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by: Michael Pollan  List Price: $16.00 Amazon.com's Price: $9.60 You Save: $6.40 (40%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.12 Format: Kindle Book Label: Penguin Manufacturer: Penguin Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 464 Publication Date: June 27, 2007 Publisher: Penguin Release Date: June 27, 2007 Studio: Penguin Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: "What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. 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. Today, as America confronts what can only be described as a national eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with an atavistic vengeance. The cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet has thrown us back on a bewildering landscape where we once again have to worry about which of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. At the same time we're realizing that our food choices also have profound implications for the health of our environment. The Omnivore's Dilemma is bestselling author Michael Pollan's brilliant and eye-opening exploration of these little-known but vitally important dimensions of eating in America. Pollan has divided The Omnivore's Dilemma into three parts, one for each of the food chains that sustain us: industrialized food, alternative or "organic" food, and food people obtain by dint of their own hunting, gathering, or gardening. Pollan follows each food chain literally from the ground up to the table, emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the species we depend on. He concludes each section by sitting down to a meal at McDonald's, at home with his family sharing a dinner from Whole Foods, and in a revolutionary "beyond organic" farm in Virginia. For each meal he traces the provenance of everything consumed, revealing the hidden components we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods reflects our environmental and biological inheritance.We are indeed what we eat-and what we eat remakes the world. A society of voracious and increasingly confused omnivores, we are just beginning to recognize the profound consequences of the simplest everyday food choices, both for ourselves and for the natural world. The Omnivore's Dilemma is a long-overdue book and one that will become known for bringing a completely fresh perspective to a question as ordinary and yet momentous as What shall we have for dinner? A few facts and figures from The Omnivore's Dilemma:Of the 38 ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, there are at least 13 that are derived from corn. 45 different menu items at Mcdonald's are made from corn. One in every three American children eats fast food every day.One in every five American meals today is eaten in the car. The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States - more than we burn with our cars and more than any other industry consumes. It takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate. A single strawberry contains about five calories. To get that strawberry from a field in California to a plate on the east coast requires 435 calories of energy.Industrial fertilizer and industrial pesticides both owe their existence to the conversion of the World War II munitions industry to civilian uses nerve gases became pesticides, and ammonium nitrate explosives became nitrogen fertilizers. Because of the obesity epidemic, today's generation of children will be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than their parents' life expectancy. In 2000 the UN reported that the number of people in the world suffering from overnutrition "a billion" exceeded for the first time in history the number suffering from undernutrition 800 million. The great food problem of our time is that there is too much of it, not too little. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Food will never look the same againThe author does an excellent job of explaining how ethics, policy, biology, culture and big business are connected and have shaped the foods that we eat today. Many of our eating habits in the Western diet simply do not make sense and ultimately have global repurcussions. The author raises many good questions without sounding moralistic or judgemental. Why eat imported organic produce from a foreign country if the shipper burns huge quanitities of fossil fuels to deliver it to you? ... Read More Rating: - Amazing ReadAll of the information in the book is something a well informed person should know. It was an interesting journey though, and quite an easy eye opening read. Highly recommended. Rating: - Thought-provoking and terrifyingPollan gives us a ton of information about food production in hopes that we can treat our meals with a little more reverence and understanding. Unfortunately, since I've read the book, I think I feel more food-related anxiety than appreciation. I can't go into a grocery store without having panic attacks. Sweaty palms and irregular breathing on Aisle 2. Seriously. The truth is, there's a lot to be nervous (and furious) about when you start looking closely at large-scale agrobusiness. ... Read More Rating: - The True Cost of Eating Your LunchJournalist Michael Pollan has written what appears on the surface to be a boring book. He decides to eat four meals and explore the history and consequences of each. He chooses an industrial agricultural meal (fast food), a large-scale organic meal, locally raised farm meal and finally he hunts and gathers his last meal. By capturing the social, economic, and ecological as well as the moral, and ethical consequences of each meal, Pollan has written a modern day masterpiece on a task most ... Read More Rating: - Changed My World ViewLet me put it out front -- I'm an omnivore and nothing in the book changes that. What has changed is my entire way of looking at food. The book is loaded with information that makes one reconsider the mix of foods you eat. What I like is that it does this while not telling the reader precisely what foods to eat and what foods to avoid. Rather, the emphasis is on balance and on knowing something about where your food comes from. This is a subject for which too many authors become preachy, but not ... Read More 
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