by Michael Pollan

Penguin, 450 pp., $26.95

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

by Bill McKibben

Times Books, 261 pp., $25.00

Michael Pollan believes that America has a national eating disorder, and in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, he shows that it goes back a long way–at least to the early 1900s, when Dr. John Harvey Kellogg attracted crowds to his sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan. There the inmates endured all-grape diets and almost hourly enemas, yet despite the discomfort (or perhaps because of it) his quackery flourished and Kellogg soon found himself with competitors. Among them was Horace Fletcher, otherwise known as “the Great Masticator.” Fletcher recommended chewing each mouthful of food one hundred times. I still remember my mother instructing me in 1950s Australia to chew my food one hundred times on each side. Just how this doubling of the great masticator’s dictum occurred is unclear to me, but I can tell you that after the twentieth chew or thereabouts, most kinds of food were reduced to a bilious sludge.

Down the decades the food faddists have just kept coming, and today we seem to have more of them (even if they are less flamboyant) than ever before. Among the better known are the late Dr. Atkins with his low-carbohydrate diet and Dr. Sears with his Zone plan. Then there are the more obscure Dr. Brownell with the LEARN scheme and Dr. Ornish with a regime named after himself. Pollan argues that Americans are more susceptible to such fads because they lack a food tradition that embodies the wisdom of earlier generations. Maybe so, but faddish diets seem to be prospering everywhere, and the public has never been more confused, or more misled, about the simple matter of eating. Many of us, it seems, have more or less given up. A recent study found that one out of every five Canadians eats by selecting from a group of ten or fewer food types.

As intriguing as they are, Pollan does not overly concern himself with diet fads, for he has an altogether more weighty matter in his sights: the dysfunction of the entire American industrial food complex. The situation is a lot worse than most of us dare imagine, for Americans are some of the most specialized eaters on earth. At the base of the national food chain is a single species of grass–corn–and its growth, processing, and sale constitute a titanic industry which is focused on increasing profits rather than health and well-being.

In America, foods as diverse as Gatorade, Ring Dings, and hamburgers have their beginning with corn. Indeed, huge factories transform its kernels into an almost unimaginable array of compounds. To illustrate how pervasive corn’s influence is, Pollan gives us the example of the chicken nugget, which he says “piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn” (because the chickens are corn-fed), as does “the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget ‘fresh’ can all be derived from corn.”

So dominant has this giant grass become that of the 45,000-odd items in American supermarkets, more than one quarter contain corn. Disposable diapers, trash bags, toothpaste, charcoal briquettes, matches, batteries, and even the shine on the covers of magazines all contain corn. In America, all meat is also ultimately corn: chickens, turkeys, pigs, and even cows (which would be far healthier and happier eating grass) are forced into eating corn, as are, increasingly, carnivores such as salmon.

If you doubt the ubiquity of corn you can take a chemical test. It turns out that corn has a peculiar carbon structure which can be traced in everything that consumes it. Compare a hair sample from an American and a tortilla-eating Mexican and you’ll discover that the American contains a far larger proportion of corn-type carbon. “We North Americans look like corn chips with legs,” says one of the researchers who conducts such tests.

You might argue that there’s nothing wrong with eating such a corn-rich diet. But you are what you eat, and Pollan provides much graphic evidence that the American way of eating spreads illness, waste, and ecological devastation across the globe. As its title suggests, his book follows the makings–from farm to plate–of four very different meals. The first is a pure product of the industrial complex that feeds most of us–a McDonald’s meal eaten in a car. Next he examines an organic meal, then a meal prepared from ingredients grown on an ingenious farm called Polyface in the Shenandoah Valley. Finally Pollan relates the making of a meal made almost entirely of ingredients he himself harvests from the suburbs and hills of northern California, where he lives.

Pollan’s research into the origins of the McDonald’s meal takes him to the farm of George Naylor in Greene County, Iowa. Like his neighbors, George is slowly going broke growing corn for what he calls the “military-industrial complex,” and he is only able to stay on the land because of a salary earned away from the farm by his wife. You don’t have to look far to find the cause of this, for the more corn George grows, the faster he goes broke. That’s because in order to grow more corn you need more expensive fertilizer, special seed stock, and machinery, which farmers can ill afford. Yet because they often need the big paycheck, and because they are urged to do so by industry reps and government agencies, corn farmers continue to grow larger and larger crops. They all hope for a good price for corn, but because so much is being produced, improvements in the price never seem to arrive. Iowa State University estimates that it costs $2.50 to grow a bushel of Iowa corn, but when Pollan visited in October 2005 the grain elevators were paying farmers $1.45. The only reason the system survives is that the federal government gives farmers substantial subsidies. Federal payments “account for nearly half the income of the average Iowa corn farmer, and represent roughly a quarter of the $19 billion US taxpayers spend each year on payments to farmers.”

Not only is the industrial corn production system destroying farm families, it is destroying the farms themselves. The soil on Naylor’s farm is beautifully rich and two feet thick. What you can’t see, Pollan tells us, is the soil that’s no longer there. Originally there was four feet of soil, but intensive crop growing has destroyed half of that natural bounty. Only corn diseases, debt, and the wind (which has increased markedly since fences and trees were torn down to make way for more corn) seem to be prospering in the bleak Iowa landscape described by Pollan.

In order to follow the food chain, Pollan buys a steer–a nameless creature bearing only the number 534–and follows it from the Blair Ranch in South Dakota, where it was born, to the feedlot where it is fattened for slaughter. Despite its having been branded and castrated at the Blair Ranch, Pollan thinks that No. 534 might look back at its time there as the “good old days,” for its life on the feedlot is grim indeed.

Cows have not evolved to feed on corn. Nor are they suited to living in crowded conditions while standing up to their ankles in feces. In the feedlot, however, they have little choice. The corn diet induces indigestion, which must be treated with repeated courses of antibiotics, and the cows seem to be miserable or vacant a lot of the time. They are subjected to this regime because it makes them grow fast, and in times past they were even fed the offal from other slaughtered cows, which is how mad cow disease came into the food supply.

Pollan describes a Karmic cycle in which the poor health of the feedlotted cows is visited on their consumers. Because they are not allowed to eat grass, their meat is higher in dangerous fats and lower in good ones than that of cows leading a more natural life. And the abattoirs where they are slaughtered need to be absolutely fastidious about hygiene, because bacteria on their skins thrive in the crowded, fecal conditions, and could easily contaminate their meat. Despite all of this, grain-fed beef has a cachet in America, where it is preferred by many for its alleged tenderness. I’m often offered it with pride, even by up-market restaurants that don’t seem interested in serving meat from cows that have lived their life on the range. Having read Pollan’s book, I’m now ordering buffalo.

Corn of course is used for many purposes apart from feeding factory-farmed chickens, cattle, and pigs. High-fructose corn syrup, for example, has replaced sugar in many processed food and beverages, and is now, according to Pollan, “the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year.” But in trying to track down how such products are made, Pollan hits a dead end. The big corn millers–Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland–won’t let him into their factories, so he wasn’t allowed to see how the corn products Americans consume are the result of complicated chemical processing.

Reading Pollan’s book, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the food industry has confined many Americans to their own urban feedlots, in which they have grown obese, ill, and uncurious about the source or nutritional quality of their food. In this system, human appetites are simply another bottleneck to be overcome in the search for greater sales. Hence the “supersizing” now so prevalent at fast-food outlets. A segment of the American population, however, is making a break for food freedom. They can often be found haunting the organic section of the supermarket, and in his quest to understand how their food is produced, Pollan travels to the great California farms where most organic produce is grown.

In the 1970s the organic food movement was a local, small-scale affair which was established as an open act of rebellion, but those days are long gone. Today, organic farms are hard to distinguish at a glance from their nonorganic neighbors, and indeed they are often worked by the same crews of migrant laborers. It’s not all bad news, however, for organic methods are kinder to the soil, and they do not permit use of synthetic hormones and antibiotics. But still, organic food is subject to industrialization in ways that damage the environment. For example, it is often transported over vast distances, thereby burning much fossil fuel.

It’s only when Pollan arrives at Polyface Farm, in pursuit of his third meal, that we see a vision of production that seems miraculous in its capacity to nurture both us and the environment. The farm is owned by Joel Salatin, whose father purchased it in the 1960s when it was a run-down dairy farm full of erosion gullies. As a result of careful ecological sculpting, that land now produces 35,000 dozen eggs, 10,000 broiler hens, 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of hogs, 1,200 turkeys, and 1,000 rabbits every year. All this is achieved without artificial fertilizer, hormones, or antibiotics and, even more remarkably, Salatin has converted 450 of his 550 acres to forest! The birds and other creatures it harbors, and the woodchips it yields, all play vital parts in maintaining the productivity of the 100 acres of worked land.

The secret of Salatin’s astounding success is a deep understanding of ecology. Everything on the farm works with everything else to promote fertility, and the creatures all seem to lead fulfilling lives. The laying hens, for example, roost in “eggmobiles” that are moved around the farm, allowing them to feed on the maggots in cow pats and spread about their own nitrogen-rich fertilizer. The cows graze grass in a rotational pattern, sweetening the pasture, while the pigs root in the compost, helping to turn it over, aiding the compost’s fertility.

While at Polyface, Pollan slaughters chickens, an experience that causes him to investigate animal rights. He deplores the practices to which animals are subjected on factory farms, and condemns them on grounds of cruelty. Yet after seeing how the animals live at Polyface, and understanding how integral they are to the fertility of this marvelous farm, he decides that it would be better for the ecology, our human health, and for animals as a whole if most of us became eaters of sustainably produced meat. Many readers will doubtless ask whether vegetarianism is better still. Pollan tells us that even vegan lifestyles result in animal cruelty. Just think of the thousands of field mice shredded by harvesters, the woodchucks crushed in their burrows by tractors, and the songbirds poisoned by pesticides when farmers grow the wheat for our bread. Pollan’s message seems to be that to live we must kill, and the best we can do is both treat animals decently while they live and kill them humanely.

An important aspect of the success of Polyface Farm is that Joel Salatin believes that everything has its own scale. He doesn’t want a bigger farm or to grow more eggs (despite the fact that demand is high), because to do that would knock the entire enterprise out of balance. You need just so many chickens per cow on such a farm, and if the whole thing becomes too big, the farmer himself can’t give the attention that the entire complex system requires.

One of the most heartening things about the Salatin farm is that all of the produce is eaten locally, thus minimizing the impact on climate through reducing the burning of fossil fuels to transport it. And the produce is good. A chef who uses the farm’s produce told Pollan: “Oh, those beautiful eggs! The difference is night and day–the color and richness and fat content. There’s just no comparison. I always have to adjust my recipes for these eggs–you never need as many as they call for.”

Pollan is entirely converted by Salatin’s approach to food production, but he worries about how applicable it is to the big cities, so he decides to ask the farmer how he thinks New York might fit into the local food economy. Salatin’s answer is not much help: “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?” he replies.

Pollan’s final meal is both wonderfully comical and deeply revealing of human nature. He decides that it will be based on wild boar and mushrooms, despite the fact that he’s never hunted and his mother has imbued him with a deep dread of poisonous toadstools. Pollan’s description of hunting–the singleness of purpose, the drama, the “fog of war” that descends following the shot, and the stomach-churning task of “dressing” the carcass–is completely absorbing. In trying to sum up the kaleidoscope of emotion it released in him, he paraphrases Ortega y Gasset,[3] saying that “hunting offers us our last best chance to escape history and return to the state of nature.” He adds: “It’s even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked at myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that’s the word) to eating that pig, I have to say that there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu-eater. Yet part of me pities him, too.” Although the hunted boar, “a very large grayish sow”–part of “a large group of pigs, big ones and babies together”–supplies the most deeply satisfying meal of all, Pollan acknowledges it is a satisfaction that most people will not be able to have.

The question left hanging by Pollan–can we create a new and better food production system for Americans?–is explored in a very practical manner at the beginning of Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. McKibben, who lives in Vermont near Lake Champlain, conducts an experiment which he calls “the year of eating locally.” During the warmer months, McKibben explains, if you live in his area you’d be crazy to do anything but eat locally. The challenge comes, however, with the short, cold days of winter. As he tries to locate the resources he will need to survive, McKibben discovers wonderful people in his neighborhood, including a farmer who grows fifty varieties of potatoes on three acres, a bison wrangler, and even an emu farmer, who can supply part of his requirements.

Some essentials are missing. Oats once grew everywhere in the valley, but the industrialization of farming means that today none can be had in the region. By February, McKibben’s eleven-year-old daughter (a remarkably tolerant and even-tempered child, one suspects) was “using the words ‘icky’ and ‘disgusting’ fairly regularly, always in connection with root vegetables…. It is a little hard to imagine how people got through winter on the contents of their root cellars alone,” McKibben admits.

