The Omnivore’s Dilemma
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Dinner is such a conundrum. Cook or order? Fast or slow? Lean or indulgent? Once the problem has been dispatched and the dishes dried, the questions return, with alarming regularity. 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…
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Michael Pollan is a magician. In his previous book, “The Botany of Desire,” he turned apples and potatoes into a best-seller. Now he turns corn and cows, pigs and chickens into a brilliant, eye-opening account of how we produce, market and agonize over what we eat. If you ever thought “what’s for dinner” was a…
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AFTER READING “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” I went out to dinner at a bistro in Greenwich Village, where I faced some dilemmas of my own. The waiter brought over the menu. Steak? Too much to worry about: hormones, antibiotics, E. coli and mad-cow disease. Tuna? Mercury. Salmon? PCBs. Chicken? Could be one of the brands treated…
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Channeling the modern middle-class shopper wandering vast supermarket aisles, Pollan asks: “The organic apple or the conventional? And if organic, the local or the imported? The wild fish or the farmed? The transfats or the butter or the ‘not butter’? Shall I be a carnivore or a vegetarian? And if a vegetarian, a lacto-vegetarian or…
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A journalist traces the meal on his plate back through the food chain. Most of us are at a great distance from our food. I don’t mean that we live “twelve miles from a lemon,” as English wit Sydney Smith said about a home in Yorkshire. I mean that our food bears little resemblance to…
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UC Berkeley’s Michael Pollan examines what we eat, and how to decide what to eat. That we are living beings who must, to continue living, physically consume other living organisms, is one of the most fundamental facts about our lives. If, as a matter of habit, comfort and self-protection, we allow ourselves to remain less…
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MICHAEL POLLAN has perfected a tone — one of gleeful irony and barely suppressed outrage — and a way of inserting himself into a narrative so that a subject comes alive through what he’s feeling and thinking. He is a master at drawing back to reveal the greater issues. At one point in his new…
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intelligently gory.
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We’re clueless. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma he tries to cut through this fog of unknowing.
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Pollan isn’t preachy: he’s too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He’s also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow’s-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the…