I read "The Omnivore's Dilemma," so I'm a weirdo.

I've had two conversations with separate friends -- successful, intelligent, warm-hearted friends -- who cannot understand why I bothered, with all the books out there, to read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

I find this even more troubling than the book itself, which takes a deep but clear-eyed look at the dysfunction of our industrial-based food system and its ominous deficiencies. The reaction of my friends is troubling because it is evidence of the author's conention that as Americans, we pay more attention to what kind of cars we drive than to what we put in our bodies.

It's true that the book is a rather extreme look at how our food chain has been twisted beyond recognition by our dependence on (and chronic overproduction of) corn, chemical fertilizers and monoculture. But it's also true that this way of producing food is at the very heart of our mental, physical and spritual malnutrition. We believe we can and should have whatever we want, whenever we want it. And we make it so, at great personal cost to ourselves and our environment.

Pollan is a very fine writer, and he's too smart to be dogmatic or doctrinaire. And he's learned more about food than you or I will ever know, so it's worth paying attention to him.

"Who is this guy?," one friend asked when I described the book, "Marx and Engels?!"

Uh ... no, I said, he's just a guy who thinks we ought to know, really know, where our food comes from.

"Why?," my friend shot back. "Are grocery chains evil? What should we do about it? Go out and forage for everything?"

No, I said, not necessarily. Although you'd learn a lot about your food if you did.

"Yeah, but you know what?," my friend sad, "I don't want to learn about my food. For thousands of generations, my ancestors could think of little else. Now that we're freed from that particular form of mental slavery, we can study, we can think, we can enjoy our relationships; we can work out and stay physically healthy. We can spend more time helping people who need help."

Well, we'd be a lot healthier if we didn't grow plants and animals the way we're growing them now, I said. But this particular friend is a cardiologist, and this was his opening to hold forth about how we have so much more heart disease now largely because we're living longer, and how we have more tools at our disposal to stay healthy than humankind has ever enjoyed.

Another friend, a stay-at-home mom whose husband works in her family's very successful business, could not believe I'd spend a week on a beach in Mexico reading a downer of a book about how awful contemporary agriculture can be, and about a guy who wants to learn about food so he goes out and kills, dresses, cooks and eats a wild pig. Eww. I told her I couldn't find my back issues of People.

Pollan does his homework in this book, and he shows how the monocultural practice of agriculture is not only unsustainable but also not particularly healthy. He finds and spends time working at farms  -- large, organic farms -- at which farmers rotate crops and livestock so that one's waste is another's nourishment, and the whole environment is the better for it. He slaughters chickens at one of these farms, and he's horrified by it. Then he spends a long chapter in the book deeply but openly pondering whether vegetarianism is the only morally defensible eating philosophy (he winds up deciding that we are meant, on the whole, to be carnivores, and that many of our healthiest landscapes and communities depend at least in part on the grazing of livestock).

We consume so much, and we consume so much fossil fuel in order to grow, harvest, transport and prepare so many of our foods, that we owe it to ourselves to be very educated on and mindful of the origins of our food. The Omnivore's Dilemma will get you most of the way there.

--T.A.

Comments

[Mom]

Though I've read only part of Pollan's book has an important message. Your friend who's relieved he doesn't have to forage totally misses the point. I'm afraid the chemiocal additives we unknowingly ingest has addled his thinking.

love, mom

[Danny]

I haven't read the book but now I want to. Why shouldn't we learn about how corporate collusion in this country is literally killing us? I recently saw the fascinating and horrifying documentary "King Corn" about how an inferior and dangerous form of cheap corn has taken over a huge part of our diet. The film raised a bunch of very troubling questions about what we eat and how we farm.