Can eating locally be done in the larger cities? McKibben finds lots of evidence that this is possible. A few hundred acres of wasteland known as the Intervale near the center of Burlington, Vermont, provides one example. When Will Rapp, who runs a catalog company, arrived in Burlington in 1980 the floodplain soil of the Intervale was buried under four or five feet of garbage. He formed a nonprofit foundation and leased two hundred acres of it, which he rented in smaller lots to people who wanted to start gardening. Today, those two hundred acres yield over half a million pounds of produce annually, and supply 7 or 8 percent of all the fresh food consumed in Burlington. The productivity of this plot, which is farmed sustainably, is truly astonishing. But could you feed Manhattan in this manner? “You could not; every place is different,” says McKibben. Knowing a few New Yorkers, however, I suspect that these words will be seen as more of a challenge than a verdict.

Deep Economy is about far more than food. At its heart is a marvelous exposition of Joel Salatin’s belief that everything has an appropriate scale. For McKibben, the appropriate scale for a sustainable and fulfilling life is the community. The dysfunction that comes with increasing scale is revealed adroitly when he investigates the impact of Wal-Mart upon the economic health of communities:

By now the sequence of events is depressingly clear: the big box store out by the interstate drains the life out of downtown, shuttering businesses left and right. In the few years when Wal-Mart was expanding fastest in Iowa, the state lost 555 grocery stores, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 161 variety shops, 158 women’s clothing stores and 116 pharmacies.

Summarizing the impact, McKibben says that while individuals may benefit from lower prices, their communities inevitably suffer, which eventually leads to a worse deal for all. This is seen clearly when we take account of the money the megastores suck out of the regions they operate in. A dollar spent in a local store stays in the town, while the same amount spent in Wal-Mart exits quickly. Studies from Great Britain show that £10 spent on a local food business is worth £25 to the local economy, but only £14 if spent at a supermarket. According to the study:

The farmer buys a drink at the local pub; the pub owner gets a car tune-up at the local mechanic; the mechanic brings a shirt to the local tailor; the tailor buys some bread at the local bakery; the baker buys wheat for bread and fruit for muffins from the local farmer. When these businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction.

It is not only the food business that prospers if our lives are lived at the right scale. McKibben provides a wonderful example of how the expansion of radio networks in America–at the expense of truly local radio stations–has cost communities dear. In the 1920s people perceived that radio had an important social function, and the rules reflected that. In 1928 the FCC ruled that “the commission is convinced that the interest of the broadcast listener is of superior importance to that of the broadcaster…. Such benefit as is derived by advertisers must be incidental and entirely secondary to the interests of the public.” Remarkably, there are still a few local radio stations–such as Vermont’s WDEV–that continue to reflect this. But for every such survivor there are a thousand that have been slain by the Rush Limbaughs of the world.

The offerings of local radio stations, in McKibben’s account, tend to reflect the interests of the community. They are characterized by a mix of music, both left- and right-leaning commentary, and items of local interest and importance. When a big flood hit Montpelier, Vermont, the owner of WDEV says, “we took all our sales staff and turned them into reporters.” As radio stations grow in size they lose both their diversity of offerings and this sense of service to the community, and instead many of them begin spouting a steady diet of right-wing rubbish. One suspects that were they confined to truly local radio, the likes of Rush Limbaugh would be more clearly seen as nothing but the offensive, bigoted buffoons that they are. If, that is, they could get anywhere near a microphone in the first place.

In one aspect of life after another McKibben shows us how globalization has destroyed communities and detracted from the quality of life of Americans. Lumber now comes from overexploited forests rather than carefully shepherded local woodlots. Our food travels 1,500 miles to reach us, and as we gather in celebration to eat it, globalization deprives us of further pleasures. I suspect that most older Americans can remember an uncle or aunt who sang at family weddings and get-togethers. Today, the pride they and their family took in such performances has been replaced by recorded music. It may be technically superior, but it lacks the heart and “community” of the old ways.

There is evidence that all of this dysfunction is leading to an epidemic of psychological depression in America. A study done in 1985 reveals that only 1.3 percent of Americans born in 1910 had suffered a major depressive episode in their lifetime–which is remarkable given the wars, economic crises, and change they experienced–but that 5.3 percent of those born after 1960 had experienced one. “Each succeeding cohort in each area had a higher rate of depression than cohorts before it. There were huge differences…suggesting a roughly ten-fold increase in risk for depression across generations.” Tellingly, the Old Order Amish do not exhibit such a trend, perhaps because their community is more intact.

Why has America so often given rise to the great, community-destroying corporations? McKibben argues that the unique view many Americans have of the Bible is revealing. “75 percent of American Christians think the saying ‘God helps those who help themselves’ can be found in the Bible,” he writes. While misunderstandings about the Bible are widespread (12 percent of Americans are confident that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife), this one is special. It was Benjamin Franklin, in fact, who came up with the saying, and it was meant to express the hyperindividualist vigor of the young, frontier America. In fact Franklin’s sentiments are markedly out of step with the Bible’s central teachings. McKibben (who was once a Sunday school teacher) tells us, “Every time Jesus tries to sum up his message, he falls back on the formula ‘Love your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.’ That is, he posits a life built around others.”

Thus do American values contribute to the feedlotting of their champions and true believers. But the American bureaucracy is also doing its part to keep its citizens well corralled. Both Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben have little but harsh words for the US Department of Agriculture, whose rules and regulations are tailored to give advantage to the big corporations, and make it exceedingly difficult for small-scale growers to get their produce to market.

With so much against them, the prospect that Americans can regain control of their food chain might seem poor. But readers of these two excellent books will surely perceive that the gate to the urban feedlot is now ajar, and that by following the sage advice of McKibben and Pollan they are free to move to better pastures. If they do so in numbers, then the process of healing their bodies, their communities, and their environment could begin.

Pollan is a gardener, a cook and an uncommonly graceful explainer of natural science; this is the book he was born to write. He walks us through four meals that delineate the battlefield of dinner. A McDonald’s meal in his car at 60mph leads into the disastrous monoculture of corn, which contains less energy than the fuel required to produce it: “It’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.” Pollan draws a straight line from agricultural subsidies to our obesity epidemic. (We’re “a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.”) And he visits the overcrowded feedlots and antibiotic-ridden factory farms that raised his cheeseburger: “Eating it, I had to remind myself there was an actual cow involved.”

At Whole Foods, Pollan wonders if “industrial organic” is an oxymoron. He coins the term “Supermarket Pastoral” to identify the seductive “literary form” used to imply a connection to the earth that Big Organic makes more tenuous every day. Such thoughts limit his enjoyment of the meal he buys. He works at an artisanal, organically perfect closed-loop farm in Virginia (with “cows eating grasses that had themselves eaten the sun”), and the dinner he later cooks involves a chicken he’s helped kill. “In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.” Finally, Pollan becomes a vegetarian just long enough to examine the reasoning of animal-rights activists (with perfect-pitch irony), then takes us along as he feeds off the land. As hunter/gatherer, he makes, at last, the richest, most satisfying meal.

Buford, a New Yorker writer and sometime cook, muscles his way into the kitchen of Mario Batali’s three-star Manhattan restaurant Babbo. He renders the place’s fiery intensity—and nuttiness—but finds cooking there “far removed from the real thing.” Batali is just the rock-star poster on the wall, while Buford brings an obsessive’s passion to exploring why making Italian food matters. He eats grouse with the over-the-top London restaurateur Marco Pierre White, a Batali mentor. He seeks out Batali’s teacher, Betta, in an Italian hill town, and isn’t allowed to touch ingredients for 10 days. Most memorably, he learns to handle meat from butcher Dario Cecchini (and his teacher, “the Maestro”) in Tuscany. Dario, Buford writes, didn’t want to be seen as a butcher, but as “an artist, whose subject was loss.” Near the book’s end, Buford comes to a similarly bittersweet conclusion: “Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go.”

The phrase “omnivore’s dilemma” was coined, thirty years ago, by the psychologist Paul Rozin. It names the problem faced by creatures — above all, human beings — who, at the opposite extreme from, say, pandas with their monotypic diet of bamboo, are willing and able to ingest, and obtain nutrition from, a very wide range of substances: from fungi to fish, chicory to chickens, and, these days, processed butane gas to what Pollan calls “the Linnaeus-defying Twinkie”, a synthetic, plastic-wrapped variation on a doughnut. Human omnivorousness, to be sure, has its blessings: utilitarian (when one source of food is threatened, people turn to another), aesthetic (the pleasures of the palate are almost unlimited) and social (pandas cannot come together to feast, or even dine). But there is a dark side to this ability of human beings — inveterate questioners as they are — to eat just about anything: it is “the anxiety of eating”, as Pollan puts it.

This anxiety may have lain dormant for many centuries, our distant ancestors having done a good job in sorting the edible and the inedible; but we are now witnessing “the return, with an almost atavistic revenge, of the omnivore’s dilemma”. Health scares, growing sensitivities to the treatment of animals and the natural environment, but above all else the sheer cornucopia of foods now readily available to people in developed countries, confront them, on a daily basis, with decisions to make and therefore to fret over. As such, the omnivore’s dilemma is only one dimension — albeit a peculiarly important one — of what the economic historian Avner Offer refers to in the title of The Challenge of Affluence (reviewed in the TLS on June 2). The sheer “abundance, through cheapness, variety, [and] novelty”, Offer writes, has produced a “shock of easy food availability” with which established “prudential strategies” have been unable to cope — one whose effect has been to make a “mockery of the rational consumer”. (The most salient failure of prudence is, simply, the overeating of all this new “easy food” — something that then generates a further level of angst.) According to Pollan, this renewed anxiety of eating comes at a bad time. It is not just that “prudential strategies” have failed to keep pace with the changing world of food. In addition, we have witnessed the atrophy of those “stable culinary traditions”, “that set of rules . . . we call a cuisine”, which in the past served “to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma”. As Aristotle would have observed, we are losing the shared virtues that are as crucial in the case of food as in that of sex, if people are rationally to govern their appetites. Sociological factors, including changes in lifestyles, working practices and family structures, help to explain this “gastro-anomy”, as one prescient social scientist dubbed it in 1980: but so too do innovations in the food industry itself, with its vested interest in weaning consumers off any conservative attachment to the ways of their elders. The resulting anxiety has familiar symptoms — anorexia, bulimia, faddish diets, serendipitous menus and a parasitic profession of “experts”, gurus and quacks who promise solutions so bewildering in their variety that our anxiety is only deepened. A more edifying symptom is the welcome appearance in recent years of books, with such titles or subtitles as Agri-Culture, Food in Society, and Eating and the Perfection of Our Nature, that are alert, not only to the central role of eating in a culture, but to the cultural, indeed spiritual, implications of the current revolution in the context of eating. The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an eloquent addition to this new genre.

Michael Pollan is not a writer easy to categorize. A Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at Berkeley, he is the prizewinning author of three earlier books, including Second Nature, a wise and witty work on the significance of gardening, and The Botany of Desire, an essay on the symbiotic relationship between people and plants. He writes clearly and engagingly, shifting styles as topic or rhetorical purpose demands — now genial and “folksy”, now hard-hitting and ironic, now poetic. Like its predecessors, his new book combines science (natural and social), personal anecdote, interviews with colourful informants, and philosophical reflection. In these respects, British readers might be reminded of Richard Mabey, whose concerns — especially in his Fencing Paradise — over mono-cultural farming, for example, or disingenuous “organic” hype, are shared by Pollan.

A good succinct characterization of the author is the one given on the dust cover by the owner of a San Francisco restaurant — “a journalist/philosopher”. The “/” in preference to an “and” is appropriate, for the journalist and the philosopher are hard to separate. Pollan is nothing if not an empiricist, committed to examining “the dinner question” through the “lens of personal experience” as much as through that of an ecologist or anthropologist, and unwilling to pass judgement on any food-related practice, such as the slaughter of animals, that he has not observed at first hand or even joined in. To this end, with his investigative journalist’s hat on, he traces, and sometimes participates in, the histories, from field, factory, or forest to the table, of the “four meals” referred to in his sub-title. The four meals are a McDonald’s take-away, two organic-chicken dinners (“organic industrial” and local, “grass-fed”, respectively), and a banquet of wild pig, mushrooms and other ingredients hunted or gathered by the author himself. Researching the histories of these meals takes Pollan from the cornbelt of Iowa to the Shenandoah Valley to the Californian Sierra, and acquaints him with a cast of characters who might variously have sprung from the pages of John Steinbeck, Thomas Jefferson, or Ken Kesey.

Gastronomically, and by any other measure that Pollan allows, there is a rank order among the four meals. If the wild-pig feast is his “perfect meal”, a Thanksgiving, then the cheeseburger gobbled down in his car is “a sort of Thanksgiving in reverse”, a perverse homage to “industrial” food. Preferable to this is mass-produced organic food — “organic industrial” — even though, its degree of freedom from chemicals and fertilizers apart, such food betrays both the agricultural ideals of the pioneers of the organic movement, and the received public image of organic produce. The best, and more practicable, alternative to hunted-and-gathered food is produce bought from small-scale, local farmers who endeavour to keep alive those ideals and “the old pastoral idea”.

