do this because all carbon is not created equal. eBook Shop: The Omnivore's Dilemma Dial Books von Michael Pollan als Download. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. Please try your request again later. What happens next is very strange. To be upfront, this book it is moderate to leftist in its opinions, as is Michael Klare's book, but both books opened my eyes to an entirely new way of thinking about my Economics & Policy degree. Something went wrong. The novel cob-and-husk arrangement that makes corn such a convenient grain for us renders the plant utterly dependent for its survival on an animal in possession of the opposable thumb needed to remove the husk, separate the seeds, and plant them. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. I don’t mean to suggest that human food chains have only recently come into conflict with the logic of biology; early agriculture and, long before that, human hunting proved enormously destructive. Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. The hard part is keeping the thing on a straight line, that and hearing the shouted instructions of the farmer sitting next to you when you both have wads of Kleenex jammed into your ears to muffle the diesel roar. The dual identity also made corn indispensable to the slave trade: Corn was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsisted during their passage to America. After the crop has supplied its farmer’s needs, he can go to market with any surplus, dried corn being the perfect commodity: easy to transport and virtually indestructible. To surmount this last problem, each flower sends out through the tip of the husk a single, sticky strand of silk (technically its “style”) to snag its own grain of pollen. Monday. “Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. Michael Pollan wrote this book in a casual manner, as if sitting around a table with the reader and having a conversation about this great journey he took, yet at the end of the conversation the reader is left with a great amount of knowledge that they can use in countless ways. It made me really think again about where our food comes from and what we are eating that is making us sick and fat. I wonder if history will reveal that one of the prime culprits for public health decline is the indiscriminate use of vegetable oils, particularly corn oils and its derivative,high fructose corn syrup. The tractor I was driving belonged to George Naylor, who bought it new back in the midseventies, when, as a twenty-seven-year-old, he returned to Greene County, Iowa, to farm his family’s 320 acres. The notion began to occupy me a few years ago, after I realized that the straightforward question “What should I eat?” could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: “What am I eating? (Hence the American slang term “corn hole.”), “Corn was the means that permitted successive waves of pioneers to settle new territories,” writes Arturo Warman, a Mexican historian. The result of this innovation has been a vast increase in the amount of food energy available to our species; this has been a boon to humanity (allowing us to multiply our numbers), but not an unalloyed one. Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. Our culture codifies the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, recipes, manners, and culinary traditions that keep us from having to reenact the omnivore’s dilemma at every meal. You won't want it if you read this book. “As lyrical as What to Eat is hard-hitting, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals …may be the best single book I read this year. But while both the new and the native Americans were substantially dependent on corn, the plant’s dependence on the Americans had become total. By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize, we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented. Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2018. The trans fats or the butter or the “not butter”? He's also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. On the phone his gravelly voice and incontrovertible pronouncements (“That is just the biggest bunch of bullshit! Long before scientists understood hybridization, Native Americans had discovered that by taking the pollen from the tassel of one corn plant and dusting it on the silks of another, they could create new plants that combined the traits of both parents. One has to wonder if Michelle Obama would have chosen to plant a White House garden had it not been for Pollan and the huge influence he’s had on chefs, consumers and the culture of American eating. According to Mr Pollan, although today we have greatly increased our food varieties, we seem to actually have more difficulty in answering the question "what should we have for dinner today". It defines us. But corn goes about this procedure a little differently than most other plants, a difference that not only renders the plant more efficient than most, but happens also to preserve the identity of the carbon atoms it recruits, even after they’ve been transformed into things like Gatorade and Ring Dings and hamburgers, not to mention the human bodies nourished on those things. The Omnivore’s Dilemma in the Food Chain Search. And though my journeys did take me to a great many states, and covered a great many miles, at the very end of these food chains (which is to say, at the very beginning), I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt. How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu? At the same time, the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five thousand different items or SKUs (stock keeping units) in the supermarket—seventeen thousand new ones every year—represent genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it. The corporation, assured for the first time of a return on its investment in breeding, showered corn with attention—R&D, promotion, advertising—and the plant responded, multiplying its fruitfulness year after year. Lacking any such local experience, wheat struggled to adapt to the continent’s harsh climate, and yields were often so poor that the settlements that stood by the old world staple often perished. This section follows a bushel of commodity corn from the field in Iowa where it grew on its long, strange journey to its ultimate destination in a fast-food meal, eaten in a moving car on a highway in Marin County, California. Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2017. Yet because those seeds are now trapped in a tough husk, the plant has lost its ability to reproduce itself—hence the catastrophe in teosinte’s sex change. Descendents of the Maya living in Mexico still sometimes refer to themselves as “the corn people.” The phrase is not intended as metaphor. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Please try again. Pollan points out that we tend to think grass is a monolith (i.e. Summary Analysis 1. The fact of our omnivorousness has done much to shape our nature, both body (we possess the omnicompetent teeth and jaws of the omnivore, equally well suited to tearing meat and grinding seeds) and soul. The silks emerge from the husk on the very day the tassel is set to shower its yellow dust. The wild fish or the farmed? that it’s all one thing, just a sea of green). What forest or prairie could hope to match it? There must be a hundred different species in the produce section alone, a handful more in the meat counter. In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. 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. It would not be susceptible to the pendulum swings of food scares or fads, to the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutrient and the demonization of another. The result, says Pollan, is that the omnivore’s dilemma has come back with an “almost atavistic vengeance.” (4) We wander bewildered in the supermarket because we don’t know what to eat. Responses to The Omnivore’s Dilemma. (As far as we’re concerned, it makes little difference whether we consume relatively more or less carbon 13.). Pleasure and Happiness. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. The mechanics of corn sex, and in particular the great distance over open space corn pollen must travel to complete its mission, go a long way toward accounting for the success of maize’s alliance with humankind. 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