Half Changed World

Today’s book is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan.  It has a great deal in common with Peter Singer’s book, The Way We Eat, which I discussed last month.  Where Singer looked at the diets of three families — a conventional American diet, full of processed meat, a diet where the family attempts to eat organic and humanely raised meat, and a vegan diet — Pollan looks at four meals that he eats — a McDonald’s burger, an organic meal from large producers, a meal from Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm, and a meal largely of foods that he hunted (a wild pig) or gathered (morels) himself.

Pollan begins by discussing how the vast majority of the American diet comes from corn in one form or another — either directly processed, or fed to animals.  He visits a corn farm to see how it’s grown, but then points out that corn is a commodity — you can’t connect that corn to any particular cow, or any particular cow to a piece of meet.  Organic food from large companies is produced in a more sustainable manner, with less chemicals, but is equally a commodity.  By contrast, Polyface is a self-contained ecosystem.  Salatin isn’t officially "organic," but invites any of his customers to see what he’s doing.

Ironically, I found Pollan’s writing more preachy than Singer’s, even though Singer is the professional ethicist.  Singer tells you what he thinks you should do, and he tells you why.  He tells you what he thinks the ideal is (not eating meat at all), and what’s a good fallback position (not eating industrial farmed meat, unless there’s an overriding reason to do so).  Pollan doesn’t ever explicitly say "you should do this" but gives the impression that he thinks he’s more enlightened than you.

In the section on the meal that he hunted and gathered (which Pollan admits freely is interesting only as a one-shot exercise, not as a lifestyle), Pollan writes about the connection he felt to the food.  But I was left with the impression that the true gift he received was the relationships he developed with the people who took him hunting, who taught him to find mushrooms, and who shared the meal with him.  Conventionally farmed food, cooked and shared with love, can be pretty magical too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Books, Food and Drink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.