Pollan’s rank order of meals corresponds to several others — to that, for a start, of the lives (and deaths) of the animals which have provided the meals. Here we ascend from the nightmare world of “industrial” CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and broiler factories — places that surely warrant J. M. Coetzee’s reference to “a crime of stupendous proportions” against animals — to the forest in which the pigs led full and free lives until being dispatched by shooters. (Although Pollan is himself “embarrassed” by his occasional lapses into the machismo “hunter porn” of Hemingway and other rhapsodists, his admittedly ambivalent enthusiasm for this practice could have been more constrained. One would never guess from his account, for example, that the pig he shoots might be a mother of suckling piglets.) As for the chickens Pollan eats, the life of “Rosie”, the “organic industrial” one, is judged to have been little better in quality than that of its anonymous “industrial” cousins destined to become “McNuggets”, and distinctly less healthy and happy than that of the grass-fed ones he takes away from the small Virginian farm on which he worked for several weeks.

As Pollan’s four menus demonstrate, he is not a vegetarian. In his usual empiricist spirit, and in response to the challenge of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, Pollan did abstain from meat for a period in order to judge whether “in good conscience” he could continue to eat it. He found that he could, indeed that he should. In the terminology of the moral philosopher R. M. Hare, Pollan is a “demi-vegetarian” — a moderate and selective meat-eater who, by insisting on free-range, organic, local, etc, products, has more of an impact on animal welfare, it is argued, than out-and-out vegetarians, whom producers and suppliers have already discounted for. The argument is a serious one, even if it cuts little ice with people whose objections to eating meat go beyond utilitarian ones — those, for example, whose sense of community with animals precludes so blatant a use of them as turning them into lunch. Pollan, whose genuine regard for animals is not in question, protests too much, I feel, when he unfairly labels such abstainers “parochial” and “sentimental”.

Animal welfare is not the only reason advanced for demi-vegetarianism. “It is doubtful”, Pollan writes, “that you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production”. Hence, “if our concern is for the health of nature”, eating animals that would otherwise disappear from the fields “may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do”. The health of the environment is a main theme in Pollan’s book, and his rank order of meals corresponds to an order of environmental impact, from the devastating to the benign. Worst, naturally, is the impact of “industrial” food production, whose gas-guzzling, in such processes as nitrogen-fertilizer “fixing”, accounts for 20 per cent of American petroleum consumption, and which, to boot, has been responsible for transforming biologically diverse landscapes into barely sustainable “monoscapes”. In these respects, “organic industrial” is only marginally better, with both its raw materials and finished products often being transported thousands of costly miles. By contrast, local, pastoral organic production of the kind witnessed by Pollan uses little fossil fuel and encourages a “synergistic ballet” of animals, soils, plants and forest.

Repair to environmental damage, like that to our damaged health, is among the many “hidden costs” of the prevailing American, and indeed British, way of eating which confound the boast that industrial processes have at least delivered cheap food. Pollan is anyway, and rightly, puzzled that something as “important to . . . our well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price”. Here, I suspect, we have an example of Offer’s “prudential strategies” that have failed to respond to “the challenge of affluence”. In less affluent times, when by necessity a high percentage of people’s expenditure went on food, pennies had to be counted at the local store or in the marketplace: these are still being counted in a manner that those spent on DVDs or holidays abroad are not — despite the fact that, in the United States at least, only 10 per cent of disposable income is now spent on food.

“Hidden costs”, in turn, are only one aspect of the lack of transparency or visibility that is Pollan’s most general complaint against our contemporary culture of food. Reflecting on why the wild-pig dinner was “the perfect meal”, he realizes that what he prized most was “the almost perfect transparency of this meal”, due mainly to “the brevity and simplicity of the food chain that linked it to the wider world”. The McNugget eater, by contrast, cannot trace the aetiology of that substance, since “industrial eating . . . obscures all . . . relationships and connections” to land, animals and raw materials. The inside of the McNugget cannot, for example, be linked to a particular chicken: for it is stuff that exemplifies what food scientists call “appropriationism” or “substitutionism” — “the reduction”, as the authors of Food in Society, Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler, put it, “of agricultural products to simple industrial inputs” such as fats and carbohydrates, which are reconstituted, with the help of chemicals, into “fabricated” items sold in the supermarket or fast-food outlet. Things are not much more transparent for the consumers of “organic industrial”, victims of the disingenuous literature (“Supermarket Pastoral”), fake evocation of a Jeffersonian idyll, which typically adorns the packets or boxes they put in their trolleys.

It is Pollan’s faith that greater visibility — whether literal (glass-walled abattoirs) or figurative (coming clean on “hidden costs”) — would lead to significant reform of the American way of eating. In particular, exposés of CAFOs and other industrial processes, would induce “disgust, and disgust’s boon companion, shame”. Pollan is perhaps over-optimistic: as he himself is aware, much of the consumer’s ignorance is surely a willed ignorance, resistant to education. Only look! — at what you’re eating, and how it was produced — is Pollan’s repeated refrain. But making visible is no guarantee that people will look at, rather than look away.

At certain points, moreover, the author recognizes that just looking is insufficient. In addition, we “require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world”. Crucially, this “different” ethics is not the kind called for by pioneers of Environmental Ethics, such as Aldo Leopold, for theirs was a concern, essentially, with nature as wilderness, as “The Other” to human culture. What Pollan envisages, by contrast, is an ethics to guide our relationships with a humanized natural world, with the environments and creatures that our cultural practices — eating included — regularly engage with. As he provocatively asked in Second Nature, “What if now, instead of to the wilderness, we were to look to the garden for the making of a new ethic?”. Human beings, wrote E. O. Wilson in Biophilia, are “suspended between the two antipodal ideas of nature and machine, forest and city, the natural and the artifactual”. Whether or not this is “the result of natural selection”, the suspension is surely real — and dangerous. For, absorbed in how to treat our fellows in the city, and how to protect distant rainforests and their creatures, little space remains, between the antipodes, for moral attention to our relationships to farmland, domesticated animals, and much else that straddles the natural/artefactual divide. It is Michael Pollan’s achievement, in his several writings, that — like Wilson and Mabey — he widens this space. And I doubt that there is a book which succeeds more than The Omnivore’s Dilemma — with its richness of information, eloquence of address, and integrity of moral purpose — in rendering visible, and presenting for a “different” style of ethical reflection, that “profound engagement” with our world which eating represents.

Whole Foods makes a large dent in my pocketbook that I rationalize by saying I’m supporting family farms and putting my money where my mouth is about agricultural reform and organics. Very righteous of me, I’m sure. But true culinary sainthood arrives when I make a pot of chili with the heirloom tomatoes frozen from my garden last summer, or pull a few green spring onions for a dinner salad. I’ve even been known to fry up some “dandelion fritters” from our yard, in which the yellow flowers are a star attraction. (We’re on shaky terms with some of our suburban neighbors.) This, I think, is eating at its best–fresh, local, and organic.

When I began reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan, I realized I had some rethinking to do. In this doorstopper of a book, Pollan, a longtime contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and now a professor of journalism at University of California in Berkley, traces the path of four meals through their various systems: organic food, alternative food, industrial food (such as fast food), and food we forage for ourselves. Each system exploration results in a meal: cheap fast-food take-out from McDonalds eaten in the car; a pricey repast from Whole Foods consumed at the dinner table; a grilled chicken and a chocolate souffle made from sustainable farm animals and local ingredients; and a meal he foraged and hunted and ate with some help from friends, right down to mushrooms and wild pig.

Pollan isn’t new to writing about food and environmental ethics. His book career began with Second Nature, a classic on the challenge of making a garden and attempting to live in harmony with creation; it’s a book I re-read every spring. His engrossing third book, The Botany of Desire, traces the co-evolution of society with four plants (tulips, apples, potatoes, and marijuana). In all of his books, including this one, Pollan brings lucid and rich prose to the table, an enthusiasm for his topic, interesting anecdotes, a journalist’s passion for research, an ability to poke fun at himself, and an appreciation for historical context.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan tackles some daunting questions. What ethics are involved in our food choices? What impact do they have on the environment? And who or what are we subsidizing with our food choices?

This is not Fast Food Nation; Pollan tends to be more thoughtful than reactive, and he takes things far beyond the golden arches and having it your way. In his first section, devoted to convenience food, he traces much of the cheap food America eats (and the plight of American agriculture) to the super-abundance and government subsidizing of corn. His research is startling. Corn has found its way into a large percentage of the foods we eat: canned fruit, mayonnaise, vitamins, and cake mixes just for starters, raising a myriad of questions. How could a McDonald’s chicken nugget be composed of 38 ingredients, 13 derived from corn? What does it mean to eat beef, chicken, or even salmon largely raised on corn?

Pollan shows that corn-fed animals and fish don’t have the same nutritional value as grass-fed animals; farmed salmon, for example, do not have the same omega-3 levels as their wild counterparts. By changing the diet of the animals we raise, we are changing ourselves. And it only takes a look at the soaring obesity rates to realize it is not for the better.

But the two portions of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that I found most engaging explored the organic food industry (an oxymoron in itself) and sustainable farming. In the segment on sustainable agriculture (which he comes closest to idealizing of any of the four food systems), Pollan lauds a small Christian operation called Polyface Farms in Virginia as a model of what agriculture can aspire to. By using a more holistic, humane approach to land use and consuming locally and seasonally, rather than globally, sustainable farming seems to solve many of the problems created by industrial agriculture. Good reading, although many will wonder if it’s viable on a large scale. To function on an ongoing basis, this sort of agriculture requires a heart-and-mind change on the part of the consumer. No small thing.

When Pollan examines the organic grocery business “Big Organic” he had me from the first page. What does organic really mean? With Wal-mart’s recent announcement that it’s jumping into the organic foods world, we need to know. And if I’m justifying my budget-busting trips to Whole Foods in the name of God, small-farming, and sustainable agriculture, I don’t want to be hoodwinked.

Pollan traces the organic foods movement back to the writings of Sir Albert Howard, whose 1940 Testament informed Rodale’s magazine Organic Gardening and Farming and the writings of Wendell Berry (who is quoted liberally through Pollan’s book). Howard had the arresting idea that we need to treat “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.” With this in mind, Pollan takes a deeper look at where the food from places such as Whole Foods now comes from. He also looks at such oddities as “organic microwavable TV dinners” and the article by nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow, “Can an Organic Twinkie Be Certified?” (The answer is yes.) This is journalism at its best.

Then Pollan, a master wordsmith, takes on the genre he calls Supermarket Pastoral, “a most seductive literary form, beguiling enough to survive in the face of a great many discomfiting facts.” Why so? “I suspect ” it gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for safe food, but for a connection to the earth and to the handful of domesticated creatures we’ve long depended on. Whole Foods understands all this better than we do.” What about dairy farms where cows have “access to pasture?” What exactly is “pasture?’ and what is “access?” What is a “free-range chicken?” (The term, Pollan shows through a fascinating trip through a poultry house, is largely a joke, an empty conceit.)

Petroleum is another problem. What about the ethics of trucking “organically grown asparagus from Argentina” to America’s suburbs in January? What are the economics of fuel and the cost to the people of Argentina, whose land is feeding Americans? The food industry, Pollan points out, burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States. And most “organic farming” is done on organic industrial farms, a contradiction in terms that Pollan explores at length in the fields of California. “Is there anything wrong with this picture? I’m not sure, frankly,” Pollan concludes. What he finds is “a much greener machine, but a machine, nonetheless.”

I won’t feel nearly so virtuous the next time I shop at Whole Foods.

Foraging is the subject of the last section of the book, which owes most of its charm to Pollan’s willingness to learn to hunt wild game, something he’s fairly squeamish about. Vegetarians may take issue with some of Pollan’s conclusions (although his arguments with Peter Singer’s animal ethics are difficult to refute). Some of his writing as he forages for mushrooms is particularly lyrical.

So what do we do with this information? How shall we then eat? If I’m honest, I’ll confess that I probably won’t give up my occasional bag of McDonald’s French fries, and I’ll still cruise the aisles at Whole Foods, albeit less sentimentally. How do I redeem this?

Perhaps, as Pollan writes, the best way to fight industrial eating is to recall people to the superior pleasure of traditional foods enjoyed communally. Then, our eating contributes to the survival of landscapes and species and traditional foods that would otherwise succumb to the “one world, one taste” fast food ideal. Having a diversified food economy where consumers have access to thriving alternative food sources, he concludes, allows us to withstand shocks to the system: outbreaks of mad cow disease, petroleum running out, pesticides that quit working.

It’s possible to live with contradictions in how we eat, Pollan believes, but important that we face up to our compromises. For me, this means planting a little more garden to offset my occasional golden arches French fry consumption; thinking more seriously about taking out that local farm share at the cooperative down the road; and inviting friends over for “slow” dinners and conversation more often. In a fallen world, we take baby steps on the journey back to wholeness.

Ever since the brilliant Stephen Jay Gould began writing layman-friendly natural history books like The Flamingo’s Smile, Dinosaur in a Haystack and The Panda’s Thumb, publishers have been printing and selling “science-lite”? books with similarly clever and catchy titles. A few are worth reading; most are not. My worry is that with a title like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan’s groundbreaking book might be dismissed as just another pseudo-science meets literature stab at The New York Times bestseller list. That would be a pity.

