Honolulu Weekly

The evidence of Michael Pollan’s pedigree is displayed on the back of the book jacket: high praise from Alice Waters, Dr. Andrew Weil, Eric Schlosser and Ruth Reichl. If none of those names ring familiar, than the subject of his new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, may not appeal to you. But maybe it should.

‘A lot of people just don’t want to know where their food comes from,’ says Pollan, speaking from his home in California. ‘I don’t know what to say about that. I’m surprised that you wouldn’t. There’s a guy in the book, Joel Salatin, who says, ‘How is it that we put more time into thinking about who will be our mechanic or our house contractor, than who grows our food?’

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan, a writer for The New York Times and the Knight Professor of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley, takes a clear-eyed look into the world of modern eating. He starts with a single question: What should we have for dinner? Not so very long ago, he says, we didn’t need an investigative journalist to answer such a question.

Through four different meals–a fast food meal, two organic meals and one meal involving hunting and foraging–Pollan takes readers to the heart of that quandary. While he does reveal absurdities within the complex modern industrial food chain, he also shares stories of mushroom hunting and of making a soufflÈ with good chocolate and fresh eggs. He visits an Iowa corn farmer who says he farms for the ‘military-industrial complex.’ He buys a steer and follows it to slaughter. He labors for a week on a multi-faceted ‘beyond organic’ farm in Virginia. He grows his own ‘chef,’ discovers chanterelle mushrooms on the street in Berkeley and kills a wild pig. And he cooks. His dead-on food descriptions and references leave no doubt that fueling his dedicated reportage is a passion for food.

‘Pleasure is a big part of this,’ Pollan says. ‘It’s not about hectoring people. It’s that the more you know about food, the more pleasurable it can be. Alice Waters calls it the delicious revolution. It’s an area where doing the right thing, often tastes better too.’

One of Pollan’s greatest strengths as a writer and thinker is understanding how little we know about our food sources and how disconnected we are from the natural world and its rules. He knows most of us grew up shopping for our food–that some of us wouldn’t know how to cook, much less gut a pig. He approaches his work as a ‘food detective,’ addressing–often through comic juxtaposition–our myths and fears of what happens prior to a cellophane wrap. His interest in food stems from his time as a gardener, he says.

‘I have been writing and thinking about nature and our relationship to nature for a very long time,’ says Pollan, who has been writing exclusively about food for The New York Times since 2001. ‘And I understood from my time in the garden that when you bring an industrial mindset to the natural world, problems often occurred.

‘One of my first essays that I ever published was about going to war with a woodchuck. I found myself doing these insane things. By the end I was pouring gasoline down the hole, putting in toxic chemicals. I was willing to do anything to assert my superior power in this relationship. And that made me understand that how you approach nature–whether you work with it or against it–it’s a large question that we have to resolve. But the attempt to impose ourselves too brutally and too bluntly leads to a lot of unintended consequences.’

One-third of the book explores a grass–corn. He examines its preponderance in the modern American diet and how it got that way. He also looks at the successes of industrial organic farming–’Earthbound Farms’ available at Costco–and at the relative cost of that model. He shows us the precarious nature of ‘free-range.’ One portion of the book came from a piece he wrote for The Times about purchasing a cow: No. 534. The piece, which follows a steer from birth to slaughter, still causes strong reactions.

‘When I published that piece on the cow, No. 534, people would come up to me and say, ‘Oh, after I read that article, I stopped eating meat,” Pollan says. ‘And I said, ‘Really, because I didn’t.’ As they talked about it, I realized that what really upset them about it, was that cows died to in order to give us meat. That something so simple hadn’t dawned on them before. I mean, they do know–you can’t remove meat from an animal surgically. But at a certain level they don’t want to know that. One of my points in this book is that, yeah, I look at some kind of disturbing things about food, but in general, the more you know about food, the more pleasurable it is.’