The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

With the cold months approaching I thought it a good time to do a book post. There's nothing like snuggling up with a big blanket and a cup of hot cocoa, and just reading a good book.
As anyone who reads this blog knows, I have a deep love for food, good, whole food produced in a sustainable way by people that feel the same way. Tim & I did not always feel the way we do about food, but, over the years we have been on a food journey leading us to how we eat now and how we plan on eating in the future. One book that helped greatly on our journey was the Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. For those who run in the circles we do Michael Pollan is extremely influential and very highly esteemed. For the past twenty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture. He has been a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine since 1987, and most recently he was appointed the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. In addition to teaching, he lectures widely on food, agriculture, and gardening. This book answers one of our greatest questions, what should we have for dinner? Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? In his book Pollan turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds. The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way you think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.

"Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food."
Michael Pollan