The full title of Pollan’s new work is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. And the omnivore’s dilemma is this: What should we have for dinner? I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets since the very first sentence of the introduction to Pollan’s book poses this exact question: What should we have for dinner? The answer to that deceptively simple question, however, takes up the next few hundred pages of this lengthy but fascinating and thought-provoking super-size journey into food and the American diet.

One of Pollan’s missions in The Omnivore’s Dilemma is to attempt to understand how deciding what to eat could have become so complicated. He writes that the “native wisdom”? we once had regarding food choices “has been replaced by confusion and anxiety.”? Pollan asks, “How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?”? The answer, in part, is that melting pot America has “never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us.”? And in Pollan’s estimation, this lack of “steadying”? food cultures leaves consumers “vulnerable to the blandishments of the food scientist and the marketer.”? Thus, we tend to find ourselves bewildered at the range of choices available in the local supermarket.

Provoked partly by the apparent goofiness of the recent fad of Americans to eschew bread (a staple of the human diet for thousands of years) in favor of Atkins’ meals, Pollan decides to tackle the American meal from the very beginning. He traces, for instance, the Chicken McNugget”"a prime example of what the author calls “industrial eating”?”"to its very source in the food chain, attempting to untangle the “relationships and connections”? that culminate in a chicken-like piece of industrialized foodstuff being served to us via a take-out window in a paper bag. How far is the Chicken McNugget from the actual chicken (Gallus gallus)? You might not want to know.

Unlike Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation though, Pollan isn’t an activist. Tracing four different meals, beginning with a McDonald’s lunch, to their origins, Pollan’s journey is more that of the anthropologist or archaeologist. Dr. Andrew Weil says Pollan has “the skill of a professional detective”? in exploring “the worlds of industrial farming, organic and sustainable agriculture, and even hunting and gathering.”? In the process, he discovers, among other things, that corn accounts for the majority of what Americans eat. The burger at McDonald’s comes from a corn-eating steer, which also becomes frying oil and sweeteners for things like milkshakes, desserts and sodas. In his deconstruction of what a McDonald’s meal is really made of and where it comes from, we learn that one-third of the 38 ingredients in a Chicken McNugget comes from corn and that of the approximate 45,000 food items in a typical supermarket, more than 25 percent contain corn.

Maybe that doesn’t seem so important, until you realize (thanks again to Pollan’s rigorous research) that it takes the equivalent of about a third of a gallon of oil to grow each industrialized bushel of corn. That oil then finds its way back into our ecosystems: running into rivers and streams, evaporating into acid rain, seeping into water tables and so on. More than any book I’ve read since being moved by Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet back in high school, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, with its clear-headed reasoning and lack of pedantics, really makes the reader think about what’s for dinner. And care.

Luckily, the solution isn’t necessarily to relocate to New Guinea and adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It’s true that Pollan’s book raises critical political, economic, nutritional and moral questions about how and what we eat. But the author finds encouragement in places like local farmers markets, organic farming, sustainable agriculture and the growing “slow-food”? movement. And, in the end, this sometimes terrifying and always eye-opening book is a hopeful one. I think Alice Waters, the owner of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant sums The Omnivore’s Dilemma and its author up best when she says of Pollan, “He’s the kind of teacher we probably all wish we had: one who triggers the little explosions of insight that change the way we eat and the way we live.”?

I like to shop at Whole Foods. Sometimes I go there just to see the variety and the colors: what new kinds of chard and kale will they have today? The employees–”team members,” as they’re called–seem reasonably happy and are often quite knowledgeable about the things they sell. A Wellesley graduate is one of the company’s prize exhibits. “I just hang on to the fact that my job is good in some larger sense,” she says on the corporate Web site. “If people buy the sprouts, they’re eating healthier foods, the farmer is doing well, and it’s good for the planet because they’re grown organically.” Since 1998, Whole Foods has ranked high among Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For in America.” Although the company is as ferociously anti-union as Wal-Mart–John Mackey, the volubly libertarian founder and C.E.O., has called unions “parasites”–Whole Foods limits the compensation of its highest-paid executives to no more than fourteen times the employee salary average, and it likes to talk about how it rewards team members’ initiative. Mackey once told Forbes, “Business is simple. Management’s job is to take care of employees. The employees’ job is to take care of the customers. Happy customers take care of the shareholders. It’s a virtuous circle.” Whole Foods gives people what they want, or, at least, the increasing number of people who don’t blanch at the prices, which have earned the company the presumably affectionate nickname “Whole Paycheck”: $3.98 for a five-ounce plastic box of Earthbound Farm organic baby arugula salad; $2.98 for six and three-quarter ounces of intricately packaged Earthbound Farm organic “mini-peeled carrots with Ranch Dip.” For the price of the fixings for a modest family dinner at Whole Foods, you could just about afford one share of its stock. The motto of the great English supermarket pioneer Sir Jack Cohen was “Pile it high; sell it cheap.” Whole Foods has shown the rewards that can flow from the opposite policy.

Whole Foods is only the most visible face of the newly confident organic industry. In February, Consumer Reports announced that sales of organic products had gone up twenty per cent a year during the past decade, reaching $15 billion in 2004–out of a total U.S. food system worth a trillion dollars–and that nearly two-thirds of American consumers bought organic foods last year, paying, on average, a fifty-per-cent premium over conventional foods. In March, Wal-Mart made the remarkable announcement that it would double its organic-grocery offerings immediately. Wal-Mart is betting that, if it follows its usual practice of squeezing suppliers and cutting prices ruthlessly, the taste for organic foods will continue to spread across the social landscape. “We don’t think you should have to have a lot of money to feed your family organic foods,” its C.E.O. said at the most recent annual general meeting.

But icons beget iconoclasm, and, just when the organic business has attained cultural legitimacy, a market has opened up for debunkers. “Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew” (Harcourt; $25), by the business writer Samuel Fromartz, is a cultural, political, and economic history of the modern organic industry that is markedly critical of the distance that “Big Organic” has come from its anti-industrial roots in the early twentieth century. “Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California” (California; $21.95), by the geographer Julie Guthman, is a meticulous academic study of the institutional dynamics of the state’s organic agriculture and asserts that organic agriculture, far from escaping the logic of capitalism, has wholly embraced it. And Michael Pollan’s outstanding “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” (Penguin; $26.95) is a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our current eating habits. Pollan undertakes a pilgrim’s progress along modern food chains, setting standards for ethical eating which the industrial approach of Whole Foods and its suppliers fails to satisfy.

Such criticisms reflect growing discontent among many veterans of the organic movement. As one consumer advocate told Pollan, “Organic is becoming what we hoped it would be an alternative to.” This disillusionment is fuelled by questions about quality, sustainability, and business ethics–but it is also, crucially, a matter of ideology and morality. For many who participated in the early phase of organic farming, its subsequent history is a story of paradise lost–or, worse, sold–in which cherished ideals have simply become part of the sales pitch. According to the Web site of Earthbound Farm, a major supplier of Whole Foods, eating organic is an almost spiritual quest: “We honor the fragile complexity of our ecosystem, the health of those who work the land, and the long-term well-being of customers who enjoy our harvest. . . . Organic farming encourages an abundance of species living in balanced, harmonious ecosystems.” This is late-modern georgic in its ripest vein. Where Virgil asked, “What makes the cornfield smile?,” Earthbound Farm’s Web site has the answer: the use of “earth-friendly methods to grow healthful crops without relying on chemical pesticides or using synthetic fertilizers.” But the reality is no idyll.

The plastic package of Earthbound Farm baby arugula in Whole Foods was grown without synthetic fertilizers; no toxic pesticides or fumigants were used to control insect predators; no herbicides were applied to deal with weeds; no genes from other species were introduced into its genome to increase yield or pest resistance; no irradiation was used to extend its shelf life. It complies with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program, a set of standards that came into full effect in 2002 to regulate the commercial use of the word “organic.” So what’s the problem?

It all depends on what you think you’re buying when you buy organic. If the word conjures up the image of a small, family-owned, local operation, you may be disappointed. Like Whole Foods, Earthbound Farm is a very big business. Earthbound’s founders, Drew and Myra Goodman, Manhattanites who went to college in the Bay Area, and then started a two-and-a-half-acre raspberry-and-baby-greens farm near Carmel to produce food they “felt good about,” are now the nation’s largest grower of organic produce, with revenues for this year projected at more than $450 million. Their greens, including the arugula, are produced on giant farms in six different counties in California, two in Arizona, one in Colorado, and in three Mexican states. Earthbound grows more than seventy per cent of all the organic lettuce sold in America; big organic retailers like Whole Foods require big organic suppliers. (Earthbound actually dropped the “organic” specification when it started its mass-distribution program, in 1993–even though the stuff was organic–because its first client, Costco, thought it might put customers off.) By 2004, Earthbound was farming twenty-six thousand acres; its production plants in California and Arizona total four hundred thousand square feet, and its products are available in supermarkets in every state of the Union. The Carmel Valley farm stand is still there, largely for public-relations purposes, and is as much an icon of California’s entrepreneurial roots as the Hewlett-Packard garage in downtown Palo Alto.

Success is not necessarily a sin, of course, and, for many people, buying organic is a way of being environmentally sensitive. Earthbound notes that its farming techniques annually obviate the use of more than a quarter of a million pounds of toxic chemical pesticides and almost 8.5 million pounds of synthetic fertilizers, which saves 1.4 million gallons of the petroleum needed to produce those chemicals. Their tractors even use biodiesel fuel.

Yet the net benefit of all this to the planet is hard to assess. Michael Pollan, who thinks that we ought to take both a wider and a deeper view of the social, economic, and physical chains that deliver food to fork, cites a Cornell scientist’s estimate that growing, processing, and shipping one calorie’s worth of arugula to the East Coast costs fifty-seven calories of fossil fuel. The growing of the arugula is indeed organic, but almost everything else is late-capitalist business as usual. Earthbound’s compost is trucked in; the salad-green farms are models of West Coast monoculture, laser-levelled fields facilitating awesomely efficient mechanical harvesting; and the whole supply chain from California to Manhattan is only four per cent less gluttonous a consumer of fossil fuel than that of a conventionally grown head of iceberg lettuce–though Earthbound plants trees to offset some of its carbon footprint. “Organic,” then, isn’t necessarily “local,” and neither “organic” nor “local” is necessarily “sustainable.”

Earthbound and other large-scale organic growers have embraced not only the logic of capitalism but the specific logic of California agribusiness. Julie Guthman’s book shows how, ever since the gold rush, the state’s growers have aimed at maximizing monetary yield per acre. First, it was wheat to feed the influx of gold miners and those dependent on the mining industry; then, after railways and refrigerated cars enabled the delivery of shining fresh produce across the country, it was orchard fruit. Later still, tract housing and mini-malls proved more profitable, which is why you’ll have a hard time finding orange groves in Orange County. Guthman writes that big, concentrated, high-value organic agriculture in California is “the legacy of the state’s own style of agrarian capitalism.” You saw this style in action when, in 1989, a “60 Minutes” exposé about residues of the carcinogenic pesticide Alar found on apples caused a consumer stampede to the organic-produce bins. “Don’t panic, buy organic,” was the mantra, and growers responded by borrowing heavily to expand their organic enterprises. When the scare subsided, supply outstripped demand, and, in the inevitable shakeout, some small-scale organic farmers had to sell out to larger players in the food industry. Washington State’s Cascadian Farm was one such. Its founder, a “onetime hippie” named Gene Kahn, sold a majority holding to Welch’s, and now it is a division of the $17.8 billion giant General Mills. He hasn’t the least regret: “We’re part of the food industry now.” The investors bankrolling Big Organic have no reason to fear the vestigial hippie rhetoric: it’s not so much a counterculture as a bean-counter culture.

According to Samuel Fromartz, ninety per cent of “frequent” organic buyers think they’re buying better “health and nutrition.” They may be right. If, for any reason, you don’t want the slightest pesticide residue in your salad, or you want to insure that there are no traces of recombinant bovine somatotropin hormone (rbST) in your children’s milk, you’re better off spending the extra money for organically produced food. But scientific evidence for the risks of such residues is iffy, as it is, too, for the benefits of the micro-nutrients that are said to be more plentiful in an organic carrot than in its conventional equivalent.

Other people are buying taste, but there’s little you can say about other people’s taste in carrots and not much more you can intelligibly articulate about your own. The taste of an heirloom carrot bought five years ago from the Chino family farm in Rancho Santa Fe, California, sticks indelibly in my memory, though at the time I hadn’t any idea whether artificial fertilizers or pesticides had been applied to it. (I later learned that they had not.) For many fruits and vegetables, freshness, weed control, and the variety grown may be far more important to taste than whether the soil in which they were grown was dosed with ammonium nitrate. Pollan did his own taste test by shopping at Whole Foods for an all-organic meal: everything was pretty good, except for the six-dollar bunch of organic asparagus, which had been grown in Argentina, air-freighted six thousand miles to the States, and immured for a week in the distribution chain. Pollan shouldn’t have been surprised that it tasted like “cardboard.”

