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What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this
simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of
things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma.
Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers,
humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't--which
mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can
enjoy. Today, as America confronts what can only be described as a
national eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with
an atavistic vengeance. The cornucopia of the modern American
supermarket and fast-food outlet has thrown us back on a
bewildering landscape where we once again have to worry about which
of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. At the same time
we're realizing that our food choices also have profound
implications for the health of our environment. "The Omnivore's
Dilemma" is bestselling author Michael Pollan's brilliant and
eye-opening exploration of these little-known but vitally important
dimensions of eating in America.
Pollan has divided "The Omnivore's Dilemma" into three parts, one
for each of the food chains that sustain us: industrialized food,
alternative or "organic" food, and food people obtain by dint of
their own hunting, gathering, or gardening. Pollan follows each
food chain literally from the ground up to the table, emphasizing
our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the species we depend
on. He concludes each section by sitting down to a meal--at
McDonald's, at home with his family sharing a dinner from Whole
Foods, and in a revolutionary "beyond organic" farm in Virginia.
For each meal he traces the provenance of everything consumed,
revealing the hidden components we unwittingly ingest and
explaining how our taste for particular foods reflects our
environmental and biological inheritance.
We are indeed what we eat-and what we eat remakes the world. A
society of voracious and increasingly confused omnivores, we are
just beginning to recognize the profound consequences of the
simplest everyday food choices, both for ourselves and for the
natural world. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is a long-overdue book and
one that will become known for bringing a completely fresh
perspective to a question as ordinary and yet momentous as What
shall we have for dinner?
A few facts and figures from "The Omnivore's Dilemma" Of the 38
ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, there are at least 13 that
are derived from corn. 45 different menu items at Mcdonald's are
made from corn.One in every three American children eats fast food
every day.One in every five American meals today is eaten in the
car.The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum
consumed in the United States--more than we burn with our cars and
more than any other industry consumes.It takes ten calories of
fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an
American plate.A single strawberry contains about five calories. To
get that strawberry from a field in California to a plate on the
east coast requires 435 calories of energy.Industrial fertilizer
and industrial pesticides both owe their existence to the
conversion of the World War II munitions industry to civilian
uses--nerve gases became pesticides, and ammonium nitrate
explosives became nitrogen fertilizers. ...
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