The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

So I was listening to NPR (my philosophy is that if my media is biased in the opposite direction, when I hear something I like, I can trust it to be true) and I caught an interview with the author of this book. I couldn't resist; I find contemporary nutrition research absolutely arresting. Pollan, a journalist by trade, investigates the actual origins of the foods we eat, beyond the grocery store.

He begins in an ostensibly random place- a cornfield in Iowa. Much of the supermarket can be traced to this state, not only in overtly corn-based products, but also in anything containing citric acid, glucose, fructose, maltodextrin, sorbitol, xanthan gum, modified cornstarch, and MSG, among other things that habitual ingredient-list readers like myself would readily recognize. High fructose corn syrup, of course, is everywhere. Almost all animals raised for consumption are now corn-fed. Break down the molecular composition of the average American, and you will find corn.

That is just a small portion of what Pollan serves up. There is a lot to this book, but the essential message is that we as a nation are producing and consuming plants and animals in ways they were not designed to be used. According to Pollan, we could save untold amounts of money in all sorts of areas- from health care, to fossil fuel use, to fertilizers and pesticides, to government subsidies- if we would allow a system based on the natural growth cycles of our food.

Pollan's worldview is decidedly evolutionary, but even he admits the fallibility of science. "The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables...the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters," he says in a statement that has implications outside the field of nutrition, and that speaks volumes about the shortcomings of materialism.

Moreover, Pollan profiles Joel Salatin, a "Christian libertarian environmentalist" who maintains an entirely self-sustaining farm on a few hundred acres in Virginia. Salatin's cows eat grass, their natural diet; his chickens eat the insects and larvae that come with cows and in doing so fertilize the pasture. His pigs turn the farm's waste into rich soil that feeds the garden. "'All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse,'" Salatin insists, likening his cause to the homeschool movement. Pollan is enthralled with the concept, and I'd have to agree.

Pollan's tone is sometimes overreaching but mostly elegant and accessible. He is methodical and scrupulously detailed. He is areligious, but he is compassionate to Christians and even presents one as his ideal food producer. It's a terribly informative book and I am quite glad I read it.