One does not necessarily expect books about food also to be about bigger ideas like oppression, spirituality, and freedom. Yet Michael Pollan has always defied expectations. To be sure, his two most recent books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, celebrate the pleasure of eating. However, Pollan also serves up something far more potent: a pointed and thorough critique of how the food industry, the government, advertisers, and, yes, even Pollan’s fellow journalists have turned the process of putting food on our tables into an increasingly dysfunctional enterprise. With insight, gentle firmness, and even some well-placed humor, Pollan observes how modern farming is at war with the needs and dictates of nature, how the nutritional policies of the government have rebelled against sound scientific practice, how even the consumer has been divided against himself and that eating has ceased to be for many of us a source of enjoyment and has become instead an occasion for uncertainty, anxiety, and guilt. Within Pollan’s jeremiads there is also a persistent core of hope. While never flinching in his critique of the way things are, Pollan constantly encourages us to think of how things might be.
In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan guides the reader through an extensive tour of food production in America, tracing a series of food chains from the seed to the table. In the harrowing first part of his story, he takes us to a massive farm in Iowa, where the formerly diverse yield of hay, apples, hogs, and cherries has given way to a vast monocultural enterprise, in which, thanks to government subsidies and a seemingly perverse set of economic principles, corn is king. With a sparkling analysis that adroitly weaves history, science, and sociology, Pollan shows how America has bent its priorities in the service of this single crop, converting it into ethanol, the now-ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup, and even disposable diapers. We discover how the monoculture of corn has impoverished the soil and the people who work it, how it has imperiled the health of the cattle industry (steers are naturally ill-suited to digest grain, but we feed it to them anyway), and how it has led unsuspecting consumers to trade nutrition for cheap calories. Pollan next transports us to a small, ecologically balanced farm in Virginia, where the chickens and cattle roam more freely, and animals and humans alike reap the benefits of a natural food chain based on grass. Finally, in perhaps his most radical encounter with the world of food, Pollan resolves to prepare a meal that he has hunted and gathered by himself. As he stalks a feral pig, dives for abalone, and wonders whether that mushroom he has picked just might kill him, we rediscover food not merely as a physical source of life but as a medium for holy communion with nature and one another.
