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The Omnivore's Dillema: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
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Omnivore's Dillema
Michael Pollan
"I work in an education program, and I had volunteered to do summer reading groups because we do them every year. So there's a group of rising sophomores, which means summer after ninth grade going into tenth grade. This group of girls who go to a private school in Marin County and their summer reading was to read this book, so I thought, "Okay, here's a perfect excuser. I'll do it as a reading group." SO I read the book over the summer with a group of 14 and 15 year-old girls; we read it together.
The Omnivore Dilemma is basically about the different kinds of choices and obstacles and dilemmas that are faced by people in contemporary US society about the food that they eat and where it comes from. It goes into a lot about different kinds of political or economic motivations for certain foods becoming popular, becoming the staples of our diet, and a kind of contrast big time industrial agriculture with smaller agricultural units and what it means to be organic versus what it means to be non-organic and what is industrial organic and really just goes in depth into what sort of factors are controlling food production in America.
The book concludes with the author putting himself to a challenge of trying to gather, forage, take it back to the hunter-gatherer days, gather and forage his own fancy meal, which he does. So it's broken into a few different sections of history, research, personal experience, field work and whatever.
Truly what I liked best was the context in which I read it because it was a really amazing educational tool. Michael Pollan is very, very, very thorough, and he's very detailed, and he goes in - he's neutral, too. I think that in content, I would give this book 4½ stars because again, I think the information is really good and really important. Readability and entertainingness, I would give it closer to maybe a 3.75. I can't stick with a whole number; it's just too much of a commitment for me."
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