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“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.
- Super-sizing works as a marketing strategy because people
presented with larger portions don’t stop eating when they
are full, but rather will eat more than 30% than they otherwise
would. Why? Probably because our bodies evolved in an environment
of feast or famine, when it made sense to eat as much as
possible when food was available.
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