Book Review: Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma"

I just recently began re-reading Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. This was a book that I was assigned to read for a class about food and culture while I was in school. You may or may not have heard of Pollan and his books about the life of food and it's place in human (particularly Western) culture, but if you are at all interested in the subject I would say that his work is definitely worth a read.

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan takes you on a detailed journey through the natural history of various meals. It's not a book about dieting, nor is it about eating healthy. It is about the choices we, as ominvores, have when it comes to the dinner table. It is about how those choices have been blurred (and somewhat mutilated if you ask me) by the processes of modern food production. As an investigative journalist, Pollan presents you with his findings as he follows his meals from the farm, to the factory and ultimately the dinner table.

Food has always been a fascinating subject to us because it is a necessity for life, for survival, and has therefore become thoroughly intertwined into the fabric of human culture. Everyone needs to eat.

However, in the past few centuries, as technologies have advanced and capitalism has become king, food has gone through a transformation. It is no longer simply a basic need. It has become an art form, and a commodity. Most people rely heavily, if not entirely on the food-system rather than on their own ability to grow and produce their own sustenance. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. It is, as are most things, a much more complex issue than the black and white of good and bad.

At Mayhew, and anywhere else we may find ourselves in the future, we grow as much of our own food as we can. This includes gardening, raising chickens for eggs and meat, and raising rabbits, ducks, pigs and beef for meat as well. Do we still shop at the grocery store? Of course, I can't get salt or cinnamon or bananas from our land. We grow our own food mostly for the pleasure of it. We do what we can and we do it for the joy that comes of it.

I could go on and on about my views about growing your own food, about local and global food, fast food and slow food, about organic and non-organic.....but we'll save that for another time.

My advice would be to educate yourself and to understand what these things ACTUALLY mean beyond the buzz words of our generation and beyond the marketing and advertising that seems so appealing, luring us into what may well be a false sense of piece of mind.

Blah blah blah.

The End.