The twentieth-century origins of the organic movement can be traced to the writings of the English agronomist Sir Albert Howard, particularly his 1940 book “An Agricultural Testament.” Howard was a critic of the rise of scientific agriculture. In the mid-nineteenth century, following the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig, it was thought that all plants really needed from the soil was the correct quantities and proportions of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium: the N-P-K ratios that you see on bags of garden fertilizer. For many crops, it is the availability of nitrogen that limits growth. Legumes apart, plants cannot extract nitrogen directly from the practically unlimited stores of the gas in the atmosphere, so farmers in the nineteenth century routinely enhanced soil fertility using animal manures, guano, or mined nitrates. But, just before the First World War, the German chemist Fritz Haber and the industrialist Carl Bosch devised a way of synthesizing ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen. From there, the commercial production of enormous quantities of nitrogenous fertilizers was a relatively easy matter. The result was a technological revolution in agriculture.

But Howard had worked in India as “Imperial Economic Botanist” to the government of the Raj at Pusa, and his experiences there convinced him that traditional Indian farming techniques were in many respects superior to those of the modern West. Howard was a pragmatist–the criterion of agricultural success was what worked–but he was also a holist and a taker of the long view. The health of the soil, the health of what grew in it, and the health of those who ate what grew in it were “one great subject.” To reduce this intricacy to a simple set of chemical inputs, as Liebig’s followers did, was reductionist science at its worst. Soils treated this way would ultimately collapse, and so would the societies that abused them: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women,” racked with disease and physically stunted. You could indeed get short-term boosts in yield through the generous application of synthetic fertilizers, but only by robbing future generations of their patrimony. Soil, Howard wrote, is “the capital of the nations which is real, permanent, and independent of everything except a market for the products of farming.” We have no choice but to go “back to nature” and to “safeguard the land of the Empire from the operations of finance.” The “supremacy of the West” depends upon it.

Howard’s ideas reached America largely through J. I. Rodale’s magazine Organic Gardening and Farming, and, later, through a widely read essay by Wendell Berry in “The Last Whole Earth Catalogue.” The organic movement that sprang up in America during the postwar years, manured by the enthusiasm of both the hippies and their New Age successors, supplemented Howard’s ideas of soil health with the imperative that the scale should be small and the length of the food chain from farm to consumer short. You were supposed to know who it was that produced your food, and to participate in a network of trust in familiar people and transparent agricultural practices. A former nutritionist at Columbia, who went on to grow produce upstate, recalls, “When we said organic, we meant local. We meant healthful. We meant being true to the ecologies of regions. We meant mutually respectful growers and eaters. We meant social justice and equality.”

There is no way to make food choices without making moral choices as well, and anthropologists have had much to say about the inevitable link between what’s good to eat and what’s good to think. Decisions about how we want our food produced and delivered are decisions about what counts as social virtue. One of the founding texts of modern social theory, Émile Durkheim’s “The Division of Labor in Society,” drew a distinction between what he called mechanical and organic solidarity. In societies characterized by mechanical solidarity, each person knew pretty much what every other person did and each social unit encompassed pretty much all the functions it needed in order to survive. Mechanical solidarity, in Durkheim’s scheme, was largely a premodern form. By contrast, organic solidarity flowed from the division of labor. Individuals depended upon one another for the performance of specialized tasks, and, as modernity proceeded, the networks of dependence that bound them together became increasingly anonymous. You didn’t know who grew the food at the end of your fork, or, indeed, who made the fork. But, then, the original English sense of “organ” was an instrument or a machine made up of interdependent specialized parts, as in the musical pipe organ. The application to living things came only later, by way of analogy with machines; the eye, for example, is the “organ of seeing.” And so, by semantic inversion, champions of organic farming actually seek virtue not in organic but in mechanical solidarity.

The quest for the shortest possible chain between producer and consumer is the narrative dynamic of Michael Pollan’s book, which is cleverly structured around four meals, each representing a different network of relations between producers, eaters, and the environment, and each an attempt at greater virtue than the last. Pollan’s first meal is fast food, and he follows a burger back to vast monocultural industrial blocs of Iowan corn, planted by G.P.S.-guided tractors and dosed with tons of synthetic fertilizer, whose massive runoff into the Mississippi River–as much as 1.5 million tons of nitrogen a year–winds up feeding algal blooms and depleting the oxygen needed by other forms of life in the Gulf of Mexico. Pollan then follows the corn to enormous feedlots in Kansas, where a heifer that he bought in South Dakota is speed-fattened–fourteen pounds of corn for each pound of edible beef–for which its naturally grass-processing rumen was not designed, requiring it to be dosed with antibiotics, which breed resistant strains of bacteria. Pollan would have liked to follow his heifer through the industrial slaughterhouse, but the giant beef-packing company was too canny to let him in, and so we are spared the stomach-churning details, which, in any case, were minutely related a few years ago in Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation.” Pollan also follows the American mountains of industrial corn into factories, where the wonders of food technology transform it into the now ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, which sweetens the soda that, consumed in super-sized quantities across the nation, contributes to the current epidemic of type 2 diabetes. All very bad things.

The second meal is the Big Organic one that he bought at his local Whole Foods store in California, featuring an “organic” chicken whose “free-range” label was authorized by U.S.D.A. statutes, but which actually shared a shed with twenty thousand other genetically identical birds. Two small doors in the shed opened onto a patch of grass, but they remained shut until the birds were five or six weeks old, and two weeks later Pollan’s “free range” chicken was a $2.99-a-pound package in his local Whole Foods. This meal was better–the corn-and-soybean chicken feed was certified organic and didn’t contain antibiotics–but still not perfect. Pollan’s third meal was even more virtuous. After spending several weeks doing heavy lifting on a polycultural, sustainable smallholding in the Shenandoah Valley, Pollan cooked a meal wholly made up of ingredients that he himself had a hand in producing: eggs from (genuinely) free-range, grub-eating hens, corn grown with compost from those happy birds, and, finally, a chicken whose throat he had slit himself. Very good, indeed–and no nitrogenous runoff, and no massive military machine to protect America’s supplies of Middle East oil and the natural gas needed to make the synthetic fertilizer.

Finally, Pollan decides to eat a meal–”the perfect meal”–for which he had almost total personal responsibility: wild morels foraged in the Sierra foothills, the braised loin and leg of a wild pig he had shot himself in Sonoma County, a chamomile tisane made from herbs picked in the Berkeley Hills, salad greens from his own garden, cherries taken by right of usufruct from a neighbor’s tree, sea salt scraped from a pond at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, and–O.K., strict perfection is unobtainable–a bottle of California Petite Sirah, presumably organic. This was not a way of eating that Pollan thinks is realistic on a routine basis, but he wanted to test what it felt like to have “a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it.” That consciousness, for Pollan, is more religious than political–every meal a sacrament. “We eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world,” he says.

Pollan winds up demanding that we know much more about what we’re putting into our mouths: “What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.” The “naked lunch,” William Burroughs wrote, is the “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Burroughs meant it metaphorically; Pollan means it literally. He wants to know his farmer’s name, and to know that his hamburger was once part of the muscles of a particular cow. He wants to do his bit to save the planet. That means he wants to eat locally, within a network of familiarity. But, even so, the knowledge required is potentially infinite. What particular bacteria, fungi, and trace elements lurk in the soil of your sustainable community farm? Does your friendly local farmer use a tractor or a horse? If a tractor, does it use fuel made from biomass? If a horse, are the oats it eats organic? If the oats are organic, does the manure with which they were grown come from organically fed animals? How much of this sort of knowledge can you digest?

Pollan seems aware of the contradictions entailed in trying to eat in this rigorously ethical spirit, but he doesn’t give much space to the most urgent moral problem with the organic ideal: how to feed the world’s population. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a serious scare about an imminent Malthusian crisis: the world’s rapidly expanding population was coming up against the limits of agricultural productivity. The Haber-Bosch process averted disaster, and was largely responsible for a fourfold increase in the world’s food supply during the twentieth century. Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, was despised by organic farmers, but he might not have been wrong when he said, in 1971, that if America returned to organic methods “someone must decide which fifty million of our people will starve!” According to a more recent estimate, if synthetic fertilizers suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth, about two billion people would perish.

Supporters of organic methods maintain that total food-energy productivity per acre can be just as high as with conventional agriculture, and that dousings of N-P-K are made necessary only by the industrial scale of modern agriculture and its long-chain systems of distribution. Yet the fact remains that, to unwind conventional agriculture, you would have to unwind some highly valued features of the modern world order. Given the way the world now is, sustainably grown and locally produced organic food is expensive. Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn is what feeds the victims of an African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers’ market. Food for a “small planet” will, for the foreseeable future, require a much smaller human population on the planet.

Besides, for most consumers that Earthbound Farm organic baby arugula from Whole Foods isn’t an opportunity to dismantle the infrastructures of the modern world; it’s simply salad. Dressed with a little Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil, a splash of sherry vinegar, some shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano, and fleur de sel from the Camargue, it makes a very nice appetizer. To insist that we are consuming not just salad but a vision of society isn’t wrong, but it’s biting off more than most people are able and willing to chew. Cascadian Farm’s Gene Kahn, countering the criticism that by growing big he had sold out, volunteered his opinion on the place that food has in the average person’s life: “This is just lunch for most people. Just lunch. We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it’s just lunch.”

READER LETTERS, 6/12:

“Stephen Shapin is correct in saying that a mass shift to organic farming would be impractical and take years, as farmers, agricultural-research institutions, and farm extension offices adjusted. But it wouldn’t necessarily mean a drop in our food supply, as critics of organic farming have speculated. Two recent studies–one by a team of ecologists at the University of Michigan and one by a team of European economists and sociologists–estimated the impact that such a conversion would have on global food output, and both teams found, independently, that the supply would increase, not decrease, dramatically. The yield gap between conventional and organic crops tends to be widest in wealthy nations, where farmers use copious amounts of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. But organic farming tends to raise yields in poorer nations like Kenya, India, and Guatemala. Because organic farms are less dependent on outside intervention, they are less vulnerable to climate change, emerging crop diseases, and rising oil prices; and techniques like composting, green manuring, and biological pest control may be the best way to boost production and reduce hunger.”

- Brian Halweil, Senior Researcher, Worldwatch Institute, Sag Harbor, NY

“Shapin’s claim that ‘genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn is what feeds the victims of an African famine’ is a dangerously literal view of a much more complicated truth. While such food may indeed arrive at refugee camps across Africa, the refugees are almost always the victims of land and/or resource (water, oil) disputes exacerbated by the West’s increasing need for fuel to help produce their genetically modified crops. In addition, poor environmental policies, corrupt local governments, careless international trade policies, and climate change all conspire to create cyclical famines in Africa–a situation that would be greatly alleviated by a return to local, ecologically sound farming practices. A model now exists that shows how such practices can restore the food security and the democratic voice of the population. Professor Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner, and her Green Belt Movement have rehabilitated vast areas of barren, eroded land and made them into rich, rain-friendly arable farms, plots, and tiny but highly productive, back-yard gardens. All crops are ‘organic’ in the true sense of the word, and the cycle of poverty, environmental degradation, fighting over resources, and corrupt governance is broken.”

- Alexandra Fuller, Wilson, Wyo.

At least it is to Michael Pollan, who delved into an anatomy of a McDonald’s meal and discovered that all roads led back to an Iowan cornfield.

It’s there, lurking, in the high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, that sweetens the pop, ketchup, relish, special sauce, faux dairy shake and salad dressing. It’s there in the fryer oil, in the starch, in the binding agents, the corn-fed chicken, the dextrose and the diglycerides. And it’s there in a number of other ways, too. In the McNugget alone, Pollan totals 13 ways corn is present in the meal.

Sounds benign enough. After all, it’s just peaches-and-cream, hearty Midwest family-values corn and, frankly, next to the petroleum products present in the chicken nugget, corn is pretty wholesome sounding.

Well, that’s what they’d have you believe. But it turns out that corn, not money, is the root of all evil today.

Pollan is a University of California Berkeley journalism professor, best known for his 2001 book, The Botany of Desire, in which he analyzed the relationship between humans and four plants. His new book is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

As the title suggests, he examines how not just the McMeal came to be, but three others as well: a Whole Foods meal, dinner on a pastoral eco-farm, and one he forages for himself.

His discovery? Despite all the apparent diversity in the food we eat, we actually mostly just eat a lot of corn, since it’s a component of about 25 per cent of the groceries in your average supermarket, let alone the fast food. This corn dependency is pretty weird, Pollan points out, since we are by nature omnivorous, generalist eaters — built to eat a very wide range of foods — as opposed to vegetarian, specialist eaters, built to eat a small range of foods. Koalas, who only eat eucalyptus leaves, or cows, who should only eat grass, are specialist eaters.

The omnivore’s dilemma, in fact, is just that: “What to have for dinner?” That’s a question you just never hear in koala households.

