“Omnivore Dilemma”: Perfect Book On What And Why We Eat

One of the Most Interesting Nonfiction Reads Out There

If you are interested in humans’ relationship with food, look no further than “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan. I heard a lot about this book before and Pollan has his own Netflix documentary “Cooked”.

At first, I thought it is a book about the differences between omnivore and vegetarian diet.

But the book is much deeper than that: Pollan goes into a detailed investigation of what we eat and how the food gets on our plates.

Omnivore’s dilemma has the following meaning: we humans (as few other species on Earth, like rats) are omnivores, i.e. we can eat essentially anything.

This is what allowed us to adapt to so many environments on the planet: if one source of food becomes scarce, we are able to start eating something else. The dilemma, though, is that the food selection is a challenge as we don’t know what is safe to eat (food selection is part of the natural selection process).

Pollan investigates in detail how industrial food production works. The book contains most detailed information on “corn plague” in the US (and why monocultural agriculture is bad). It also stresses issues with industrial meat processing facilities and explains why we should know how the animals we eat are killed.

To Pollan, the issue is not eating animals per se, but how it is organized on the industrial scale.

Before industrial food processing, humans treated the fact of killing an animal with respect, while now this process is fully hidden and unknown to us. Meat in the supermarkets is meant not to resemble parts of a dead animal; chicken nuggets have no appearance of a chicken.

Pollan visits both industrial and organic farms, goes hunting and mushroom picking (in order to show all possible ways of obtaining food). The chapter on mushrooms is one of the most interesting ones (spoiler: we still don’t really know much about what mushrooms are and how they work).

All in all, a really good, comprehensive read that definitely takes time. Pollan’s research is obviously strictly US-focused. I want to believe that industrial food processing is organized somewhat better in the EU, but proving Pollan’s point, I as a consumer don’t know much about it.

You might know that I don’t post book reviews without a beer recommendation. It’s just not what I would do.

Today’s beer is a grapefruit pale ale by a London brewery Brew By Numbers. It was a solid grapefruit ale, maybe more of a choice for the summer nights.