THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA BY MICHAEL POLLAN

NORRISVILLE BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP
JULY BOOK - THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA BY MICHAEL POLLAN

Michael Pollan’s growing fame as a journalist of gardens, food, and other subjects central to the human experience is well deserved. He approaches his subjects with a mostly open mind, writes clearly and elegantly, and sees even the most horrific facts of life with a twist of wry humor.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is cleverly conceived and organized. The author has imagined four different types of dinners (mainstream supermarket, large-scale organic, sustainable agriculture, and hunting/foraging) and delved deeply into the sources, problems, and moral issues surrounding each meal. While on his journey he uncovered some eye-poppingly disturbing attributes of “factory” cattle lots, the corporate hijacking of corn (and its appearance in myriad altered states in all of our packaged foods and drinks), and the difficulties facing anybody trying to buck the system and produce food responsibly on a small scale.

But Pollan is not for everyone, as our July meeting revealed. The group divided up between two camps: those that couldn’t read the book at all and gave up quickly, and those who couldn’t put the book down and loved it. Pollan's complex vocabulary and long sentences are not for everyone. The feeling of needing a dictionary for every sentence and the soporific effect of the sometimes rambling arguments was off-putting to some.

Those group members with more patience for nonfiction, however, were greatly affected by The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Several readers observed, only half-jokingly, that they were unlikely ever to buy meat from the supermarket again. The great machine of industrial food production is largely hidden from our view, and Americans have stopped worrying about the origins of what they eat. Yet the truth is disturbing: meat animals fed foods they are not designed to digest, the heavy use of antibiotics and other drugs on cattle and pigs designed to keep stressed animals going, the co-opting of the corn and soybean sectors by a handful of enormous yet private companies, and the food industry regulations designed to prevent anybody with a different idea about food from competing with the giants of food production.

Interestingly, those in the group who found the book riveting did not seem to absorb or notice the more optimistic parts of the book, those that talked of sustainable agriculture and the benefits of locally produced food. Perhaps the choice to avoid chain supermarkets is not open to everyone.

The upshot was that those who couldn’t finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma were eager to begin on August’s title, while those who enjoyed the book were pleased to learn that Pollan’s most recent book, In Defense of Food, contained more in the same vein.

Check the calendar of events for future titles to be discussed by the Norrisville book group.