But koalas are bears of very little brain. We have very large brains that have evolved to store all sorts of information about just which mushrooms make you high, which ones poison you completely, which ones you get the pigs to dig up and which ones are ideally picked in early summer and late fall to make that lovely chanterelle risotto.

Some scientists even argue that our big brains evolved so we could remember exactly those things.

This modern reliance on corn certainly doesn’t make the most of one of our greatest evolutionary advantages — if we run out of one thing to eat, we can always find something else.

Despite such a grand survival trait and all that space in our brains to store all that how-to information, somehow, over the last 50 years, we’ve opted to eat mostly corn.

Over reliance on one crop is never a great idea. Remember the Irish potato?

But the story of how corn became so prevalent is even more nefarious. It involves two super-villains, Richard Nixon and Monsanto.

Food prices soared during the Nixon administration, prompting an inverse correlation in his poll numbers, so Washington began subsidizing corn. And Monsanto, a name that comes up just about every time the topic of the degradation of our food is addressed, did its part by creating genetically modified corn seeds to increase yields.

So far, so good. Our hero, corn, was feeding the hungry. Except that before too long there was a glut of corn; along came inventive ways to dispose of the mountains of it. Corn found its way into much commercial beer, a sweetener in the form of HFCS, pet food filler, farm animal feed and as a base in less attractive-sounding multi-syllabic ingredients in about 25 per cent of the products found on our grocery store shelves.

Cheap filler and sweetener begat supersizing (since lower food costs meant bigger portions), and supersizing begat obesity.

Worse yet, when it comes to your big gulp, the supersizing is a double whammy — more fructose makes us fat, which leads to diabetes.

On top of that, corn fructose is much harder for our bodies to metabolize than traditional cane sugar glucose, and a possible cause of diabetes (one major U.S. study projects that one in three Americans born in 2000 will develop diabetes in their lifetimes).

It gets worse. Pollan demonstrates how a series of other seemingly unconnected problems, such as our greenhouse gas buildup and our newer improved E. coli problems (made super-resistant thanks to the acids produced in the sick, corn-eating cows’ stomachs) can be traced back to corn. It’s not just the cows that are sick; our entire food system is.

What about Pollen’s other three meals? Is there hope for a healthier food system lying in those? Well, yes, to varying degrees.

The pastoral, pre-industrial farm meal he enjoys sounds healthy, tasty and utopian. The meal he cobbles together from foraging and hunting is grand, but neither are realistic options for getting dinner for four on the table every night. Concerned foodies turn to “big organic” places such as Whole Foods, in the hopes that a pastoral farm meal might be delivered to the downtown core. But, by definition, slow food isn’t driven into town on a truck.

Aside from the fact that Whole Food carts are suspiciously full of pre-packaged, supposedly healthy processed foods rather than real fresh ingredients, thereby missing the point of cooking healthy food from scratch, I think most of us have had a growing suspicion that a lot of “big organic” is a pretty savvy marketing ploy with few real health or ethical advantages.

Pollan confirms that fear. At least there are fewer bad things like nitrates in organic produce, and more good things like antioxidant plant phenols. Those of us squeamish about hormones in beef, and the possibility of mad cow brain-wasting prions coming from the continuing practice of turning herbivore cows into cannibalistic carnivores, can rest easy. Our organic beef comes from cows fed on, well, corn. Oops.

The lesser of two evils? Maybe.

But the whole “big organic” is modelled pretty closely after the industrial food chain it was set up to compete with, and therefore comes with its own pitfalls. For example, organic is certainly not environmentally sustainable, because it relies so heavily on petroleum. If fact, Pollan says our entire food system is “floating on a sinking sea of petroleum.”

First we drive the seed to the farm, using petroleum, then we use petroleum to make fertilizer, then we use fuel-powered tractors and finish it off with fuel-powered processing plants. Then we drive the produce all around the world. And what plant requires just about the highest ratio of petroleum to edible stuff produced?

Corn. In the United States, a quarter to a third of a gallon of oil goes into every bushel of corn.

It’s a fascinating (and twisted) system. Pollan tells the story of our food and how we got here brilliantly. This is simply one of the best books ever written about the state of our food. Everyone who cares about what we eat should read this book.

Paradoxically, I wouldn’t wish the book on anyone. Now I’m looking at labels to see if HFCS is listed as the first ingredient, haven’t eaten corn-fed cow flesh in weeks and am seeing corn everywhere. Even in my bourbon. Corn dogs? Right out. The book nearly made me lose my lunch, pack it all in and run away to a cattle ranch in Argentina.

Maybe it’s best to pack a light lunch.

The Bad Some repetition and over-long meanders.

The Bottom Line A penetrating account by an engaging guide.

The deep, rich soil of the American breadbasket grows a staggering amount of corn. The grain then funnels into an agricultural and industrial juggernaut that produces everything from beef and eggs to Twinkies and ethanol. A triumph of efficiency and modern technology? No, argues Michael Pollan in his far-reaching and disturbing The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. This “industrial revolution of the food chain,” as he calls it, is putting our health, and the health of the land, in unprecedented danger. “If we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.”

Pollan, author of the best-selling Botany of Desire (2001), tirelessly scales those walls and searches for alternatives amid four different strands of U.S. cuisine. In the process, he guides a spidery eight-row planter through an Iowa cornfield, buys a steer and follows its journey through the mind-numbing conditions of the modern feedlot, and rises before dawn to herd chickens on a Virginia farm. He shoots wild pigs and forages in California wine country. He describes how companies transform corn into fructose, citric acid, MSG, and “natural” raspberry flavor. He deconstructs a McDonald’s (MCD ) meal, showing that it contains scary ingredients such as a toxic chemical similar to butane and sits atop a food chain largely based on corn.

These explorations leave Pollan deeply worried. “America’s corn-fed food chain looks like an unalloyed disaster,” he says. The trouble starts with government subsidies, which keep corn prices below the true cost of growing it, yet often don’t make up the difference. Farmers thus must grow more and more to turn a profit, reducing the price even further. Plus, they need to use lots of fertilizer and fuel. “The plague of cheap corn goes on, impoverishing farmers…degrading the land, polluting the water, and bleeding the federal treasury,” Pollan writes.

Consider the industrial feedlot, where “animals exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass must be adapted by us…to live on corn, for no other reason than it offers the cheapest calories around.” Most feedlot cattle are sickened by their diet and require antibiotics and other treatments. And meat, milk, and eggs from corn-fed animals have more bad saturated fat and less healthy omega-3 fat than those from grass-fed animals, plus more fat overall. “Changes in the composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the diseases of civilization,” including diabetes and obesity, Pollan argues.

Nor is organic agriculture necessarily the answer: Pollan visits big industrial organic operations that hardly differ from their nonorganic counterparts. Many chickens advertised as “free-range” never touch a patch of grass in their short lives.

There is a better way, Pollan says. His guru is Joel Salatin, a farmer near Staunton, Va. From 100 acres of pasture set amid 450 acres of forest, he grows “an astounding cornucopia”: 70,000 pounds of beef and pork, 10,000 broiler chickens, 1,200 turkeys, and 35,000 dozen eggs a year. “Yet…this pasture will be…the better for it, lusher, more fertile, even springier underfoot,” Pollan writes. Plus, the meat and eggs are tastier and healthier.

The secret is intensive management of the grassland. Salatin moves his cattle every day so that the pasture will quickly grow back. He brings in a portable henhouse so chickens can eat the grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats. That spreads the manure, eliminates parasites, adds nitrogen-rich droppings to the soil, and makes for better eggs. Salatin also spreads a few bucketfuls of corn on the growing pile of wood chips and manure in the barn. After it ferments, he lets in pigs that “systematically…turn and aerate the compost in their quest for kernels of alcoholic corn.” Compare those happy hogs with the tens of thousands on a typical industrial farm, who “spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine.” Salatin needs no added fertilizers or chemicals and produces no pollution, a far cry from the ecological havoc Pollan describes as being wrought by vast cornfields and crowded feedlots.

Pollan blames America’s bad food habits and susceptibility to fad diets on the lack of a strong food culture, something other nations enjoy. The French, for instance, “eat all sorts of supposedly unhealthy foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: They eat small portions and don’t go back for seconds; they don’t snack; [and] they seldom eat alone.” Americans, of course, have no self-restraining rules.

The book isn’t as grim as all this sounds. Pollan is an engaging companion, whether he’s diving for abalone, collecting wild yeast, or musing about American gullibility. And his message is compelling. After reading the book, you will want to change how you eat.

It also typifies the dilemma that Michael Pollan dissects in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” his incisive and insightful look at the American diet that, like any good meal, consists of different yet complementary parts that blend in a satisfying, filling, nourishing and enjoyable whole.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Pollan says, is the problem faced by any modern eater who contemplates the seemingly inexhaustible range of foods available. From fast to slow, from packaged to homemade, from organic to artificial and every gradation in between, Americans in particular have the kind of freedom of choice that overwhelmed Cecile in the soda aisle. How should you decide the simple dilemma of what to eat?

One reason for the problem, Pollan says, is that Americans are too far divorced from where their foods actually come from. So he devised a plan to bring himself–and his readers–closer to the source. His quest includes three primary food chains: the industrial, as typified by corn; the organic, which he alternately labels the pastoral or the biological; and the most interesting, the hunter-gatherer.

For each section, Pollan ends up with the perfect meal, not necessarily in terms of flavor or cost but in how the meal exemplifies the food chain at hand.

With his broad base of knowledge and his graceful writing, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” gets across a wide range of facts without seeming to be teaching a lesson. So the reader will get minitutorials on subjects as diverse as corn sex, synthetic nitrogen, the history of supersizing and the role of the People’s Park in Berkeley, Calif., in organic food. Instruction in CFAOs, TBHQ and other alphabet topics are stirred in along the way.

For the industrial food chain, Pollan visits an Iowa cornfield, shows how high-fructose corn syrup has practically taken over the American diet and winds up eating a meal from McDonald’s in the family car.

The organic meal, selected after Pollan tries his hand at killing chickens in Virginia, is made up of food “within a leisurely drive of the farm where it had been grown.”

His biggest challenge emerges in the hunter-gatherer stage, where he comes face-to-face with whether he can go hunting for a wild pig to slaughter and serve. Examining his attitude toward animals, he notes wryly that “half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of a pig–an animal easily as intelligent as a dog–that becomes the Christmas ham.”

Between learning how to stalk, shoot and dress a pig, Pollan’s stint as a hunter-gatherer makes up the most intriguing and absorbing part of the book. And the meal that results is by far the most inventive and elaborate: from fava bean toasts with boar pate to grilled pork loin to egg fettucine with morel mushrooms.

Such a meal isn’t a true solution to the omnivore’s dilemma, of course, and Pollan acknowledges as much. But, he says, at some point we all need to take a much closer look at where our daily sustenance comes from.

Then, he concludes, “we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.”

A similar process faces U.S. writer Michael Pollan throughout The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which he examines the production of food in the United States and its impact on the food chain and on this particular writer and thinker. He asks the “can” and “should” questions as he moves from Big Food, with its reliance upon corn, through to Big Organic (which emerged as an alternative response to the traditional production and marketing of food) and Tiny Organic (the small producer), concluding finally with a bout of foraging in his immediate and local neighbourhood.

For the past five years, as a contributing writer with The New York Times Magazine, Pollan has developed a solid readership with his thought-provoking feature stories. The most recent, The Conscious Carnivore, was excerpted from this book late last month. His work is not unlike the muckraking of such fiction and non-fiction as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. However, The Omnivore’s Dilemma may be the first book that offers on its menu a heady mix of ethics, philosophy, sociology, market economics, history and plain old kitchen smarts.

The writer in this country Pollan most closely resembles is Margaret Visser, but with a major difference. When I interviewed Visser many years ago, after the release of Much Depends On Dinner, I was surprised to learn that she does not venture into the field but relies instead on book research and interviews. Pollan certainly does that, but you also find him on his belly examining the variety of plants and critters in a pasture, attempting to get up at 5:30 a.m. to do chores at Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley (described by its Christian owner Joel Salatin as “beyond organic”), traipsing up and down burned-off California forest hillsides in search of morels (Pollan will refer to them as “power fire morels”), following food sources Rosie the chicken and a steer known only as 534 to their respective demises, serving time on the line with a very sharp knife at Polyface’s open-air chicken abbatoir, and hunting wild pig with one of his food guides, or “Virgils.”

This may, in fact, be one of those books whose ending you actually wish would arrive more quickly. As his thesis plays out, and the book’s rhythms become ever more predictable, the Slow Food-curious just know that The Omnivore’s Dilemma will conclude with the best meal, the most heartfelt renderings, of Pollan’s five-year quest for knowledge and wisdom. They won’t be disappointed, either, as Pollan enters the hunter-gatherer phase of his enquiry in search of a meal he can forage from appetizer through to dessert.

It is in the final 120 pages that the writing in Pollan’s participatory journalism tends to shine, and he finally comes to terms with his own omnivore’s dilemma. Having retreated at one point to vegetarianism as he considered that the ability of an animal to suffer was the make-or-break determinant on food choice–hardly an original concept–he nonetheless feels he can return to meat as he realizes and understands its role in the food chain.

