The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael PollanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-08-28
ISBN: 0143038583
Number of pages: 450
Publisher: Penguin
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780143038580
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Book Review: A True Work of Genius !!!
Summary: 5 Stars
A True Work of Genius !!!
I read every word of this great book - and it is great. It truly deserves every last one of those five stars I gave it. It reads more like a novel than like a book of commentary about the state of our food supply. I even read all of the SOURCES pages as well as the INDEX. It's a masterpiece of English literature and more than simply a serious sociological book of non-fiction. It is a work of art!
I used to own a natural food store in Lowell, Massachusetts - AEOLIA: WHOLE FOODS. This was before THE "Whole Foods" got so big and famous and started buying up all of the other natural food store chains like Bread & Circus, Fresh Fields, Mrs. Gooches, and the smaller strip mall regional chain stores. This was during the days when there were still Health Food Cooperatives ("Co-Ops!") and little health food stores in small towns and cities across the country - BEFORE Trader Joe's got as big as it has. This was in the late 1980's and early 1990's when it was only the natural food stores in England and Europe that went by the name of `whole food' stores and when natural food stores in the USA were still called `health food stores." ... Those were the good old days.
I'll never forget the day in May of 1987 - before I opened AEOLIA in 1989 - but right after I left my job as the manager for four years of the health food store in Groton, MA called `The Natural Shop' (before it moved into the funky old US Post Office in the center of town!) when I drove out to Bread & Circus in Hadley, Massachusetts for a job interview and the manager totally blew me off. They had lost my resume, and the girl at the information desk asked me to wait for someone from the meat department to come out and interview me. I was already thinking like this was a bad decision on my part, but after I saw this big blonde-haired guy that looked like a Nazi with a crew cut wearing a white smock with blood all over it coming my way like a lumberjack on steroids I knew I was in for a shocker. He took one look at me, and before he even looked at my resume (I brought along extra copies.) he said, "Listen, if you're serious about working here, you need to go back home and get a hair cut and trim your beard; and if you shave off that beard, don't expect to be able to grow it back. ... Have I made myself clear? ... Come back when you look like a real store employee." ... He didn't even look at my resume! I felt like calling up Tony Harnett (the owner of Bread & Circus at the time) right then and there and complaining to him that his butchers in the meat department were not the most professional human resource / personnel dept employees to be managing people or interviewing prospective employees. Besides, what the hell did a former truck driver for Erewhon Natural Foods and an immigrant from Ireland only recently introduced to the world of alternative medicine, natural healing, and health food know about nutrition in general or homeopathic medicine in particular? It's ironic that he now owns Harnett's Apocathery in Cambridge, MA. (Hey, the money is in the pills and potions, not wheat germ and yogurt!) ... So, like Jesus, I `dusted the dust off my feet' and ended up painting houses all summer out in western Massachusetts before opening up my own, real, health food store back in my home town where I was the owner and the manager and there would be no one telling me when to get a haircut! Thank you very much!
I relate this story because this is just one of the things that came to mind on reading Michael Pollan's outstanding tome on the health of our food and the soil it is grown on in this country. He has done us all a huge service in the interest of exposing the ugly underbelly of the food industry which, for the most part, has also taken over the natural food industry, the health food stores, and the organic food market. The last bastion of "hippiedom" left now it seems, when it comes to natural foods, is the realm of the biodynamic, permaculture-composting, local food-growing, truly organic garderners and farmers of non-genetically modified whole foods that can be bought at the source. Do you know any small, family farm, good local farmers to patronize who grow good food without petrochemical fertilizers or pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides who do not buy their seeds from Monsanto, who rotate their crops, rotate their fields, and use human and animal labor the good old way to grow their food? If you do, consider yourself truly blessed! And hey (I'll start this sentence with the word AND, even if it is not grammatically correct!) - how in the HELL can Whole Foods sell SEEDLESS watermelons and call that a WHOLE food? Are SEEDLESS watermelons natural? They may be "organic" by the latest USDA definition of corporately-defined, politically correct terminology, but they are in NO WAY totally natural, and if they lack the damn seeds, then they cannot be called a `whole' food and should not be sold at WHOLE FOODS. ... Correct? ... Besides, have you ever noticed that seedless watermelons do not taste as sweet as good old regular watermelons with seeds? I think Monsanto doesn't want us to be saving the natural seeds, that's what I think! ... Michael Pollan alludes to all of these sentiments in this wonderful book.
I took notes, literally, from every page. I took over 252 notes in total. There is so much good information in this book, I don't know where to begin. It's like reading Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. Every damn page has something profound written on it! If I still had my health food store (where I sold lots of books!) this book would have been featured, face-front (Yeah, I worked at Barnes & Noble for four years as well, and learned all the promotional and marketing tricks!), right on the eye level shelf of my book section book case! Also, I would have had copies for sale right on the front counter by the register as well, because this book lays it all out there on the line. Hell, it even talks about magic mushrooms at the end of the book (my favorite chapter)! When you can read a book that discusses both the evils of Monsanto and the beauty of the Eleusinian Mystery Rights of ancient Greece in the same pages, then that is my kind of book.
I could not resist quoting these words from page 132:
"We never called ourselves organic - we call ourselves `beyond organic.' Why dumb down to a lesser level than we are? If I said I was organic, people would fuss at me for getting feed corn from a neighbor who might be using atrazine.Well, I would much rather use my money to keep my neighborhood productive and healthy than export my dollars five hundred miles away to get `pure product' that's really coated in diesel fuel. There are a whole lot more variables in making the right decision than does the chicken feed have chemicals or not. Like what sort of habitat is going to allow that chicken to express its physiological distinctiveness? A ten-thousand-bird shed that stinks to high heaven or a new paddock of fresh green grass every day? Now which chicken shall we call `organic?' I'm afraid you'll have to ask the government because now they own the word.
"Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians - we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians ever wanted - to keep their teepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn't care if there was a Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the western mind can't bear an opt-out option. We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate."
Whew..." ...
That's the author, Michael Pollan, quoting his natural food and lifestyle mentor, Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. I have been to Charlottesville, Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountain and Shenadoah River Valley area - home of Thomas Jefferson, his Monticello, his University of Virginia, The Dave Matthews Band, and `And George!" in Albemarle County. ... It's the kind of rural place out in the green rolling hills of the countryside where I can seer the human race getting back on the right track again. ... `Whew' - Indeed! ... YOWZA! - George Koumantzelis / The Aeolian Kid
Summary of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
A national bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner? Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us--whether industrial or organic, alternative or processed--he develops a portrait of the American way of eating.The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet.
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