The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World (reissued)

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Food scientists are hard at work creating new and more complicated uses for corn all the time, illustrating how the industry is driven by the economic needs of food companies and manufacturers, rather than the best interests of its human consumers, the animals, or the planet. The corn that isn’t used to feed cows is sent to refineries, where it undergoes complicated processing to turn it into various edible and non-edible materials, most frequently high-fructose corn syrup. Pollan’s perfect meal is completely inefficient and unsustainable as a consistent practice, however—the other end of the spectrum from the unsustainable fast food meal.

His farm guru is Joel Salatin, an independent-minded small farmer who runs Polyface, his small family farm in Virginia.Pollan combines ecology, biology, history and anthropology with personal experience to present fascinating multiple perspectives.

Cooked explores what ancient and modern cooking methods can tell us about the human relationship to food. The author and New York Times Magazine contributor is, as Newsweek asserts, “an uncommonly graceful explainer of natural science,” for his investigative stories about food, agriculture, and the environment. Born and raised in Long Island, New York, Pollan attended Bennington College and received a Master’s Degree in English Literature at Columbia University. Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan—whose number-one New York Times best sellers include The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind—offers his latest, provocative look into the profound ways that what we eat affects how we live.Sinclair’s book exposed the brutal and unsanitary conditions in the American meat industry, drawing public attention to a previously under-scrutinized sector of the newly industrialized and prosperous American economy. A room of one’s own: is there anybody who hasn’t at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn’t turned those soft words over until they’d assumed a habitable shape? Because he is engaging directly with his food, he has to grapple with more basic questions, like the ethics of killing and eating animals, and the methods by which humans decide what foods are edible in the wild, particularly in the case of mushrooms. The Omnivore’s Dilemma was also adapted into a popular young readers’ edition designed to make his analysis of the food system accessible to younger people.