Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 16
 Entertaining and Eye Opening May 26, 2010
C. Messer (Canada)
If you are considering reading the Omnivore's Dilemma you already likely have some ill feelings towards the food industry in general. Michael Pollan offers a very well organized account of where our food comes from as well as his encounters with trying to follow our food from field to plate.
It is truly amazing how corn rules the grocery store, and I find myself checking labels all the time in awe of how many products contain some by product of corn production.
The book makes a really good case for buying local, and supporting farmers that have managed to resist selling out to corporations intent on lobbying governments rather than working with the farmers to improve products.
A must read for anyone that is curious about our eating habits and the unnecessarily long food chain we have created for ourselves to prop up an industry that may very well be unnecessary if not for some crazy decisions along the way.
 Outlook on Nutrition April 7, 2010
Sharon (Canada)
Pollan shares a great insight on how we view nutrition. Do we necessarily need to be so focused on all the vitamins and nutrients that make up our food, when really, if we just eat real food, we should be getting an abundance of everything. That is, if we eat a variety of real, wholesome food. Highly recommend this book for others to gain insight on this view of nutrition that we often hold.
Great read! February 14, 2010
dafeist (Montreal, Quebec Canada)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book can make you change the way you look at food forever. It has led to major life changes in our family, starting with the elimination of foods that are not really food at all. We are now eating food. Just food.
The first 2/3rds are worth reading June 22, 2009
M. Fleming (Canada)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Omnivore's Dilemma explores the whole concept of where our food comes from and connecting with our food. In that the book is a success. Pollan's trademark storytelling style is inviting and easy to read.
Michael Pollan is blessed with fantastic literary skills and an ability to string along 800-word sentences with commas that is unrivaled in the English language.
However, Pollan puts too much of himself in his own work. He's kind of a self-absorbed windbag and his ego won't let him describe a grazing pasture with out putting himself in the scene. It's a little hard to relate to the story the more personal it gets. Who has a wine and cheese party in the middle of hunting wild boar?
Still, I have to give this 4 stars. Even if he is a wiener, this guy can spin a yarn. For many people the content in the first 2/3rds of this book will open their eyes to the truth behind what's on their dinner table.
Think before you eat December 23, 2008
Tommy Tom Tom (toronto canada)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Omnivore's Dilemma is the product of a very talented investigative journalist (who also happens to be a good writer) tackling one of the most important issues facing N. American consumers - what's on their dinner plates.
The book isn't written as an "expose" of the food industry - Pollan isn't trying to grab you by your shirt collar and slap you around with information. And despite the lengthy discussion of the factory farm system, this isn't a vegetarian or vegan call to arms. Although he never actually states his position, it's fairly clear that Pollan is an omnivore who finds it defensible to eat animals raised on organic / natural farms who lived a good life and had a quick clean death. What he does not find defensible is eating animals - like the billions going through the factory farms - that did nothing but suffer for their entire existence before they reached our plates.
Pollan emphasizes several times the fact that it is incumbent upon the eater to truly look at, and make a conscious moral decision, about what he/she is eating. On page 312 he writes about the choice you have to make after you accept the evidence that an animal was tortured to get to your dinner table: You look away (and ignore the truth) - or you stop eating animals.
Aside from the moral problems associated with the factory farm system, Pollan is also great at discussing what is actually happening in this system. Listen to this description of the food given to cattle:
-----
Around to the other side of the building, tanker trucks back up to silo-shaped tanks into which they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and protein supplements. In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen beside pallets stacked with fifty-pound sacks of antibiotics - Rumensis and Tylosin. Along with alfafa hay and silage (for roughage), all these ingredients will be automatically blended and then piped into the parade of dump trucks that three times a day fan out from here to keep Poky's eight and a half miles of trough filled.
.... [corn kernels were] the only feed ingredient I sampled, and it wasn't half bad; not as crisp as a Kellog's flake, but with a cornier flavor. I passed on the other ingredients: the liquefied fat (which on today's menu is beef tallow, trucked in from one of the nearby slaughter-houses), and the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea. The urea is a form of synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas, similar to the fertilizer spread on a farmer's fields].
-----
So the cows (whose bodies can only naturally tolerate grass) are eating antibiotics, steroids, liquefied fat, and natural gas? And I'm then giving this to my kids? Fat chance!
As I said, this isn't really intended to be a shocking wake up call. However, after reading 400+ pages of patiently researched material, there's no doubt you're going to be a lot more careful the next time you're at a supermarket. Great book on a very important topic.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 16
|
