The Omnivore's Dilemma

I was expecting a whiny Bay Area style Organic vs. Big Business book about food. Instead Pollan makes the situation far more complicated and now I don't know what to eat. I thought he'd make vegetarian out as the saintliest way to eat a meal. That's not necessarily the case. He even goes hunting wild animals and shoots a pig which he later eats and serves to his comrades.

What really intrigues me is how the military-industrial complex extends its fingers into the nation's food supply. I already knew U.S. farmers get fat government subsidies. But the effect it has (especially corn farms) upon the world economy and how it creates bizarre feedback loops is staggering, nauseating, perplexing. How you turn such a feedback loop off is the million dollar question.

Let's put food politics aside for a sec. Because you can't deny this book is well written. It's one of the few nonfiction audiobooks I've heard that makes me want to read the text as well. Pollan tells a good story. That's all I want from any book. It's a fat 13-hour narrative that I listened to going to work each day and I feel like an entire layer of the U.S. onion had been peeled away.

People want to eat good food and not destroy the planet and their health in the process. Why is that so hard to do?