The bestselling author of The Botany of Desire explores the ecology of eating to unveil why we consume what we consume in the twenty-first century.

"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 relationsip 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?

“Pollan tells the story of our food and how we got here brilliantly. This is simply one of the best books ever written about the state of our food.”
–The Toronto Star

"Trenchant commentary and at-times exquisite prose…a personal journey based on massive scholarship."
—The Vancouver Sun

"It is a dilemma we confront every day, in the supermarket or at the dinner table. ‘The organic apple or the conventional? And if the organic, the local one or imported? The wild fish or the farmed? The trans-fats or the butter or the ‘not-butter.’ Shall I be a carnivore or a vegetarian?"
—The Sun Times

"An absolute must read for anyone who cares about this planet and what we do on it and with it. With every page beautifully written and compelling, Pollan refreshes an age-old dilemma – what do we eat for dinner?"
—The Sun Times

"Pollan writes engrossingly..."
"Foraging and hunting produce the final dinner in this endlessly fascinating journey."
—Georgia Straight

Introduction: Our National Eating Disorder

I Industrial

Corn

One: The Plant: Corn's Conquest

Two: The Farm

Three: The Elevator

Four: The Feedlot: Making Meat

Five: The Processing Plant: Making COmplex Foods

Six: The Consumer: A Republic of Fat

Seven: The Meal: Fast Food

II Pastoral

Grass

Eight: All Flesh is Grass

Nine: Big Organic

Ten: Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture

Eleven: The Animals: Practicing Complexity'

Twelve: Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir

Thirteen: The Market: "Greetings from the Non-Barcode People"

Fourteen: The Meal: Grass-Fed

III Personal

The Forest: (Hunting and Catering)

Fifteen: The Forager

Sixteen: The Omnivore's Dilemma

Seventeen: The Ethics of Eating Animals

Eighteen: Hunting: The Meat

Nineteen: Gathering: The Fungi

Twenty: The Perfect Meal

Acknowledgments

Sources

Index