So the latest book I've finished was The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. The dilemma, as Pollan puts it is simply: "What to eat?"
As always, its hard for me to put into words the message that Pollan pushes in the book. His goal through the book is to trace a few meals back to their origin point, and along the way touches on all of the sources of food in America: the CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and factory farms, Industrial Organic like those from Whole Foods, locally produced and pastured meat, and he goes and at the ends he journeys to find a meal by using a hunter-gatherer method. The argument is that as Americans we have to culturally-enforced eating habit, and the advent of the industrial farm has further thrown us as humans out of whack with our eating and food-buying heritage. Pollan tries to convince us that we have to give up the idea that supermarket foodstuffs are OK, that we're really fooling ourselves with absurdly cheap food engineered to make us keep eating and all built on a mountain of corn and petroleum (read the book to find out more)
Pollan writes well, and he gives sufficient evidence to make you think twice about where you get your food. Definitely a book to read.
