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Description
The bestselling author of The Botany of Desire explores the ecology of eating to unveil why we consume what we consume in the twenty-first century "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... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis
Summary
Pollan begins with a deep exploration of the food-production system from which the vast majority of American meals are derived. This industrial food chain is largely based on corn, whether it is eaten directly, fed to livestock, or processed into chemicals such as glucose and ethanol. Pollan... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)
Memorable Quotes
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“When you look at the isotope ratios... we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.”
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“In many ways, breakfast food: four cents' worth of commodity corn (or some other equally cheap grain) transformed into four dollars worth of processed food. What an alchemy!”
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“Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise. ... Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.”
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“Some time later I found another way to calculate just how much corn we had eaten that day. I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at Berkely, to run a McDonald's meal through his mass spectrometer and calculate how much of the carbon in it came originally from a corn plant...the atomic signature of those carbon isotopes is indestructible, and still legible to the mass spectrometer.... soda (100 percent), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and french fries (23 percent).”
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“The more you concentrate on how it tastes, the less like anything it tastes. ... And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.”
First Sentence
Air-conditioned, odorless, illuminated by buzzing fluorescent tubes, the American supermarket doesn't present itself as having very much to do with Nature.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Our National Eating Disorder
I Industrial Corn
Chapter 1 - The Plant: Corn's Conquest
Chapter 2 - The Farm
Chapter 3 - The Elevator
Chapter 4 - The Feedlot: Making Meat
Chapter 5 - The Processing Plant: Making Complex Foods
Chapter 6 - The Consumer: A Republic of Fat
Chapter 7 - The Meal: Fast Food
II Pastoral Grass
Chapter 8 - All Flesh is Grass
Chapter 9 - Big Organic
Chapter 10 - Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture
Chapter 11 - The Animals: Practicing Complexity
Chapter 12 - Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir
Chapter 13 - The Market: "Greetings from the Non-Barcode People"
Chapter 14 - The Meal: Grass-Fed
III Personal The Forest
Chapter 15 - The Forager
Chapter 16 - The Omnivore's Dilemma
Chapter 17 - The Ethics of Eating Animals
Chapter 18 - Hunting: The Meat
Chapter 19 - Gathering: The Fungi
Chapter 20 - The Perfect Meal
Acknowledgments
Sources
Index
Errata
"Forego" for "forgo" (page 311: "...we could choose to forego meat for moral reasons...").
"Forbear" for "forebear" (page 339: "...their domestic forbears...").
"Prosciutto" spelled with transposed vowels ("proscuitto") in at least two references (page 345 and page 353).
"Blanche" (a woman's name) for "blanch" (a cooking technique) and "kneed" (assaulted with a knee, past tense) for "knead" (manipulate bread dough, present tense), both on page 402.
Authors & Contributors
- Michael Pollan (Author)
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