On the hunt with his Virgil, San Francisco iron artist and “poster boy for the Slow Food movement” Angelo Garro, his kill is clean–despite an implication that the shot might have come from Garro’s rifle–though even here, Pollan’s feelings are not quite as clear-cut. While he is relatively emotionless at the point of the large grey sow’s killing, during the cleaning of the animal in the forest, the impact of his act finally hits him.

“What disgusted me about ‘cleaning’ the animal was just how messy–in every sense of the word–the process really was, how it forced me to look at and smell and touch and even to taste the death, at my hands, of a creature my size that, on the inside at least, had all the same parts and probably looked an awful lot like I did… So we are left standing there in the woods with our uneasiness and our disgust, and disgust’s boon companion, shame.”

In many ways, this may be the perfect food book. It covers ground in areas seldom visited by food writers and cooks, draws on an abundance of literary sources, introduces a colourful set of characters more likely to be found in a novel, and shows off a writer at the peak of his powers. Try his description of the pigs at Polyface Farm: “Buried clear to their butts in composting manure, a bobbing sea of wriggling hams and corkscrew tails, these were the happiest pigs I’d ever seen. I couldn’t look at their spiralled tails, which cruised above the earthy mass like conning towers on submarines, without thinking about the fate of pigtails in industrial hog production.”

Ultimately, though, The Omnivore’s Dilemma prods you to think, a role that suits me just fine, whether I’m in a grocery store or a restaurant or bumbling around in my own kitchen. Pollan may aim a kick at your gut, but he hits you in the head, too.

Nowhere is this anxiety more acute, Pollan says, than in the United States. Wealth, abundance and the lack of a steadying, centuries-old food culture have conspired to make us Americans dysfunctional eaters, obsessed with getting thin while becoming ever more fat, lurching from one specious bit of dietary wisdom (margarine is better for you than butter) to another (carbs kill). Pollan diagnoses a “national eating disorder,” and he aims to shed light on both its causes and some potential solutions. To this end, he embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which starts at the very beginning — in the soil from which the raw materials of his dinners will emerge — and ends with a cooked, finished meal.

These meals are, in order, a McDonald’s repast consumed by Pollan with his wife and son in their car as it vrooms up a California freeway; a “Big Organic” meal of ingredients purchased at the upmarket chain Whole Foods; a beyond-organic chicken dinner whose main course and side dishes come from a wondrously self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics or synthetic fertilizers; and a “hunter-gatherer” feast consisting almost entirely of ingredients that Pollan has shot dead or foraged himself.

Even if the author weren’t a professor of journalism at Berkeley, and therefore by definition a liberal foodie intellectual, you could guess how this scheme will play out: the McDonald’s meal will be found wanting in terms of nutrition and eco-sustainability; the Whole Foods meal will be decent but tainted with a whiff of corporate compromise; the Virginia farm meal will be rapturously flavorful and uplifting; and the hunter-gatherer meal will be a gutsy feast of wild boar and morels, with a side of guilt and some squirmy philosophizing on what it means to take a pig’s life.

But for Pollan, the final outcome is less important than the meal’s journey from the soil to the plate. His supermeticulous reporting is the book’s strength — you’re not likely to get a better explanation of exactly where your food comes from. In fact, the first quarter of the book is devoted to a shocking, page-turning exposé of the secret life of that most seemingly innocent and benign of American crops, corn.

The species Zea mays, for all its connotations of heartland goodness and Rodgers and Hammerstein romance (“as high as an elephant’s eye”), has been turned into nothing less than an agent of evil, Pollan argues. Expanding on his articles for The New York Times Magazine, he lays out the many ways in which government policy since the Nixon era — to grow as much corn as possible, subsidized with federal money — is totally out of whack with the needs of nature and the American public.

Big agribusiness has Washington in its pocket. The reason its titans want to keep corn cheap and plentiful, Pollan explains, is that they value it, above all, as a remarkably inexpensive industrial raw material. Not only does it fatten up a beef steer more quickly than pasture does (though at a cost to ourselves and cattle, which haven’t evolved to digest corn, and are therefore pre-emptively fed antibiotics to offset the stresses caused by their unnatural diet); once milled, refined and recompounded, corn can become any number of things, from ethanol for the gas tank to dozens of edible, if not nutritious, products, like the thickener in a milkshake, the hydrogenated oil in margarine, the modified cornstarch that binds the pulverized meat in a McNugget and, most disastrously, the ubiquitous sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Though it didn’t reach the American market until 1980, HFCS has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the larder — in Pollan’s McDonald’s meal, there’s HFCS not only in his 32-ounce soda, but in the ketchup and the bun of his cheeseburger — and Pollan fingers it as the prime culprit in the nation’s obesity epidemic.

Against this backdrop of cynicism and big bellies, Pollan finds his hero in Joel Salatin, an “alternative” farmer in Virginia who will sell his goods only to local customers. A cantankerous self-described “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic,” Farmer Joel has ingeniously marshalled the rhythms and symbioses of nature to produce a bounty of food from his hundred acres. For example, his cattle graze a plot of grass for a day or two and are then succeeded by several hundred laying hens, which not only nibble on the clipped grass but pick grubs and larvae from the cowpats, thereby spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. The chickens’ bug-laden, high-protein diet results in fantastically flavorful eggs, while their excrement enriches the pasture with nitrogen, allowing it to recover in a matter of weeks for the cows to revisit.

Salatin seems to have found the secrets of sustainable agriculture. The shocker is that he doesn’t want to be part of any national solution. He’s an off-the-grid crank who hates the government, home-schooled his kids and declares to Pollan: “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?” But Pollan, a nice-guy writer whose awe of Salatin is palpable, lets the farmer off lightly, saying that his provocative words “made me appreciate what a deep gulf of culture and experience separates me from Joel — and yet at the same time, what a sturdy bridge caring about food can sometimes provide.”

If I have any caveats about “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” it’s Pollan’s tendency to be too nice. He doesn’t write with the propulsive rage that fueled Eric Schlosser’s blockbuster “Fast Food Nation,” nor does he take a firm stand on figures like the “Big Organic” pioneer Gene Kahn, an ex-hippie farmer from Washington State who decided that the only way to sustain his company, Cascadian Farm, was to sell it to General Mills. Pollan wryly notes that Kahn drives a late-model Lexus with vanity plates that say ORGANIC, but he calls Kahn “a realist, a businessman with a payroll to meet.” Does this mean that Kahn is striking the right balance between mammon and the mission, or does Pollan think he’s a hypocrite?

Likewise, I wish Pollan would stick his neck out and be more prescriptive about how we might realistically address our national eating disorder. We can’t all go off the grid like Salatin, nor can we just wish away 200 years of industrialization. So what to do? Is the ever-growing organic-food industry already on the right path? Or is more radical action needed? Should the Department of Justice break up giant, soil-exhausting factory farms into small, self-sustaining polycultural organic farms? Perhaps it’s greedy to demand more from a book already brimming with ideas, but what can I say? I’m an American, and I’m still hungry.

First stop: McDonald’s, after a side trip to the cornfields of Iowa and a bovine Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) in Kansas. Pollan explains how fast food depends on corn-fed animals, modified corn starch, corn-syrup sweeteners (especially high-fructose corn syrup), partially hydrogenated corn oil, etc.; and how agribusiness in turn depends on government subsidies and considerable fossil fuel consumption. If you weren’t horrified enough by Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Pollan’s descriptions of CAFO methodology, where corn is practically force-fed to the cows, and manure lagoons are enough to make you gag.

Pollan then pushes his cart down the aisles of Whole Foods to explore the big business of organic–an increasingly complicated term for growers, retailers, and shoppers alike. His big insight from grazing under the fluorescent lights is, given the amount of fossil fuel used in the large-scale production and distribution of organic goods (not to mention that they’re often flown in from abroad), maybe the time has come to move beyond organic and to “raise the bar on the American food system once again.” Then, going the DIY orgo route, Pollan visits Polyface Farm, an artisanal operation in Virginia, where he tries his hand at killing chickens and rotating livestock in the pastures. These are some of the book’s best passages.

Finally, Pollan creates a meal from ingredients he’s foraged or hunted in the wild, in an effort to “start again from scratch.” Interspersed between the wild boar and mushroom hunting are excellent ponderings about “the omnivore’s dilemma”–i.e., what should we eat? This question, coupled with the conflicting messages Americans receive about health and weight loss, creates opportunities for both food marketers and scientists. Meanwhile, we consumers eat based upon what’s “good” or what’s convenient versus what actually tastes good. This tendency–call it addiction if you will–toward specialized, industrial-scale eating makes us like koalas and eucalyptus, Pollan suggests. We’re so used to eating one way, unhealthily, we’ve sadly lost touch with eating for pleasure–which he equates with a more diverse, less corporate, and better informed diet.

For the author, who isn’t about to hunt for all of his meals or to become a long-term vegetarian, the answer partly involves eating animals that have had happy lives and humane deaths. For busy Seattle readers unable to raise chickens in their backyards, the only solution may be wallets thick enough to support weekly deliveries of locally farmed produce, meat, and milk.

I thought it was just me. But now that I’ve cleared time from my heavy schedule of fretting and shopping and cooking to read Michael Pollan’s new book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” I realize I’m in crowded company. Deciding what to eat isn’t just a personal quandary; it’s a burden to our species.

Take a panda to the food court and he’ll choose the bamboo, every time. Doesn’t give the rice pudding or waffle fries a second thought. The human, on the other hand, can eat anything–but maybe shouldn’t. We have to suss out which mushroom is lethal and how to crack a lobster and whether a diet of nachos and beer is a good long-term strategy. Deciding what to eat is so vexing it’s the reason (some say) we come equipped with big brains. The social scientist calls this quandary “the omnivore’s dilemma.” It’s a dilemma Pollan takes on in all its complexity.

Pollan, who teaches journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, bit off meaty topics in his other books, “Second Nature,” “A Place of My Own” and “The Botany of Desire.” This time he offers “A Natural History of Four Meals,” start to finish. Start being sunlight (which feeds plant, which feeds animal, which feeds us). Finish being a dinner he makes (or buys). En route, Pollan manages a Paris Hilton: He sows corn, buys a steer and bales hay. He also reads up on the biological, cultural, economic and philosophic pressures that congeal into the Chicken McNugget or wild boar prosciutto. It’s a good show, watching the city boy with the book smarts get his hands dirty. All in the interest of figuring out why we eat what we eat.

Fast food comes first. Pollan follows one meal from a kernel in an Iowa cornfield to a chemical-sprayed box of McNuggets–which taste, according to Pollan’s 11-year-old, Isaac, ” `like what they are, which is nuggets.’ ” As Isaac explains in two syllables: “Duh.” The revelation here is how much industrial food–for all its crunchy variety and alluring packaging–is, in one form or another, corn. Corn we produce too much of, then invent ways to use. Corn (as chicken feed) is turned into chicken nugget as well as many of the nugget’s addititves, breading, oil, packaging and the gasoline needed to transport it. Corn fattens cattle that spend most of their lives in what is called a confined-animal feeding operation, hoof-deep in excrement, eating antibiotic-laced corn. Not because cattle are supposed to eat corn–they’re not. But because, Pollan says, someone’s got to.

Pollan distills a lot of complicated botany and works a neat trick of assuming the perspective of corn, which, amazingly, can’t reproduce without human help. He argues that industrial agriculture produces cheap food, yet ultimately impoverishes farmer, land and (in the form of obesity and other diseases) consumer.

It’s maddening–or heartbreaking–to watch farmers planting more and more of a crop that Pollan argues is making them poorer and poorer. Corn, Pollan says, now sells for less than it costs to grow. And yet it keeps rolling off the farm. Presumably such a system can’t last indefinitely. Pollan chalks it up to “the perverse economics of agriculture,” “the psychology of farmers” and a tangle of misguided government farm policy. Which still left me wondering what keeps this house of cards upright.

The second meal is provisioned by “big organic”–which is to say, Whole Foods. Pollan cleverly identifies what the grocery chain sells: an appealing story. He calls this art form “supermarket pastoral,” the reassuring tale that backs the happy cow grazing on the milk carton, or the label attached to “Rosie,” the ” `sustainably-farmed’ `free-range chicken.’ ” Then Pollan tracks down cow and chicken. He finds that organic milk is often produced on factory farms where cows never see grass. Rosie “lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosies, who, aside from their certified organic feed, live lives little different from that of any other industrial chicken.” Her “free-range” lifestyle is afforded by a door at the end of her coop, unlatched during the last two weeks of her life.

Pollan watches that unused door. “I finally had to conclude that Rosie the organic free-range chicken doesn’t really grasp the whole free-range conceit. The space that has been provided to her for that purpose is, I realized, not unlike the typical American front lawn it resembles–it’s a kind of ritual space, intended not so much for the use of the local residents as a symbolic offering to the larger community. Seldom if ever stepped upon, the chicken-house lawn is scrupulously maintained nevertheless, to honor an ideal nobody wants to admit has by now become something of a joke, an empty pastoral conceit.”

