Michael Pollan - The Omnivores Dilemma

Praise for The Omnivores Dilemma

Gold Medal in Nonfiction for the California Book Award Winner of the 2007 Bay Area Book Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 2007 James Beard Book Award/Writing on Food Category Finalist for the 2007 Orion Book Award Finalist for the 2007 NBCC Award

Michael Pollans outstanding The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our current eating habits. Pollan undertakes a pilgrims progress along modern food chains, setting standards for ethical eating.

The New Yorker

[Pollans] book is an eaters manifesto, and he touches on a vast array of subjects, from food fads and taboos to our avoidance of not only our foods animality, but also our own. Along the way, he is alert to his own emotions and thoughts, to see how they affect what he does and what he eats, to learn more and to explain what he knows. His approach is steeped in honesty and self-awareness. His cause is just, his thinking is clear, and his writing is compelling. Be careful of your dinner!

The Washington Post

Michael Pollan is a magician. He turns corn and cows, pigs and chickens into a brilliant, eye-opening account of how we produce, market and agonize over what we eat. If you ever thought whats for dinner was a simple question, youll change your mind after reading Pollans searing indictment of todays food industryand his glimpse of some inspiring alternatives. I just loved this book so much I didnt want it to end.

The Seattle Times

Michael Pollan has perfected a toneone of gleeful irony and barely suppressed outrageand a way of inserting himself into a narrative so that a subject comes alive through what hes feeling and thinking. He is a master at drawing back to reveal the greater issues.

Los Angeles Times

Michael Pollan convincingly demonstrates that the oddest meal can be found right around the corner at your local McDonalds. He brilliantly anatomizes the corn-based diet that has emerged in the postwar era.

The New York Times

[Pollan] wants us at least to know what it is we are eating, where it came from and how it got to our table. He also wants us to be aware of the choices we make and to take responsibility for them. Its an admirable goal, well met in The Omnivores Dilemma.

The Wall Street Journal

A gripping delightThis is a brilliant, revolutionary book with huge implications for our future and a must-read for everyone. And I do mean everyone.

The Austin Chronicle

As lyrical as What to Eat is hard-hitting, Michael Pollans The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals may be the best single book I read this year. This magisterial work, whose subject is nothing less than our own omnivorous (i.e., eating everything) humanity, is organized around two plants and one ecosystem. Pollan has a love-hate relationship with Corn, the wildly successful plant that has found its way into meat (as feed), corn syrup and virtually every other type of processed food. American agribusiness monoculture of corn has shoved aside the old pastoral ideal of Grass, and the self-sustaining, diversified farm based on the grass-eating livestock. In The Forest, Pollan ponders the earliest forms of obtaining food: hunting and gathering. If you eat, you should read this book.

Newsday

Smart, insightful, funny and often profound.

USA Today

The Omnivores Dilemma is an ambitious and thoroughly enjoyable, if sometimes unsettling, attempt to peer over these walls, to bring us closer to a true understanding of what we eatand, by extension, what we should eat. It is interested not only in how the consumed affects the consumer, but in how we consumers affect what we consume as well. Entertaining and memorable. Readers of this intelligent and admirable book will almost certainly find their capacity to delight in food augmented rather than diminished.

San Francisco Chronicle

On the long trip from the soil to our mouths, a trip of 1,500 miles on average, the food we eat often passes through places most of us will never see. Michael Pollan has spent much of the last five years visiting these places on our behalf.

Salon.com

The author of Second Nature and The Botany of Desire, Pollan is willing to go to some lengths to reconnect with what he eats, even if that means putting in a hard week on an organic farm and slitting the throats of chickens. Hes not Paris Hilton on The Simple Life.

Time

A pleasure to read.

The Baltimore Sun

A fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. Youll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again. Pollan isnt preachy; hes too thoughtful a writer and too dogged a researcher to let ideology take over. Hes also funny and adventurous.

Publishers Weekly

[Pollan] does everything from buying his own cow to helping with the open-air slaughter of pasture-raised chickens to hunting morels in Northern California. This is not a man whos afraid of getting his hands dirty in the quest for better understanding. Along with wonderfully descriptive writing and truly engaging stories and characters, there is a full helping of serious information on the way modern food is produced.

BookPage

The Omnivores Dilemma is about something that affects everyone.

The Sacramento Bee

Lively and thought-provoking.

East Bay Express

Michael Pollan makes tracking your dinner back through the food chain that produced it a rare adventure.

O, The Oprah Magazine

A master wordsmithPollan brings to the table lucid and rich prose, an enthusiasm for his topic, interesting anecdotes, a journalists passion for research, an ability to poke fun at himself, and an appreciation for historical context. This is journalism at its best.

Christianity Today

First-rate[A] passionate journey of the heartPollan isan uncommonly graceful explainer of natural science; this is the book he was born to write.

Newsweek

[Pollans] stirring new bookis a feast, illuminating the ethical, social and environmental impacts of how and what we choose to eat.

The Courier-Journal

From fast food to big organic to locally sourced to foraging for dinner with rifle in hand, Pollan captures the perils and the promise of how we eat today.

The Arizona Daily Star

A multivalent, highly introspective examination of the human diet, from capitalism to consumption.

The Hudson Review

What should you eat? Michael Pollan addresses that fundamental question with great wit and intelligence, looking at the social, ethical, and environmental impact of four different meals. Eating well, he finds, can be a pleasurable way to change the world.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness

Widely and rightly praised The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals [is] a book thatI kid you notmay change your life.

Austin American-Statesman

With the skill of a professional detective, Michael Pollan explores the worlds of industrial farming, organic and sustainable agriculture, and even hunting and gathering to determine the links of food chains: how food gets from its sources in nature to our plates. The findings he reports in this this book are often unexpected, disturbing, even horrifying, but they are facts every eater should know. This is an engaging book, full of information that is most relevant to conscious living.

Dr. Andrew Weil, author of Spontaneous Healing and Healthy Aging

Michael Pollan is a voice of reason, a journalist/philosopher who forages in the overgrowth of our schizophrenic food culture. Hes the kind of teacher we probably all wish we had: one who triggers the little explosions of insight that change the way we eat and the way we live.