Pollan doesn’t leave big organic entirely disillusioned. Organic products, he concludes, often taste better and tend to be produced in a way that is healthier for the farmer, consumer and planet.

Pollan prepares the third meal after a week working on a small farm in Virginia. He struggles out of bed early to bale hay and move cows. He watches the pigs wallow in manure, happily making compost. He listens to Joel Salatin, “self-described `Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer.’ ” He tends the chickens, then kills, cooks and serves one. Pollan finds this type of intensive farming–”beyond organic” as Salatin would say–inspiring.

“Salatin reached down deep where his pigs were happily rooting and brought a handful of fresh compost right up to my nose. What had been cow manure and woodchips just a few weeks before now smelled as sweet and warm as the forest floor in summertime, a miracle of transubstantiation. As soon as the pigs complete their alchemy, Joel will spread the compost on his pastures. There it will feed the grasses, so the grasses might again feed the cows, the cow the chickens, and so on until the snow falls, in one long, beautiful, and utterly convincing proof that in a world where grass can eat sunlight and food animals can eat grass, there is indeed a free lunch.”

For the last meal, Pollan hunts and gathers his own groceries. He infiltrates California’s humorless mushroom foragers, nabbing morels and chanterelles. He collects foul brown salt from a polluted pond. And, dramatically, he shoots his own pig.

It’s a pleasure to read the well-read writer who can breezily summon Brillat-Savarin or Rousseau. You gotta love that Pollan is willing to find Rosie and wrap his arms around a bloody pig. Still, for all the discusion of the brutality of industrial meat production, I wish he had managed to get inside a big abattoir to look around.

Pollan serves his hard-fought braised leg and grilled loin of wild Sonoma pig to the hunters and gatherers who tutored him. He calls it a “perfect meal”–full of good flavors, good conversation and the good feeling of self-sufficiency. It is, he concludes, its own form of grace. To Pollan its success also springs from its “transparency.” He knows where this meal came from–which specific pig, cherry tree and mushroom patch.

Transparency is also the achievement of this book. At McDonald’s, I now see not just limp burger but more: cattle crowded into feedlots, cities of corn straight and silent on the Iowa landscape. At Whole Foods, I notice that nearly all the organic produce has been trucked in from two California farms. When the fine-dining fine print lists the provenance of beet or rabbit, I see more than sales pitch. And though I may never fell my own prosciutto, I am happy to see dinner as grace.

Pollan quotes anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who said food must be ” `not only good to eat, but also good to think.’ ” Pollan–who eats and thinks heartily–makes food good to see.

“Imagine for a moment,” Pollan beckons, “if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.” His ingenious way of answering these questions was to take four very different meals “” a McDonald’s lunch eaten in the car; a dinner assembled from organic ingredients purchased at Whole Foods; a dinner built around chicken and eggs from an alternative farm where he volunteered for a week; and a feast he had hunted and foraged himself near his home in Berkeley — and trace their components all the way back through their various food chains. Sounds simple and straightforward enough — but in fact it ended up being a long, strange trip indeed.

The strangest, and darkest, part came first. Pollan, to his dismay, learned that most of what he was eating at McDonald’s was corn: Thirteen of the 38 ingredients of a Chicken McNugget are derived from corn; processed corn is the prime ingredient in soft drinks, a component of salad dressing and hamburger buns; and of course the cow that supplied the burger meat was fattened, quickly and efficiently, on corn — along with the cocktail of antibiotics that becomes necessary once you move a cow from the grass it was intended to eat to a grain it can’t digest healthily. Chemical fertilizer, rampant hybridization and genetic modification, industrial processing, ever increasing inputs of government subsidies and fossil fuels — That’s what we’re biting into at McDonald’s.

The picture is only slightly less depressing when he scrutinizes those bright and pricey organic vegetables and glossy “fear and stress free” natural meats on display at Whole Foods. Rosie the free-range chicken from Petaluma in fact lives in a shed jam-packed with 20,000 other Rosies and eats corn-based feed (albeit from certified organic corn) just like a regular industrial chicken. As for the free-range bit, it “turns out to be not so much a lifestyle for these chickens,” writes Pollan, “as a two-week vacation option.” Anyone harboring illusions that certified organic means pure and natural and free of corporate control would do well to read Pollan’s account of how Cascadian Farm in the Skagit Valley went from supplying Bellingham hippies with fresh produce to becoming another profitable General Mills brand. “Thus is a venerable ideal hollowed out, reduced to a sentimental conceit,” writes Pollan as he picks at an organic TV dinner laced with xanthan gum and “natural chicken flavor.”

The last two meals — from an alternative farm in Virginia and from the woods, fields and backyards of Northern California — finally give Pollan the chance to relax and enjoy himself. Well, maybe not relax, since a considerable amount of time and sweat went into these repasts. To learn about “grass farming,” the agricultural cutting edge beyond organic, Pollan endured a week of chores and rhetoric on Polyface Farm, a 550-acre utopia of sustainably raised chickens, cows, pigs and produce run by self-described “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer” Joel Salatin. In a scene worthy of George Plimpton, Pollan took his turn on the chicken processing line, slitting the throats of Salatin’s happy broilers while the farmer peppered him with diatribes against the evils of “the organic empire” and big government regulation.

But for sheer narrative thrill, the high point of the book is the semi-comic epic of the Sonoma pig hunt. Determined to “see what it’d be like to prepare and eat a meal in full consciousness of what was involved,” Pollan set out to shoot, pluck, snip, pry, peel and bag an entire dinner with his bare hands. And so the erstwhile gardener becomes the rifle-toting sidekick to a cast of Bay Area prosciutto and chanterelle nuts. Almost as riveting as the hunt is the D-day of the final meal when Pollan single-handedly transforms pig, fava beans, wild yeast, foraged cherries and homegrown lettuce into an “Omnivore’s Thanksgiving” feast for his tribe of hunter-gatherer gurus.

“No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do,” Pollan writes. But beyond lashing out at our “perfect ignorance” of what really goes on in the nation’s feedlots, slaughterhouses, cages and farm fields, he pretty much lets the facts speak for themselves. In the end, I was hungry for more — a closing of the circle, a deeper historical perspective, a vision of the future. But perhaps I just loved this book so much I didn’t want it to end.

Eating is no longer a simple pleasure, if it ever was. It is fraught with predicaments and technical imperatives. Should I be a carnivore, vegetarian or vegan? Should I leave out fat or carbs? When you shop in a supermarket you are confronted by mind-boggling choices and shelves of packages that ring with phrases like “heart-healthy,” “no trans-fats,” “cage-free” and “range-fed.” Even buying a carton of milk involves an inner debate: regular or organic? The organic, if you read carefully, may be ultra-pasteurized, with a sell-by date a month away (which, of course, would be a badge of quality and safety in some quarters but is anathema to those who care about the quality of the taste of their milk).

Of course, the more anxious we are about what we eat, the more we fall prey to the seductions of marketers. Take those “healthy” protein bars and shakes. They are healthy only when compared with something already loaded with calories. Things could be worse, we tell ourselves. And more and more it is only ourselves who are there to listen. “Consuming these neo-pseudo foods alone in our cars,” writes Michael Pollan, “we have become a nation of antinomian eaters, each of us struggling to work out our dietary salvation on our own.” In other words, we have a national eating disorder.

To make his case, Mr. Pollan — whose other books include “The Botany of Desire,” a “plant’s-eye view of the world” — follows America’s food chains from earth to table. He traces the provenance of what we eat, making a depressing pilgrim’s progress through the worlds of industrialized food, organic food and the food that a few people harvest for themselves from the wild. He winds up each section with a meal — from McDonald’s, from Whole Foods, from a small organic farm in Virginia, even from his own hunting and gathering efforts. Along the way, he raises a lot of disturbing questions about how we eat and how we think about food today.

American eaters are overwrought in part because our culture isn’t rooted in a culinary tradition. If I’d been a Frenchman sitting down to a meal in that bistro, I doubt that I’d have given a second thought to the provenance of my steak frites (cooked rare, of course). The French drink gallons of wine, consume smelly raw-milk cheeses and eat leisurely communal meals, and they don’t have our rates of obesity, heart disease and diabetes. (Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese; Type 2 diabetes, previously the bane of adults only, is now showing up in children.) While the French dine as they please, we battle over the precise design of the government’s eat-healthy food pyramid, all the while consuming more and more stuff that seems far removed from nature but close to the factory floor.

Part of the marketing logic regarding American food is to turn it into something beyond its strictly culinary value — into a brand name, a convenience (such as TV dinners) or, in the case of apples from a company called TreeTop, into a “nutraceutical food,” that is, a food that is engineered to offer extra health benefits. TreeTop’s apple pieces are “low moisture,” “naturally sweetened” and “infused with a red-wine extract.” Just 18 grams of them, according to Food Technology magazine (cited by Mr. Pollan), provide as many “flavonoid phenols as five glasses of wine and the dietary fiber equivalent of one whole apple.” The implicit message of turning something as ordinary as an apple into something so specialized and high-tech is clear, Mr. Pollan believes. It is: “We need food scientists to feed us.” But of course we don’t.

So whatever happened to real food? A leading villain, says Mr. Pollan, is the corn industry, a subsidized monoculture that produces 10 billion bushels a year. High fructose corn syrup has insinuated itself into everything from mustard and bread to cereal and ham, either giving America a sweet tooth or satisfying the one it already had. Most of the beef sold in America is fed corn because it’s the cheapest way of stuffing cattle with calories.

To see how the system works, how “the industrial food chain transforms bushels of corn into steaks,” Mr. Pollan bought a steer — No. 534 — at a ranch in South Dakota. He says he’d envisioned that his steer would be peacefully grazing among other cattle in a green pasture. But when he headed out to Kansas six months after its birth, he found out that grass had nothing to do with it.

No. 534 is penned in a feedlot, sleeping on its own manure and eating 25 pounds of corn a day. Cattle are by nature not corn eaters; it’s too starchy, and they become vulnerable to disease, especially liver abscesses, so they have to be given antibiotics. And because of the manure, there is the increased danger of E.coli infections, which has led to the irradiation of raw meat to kill the bacteria.

Mr. Pollan notes as well that raising corn and transporting it — as opposed to letting the sun grow grass under a steer’s feet — make petroleum “one of the most important ingredients in the production of modern meat.” He estimates that when No. 534 had reached the weight of 1,200 pounds, he would have prompted, over the course of his short life (about two years), the consumption of “the equivalent of 35 gallons of oil — nearly a barrel.”

But it’s not only industrial farmers who are burning up diesel fuel. Mr. Pollan also targets what he calls “big organic,” a $10 billion dollar industry that would seem attuned to the sensibilities of its health-minded customers — unless they also have environmental concerns. Big organic’s far-flung trucking operations often use more fuel than its conventional-food counterparts. “The word organic has been stretched and twisted to admit the very sort of industrial practices for which it once offered a critique and an alternative,” says Mr. Pollan. Don’t be fooled by that cheery picture on your organic egg carton of hens scratching in the barnyard. The 20,000 “organic” birds he observes in a California shed “did pretty much everything except step outside the little doors located at either end.”

What to do? Mr. Pollan argues that some of our problems with food can be solved by simply buying locally. To do so is an act of conservation (not in the least for the savings on transport gasoline) as well as an aesthetic one, because locally produced food is more likely to be fresher and taste better than industrial-made foodstuffs. Chefs are increasingly taking up the practice of using local foods — hence those menus with sometimes hilariously detailed resumes of ingredients.

Mr. Pollan ends up cooking a meal that he has gathered entirely himself. Alone in the woods with his conscience, he shoots a wild pig and cooks it, along with the morels he found, finishing with a galette of cherries picked from a tree overhanging a street in his hometown of Berkeley, Calif. It was the other end of the spectrum from a McDonald’s meal. “The pleasures of one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge, the pleasure of the other on an equally perfect ignorance.”

He doesn’t dismiss fast food entirely: He says it’s OK once a year. Mr. Pollan is not allowed into the Kansas slaughterhouse where his steer meets its end, but he talks to an animal-handling expert there who designed the ramps and slaughtering machinery for McDonald’s National Beef Plant. As far as the treatment of the animals goes, the man says that it is much better than it used to be. “There is a pre-McDonald’s era and the post-McDonald’s era — it’s night and day.”

Mr. Pollan acknowledges that his own wild-pig experiment is not a perfect model for a country of 300 million people, most living in cities and suburbs. It’s unrealistic to send us all out foraging in the wild. But he wants us at least to know what it is we are eating, where it came from and how it got to our table. He also wants us to be aware of the choices we make and to take responsibility for them.

It’s an admirable goal, well met in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” There is much to be worried about: corn overload, fertilizer runoff, marketing gimmicks and other such aspects of the modern food chain. But at the same time, commerce and technology have made food abundant in the U.S. and — if we buy with care — often very good.

In that Village bistro, the site of my indecision, I ended up having the scallops. Diver-caught. From the bottom of the sea. Was I still taking a chance? After all, who knows what really goes on down there?