The quickest way to relieve pressure on world food prices would be to cut U.S. subsidies for ethanol and drop import tariffs on Brazilian ethanol. But there are longer-term steps we need to take as well if we are to ensure food for everyone. The other reason grain prices have spiked is that oil prices have spiked, and industrial agriculture has become heavily reliant on fossil fuel–for fertilizer, for pesticide, for processing and transportation. Today it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy. We need to reduce the dependence of modern agriculture on oil, an eminently feasible goal–after all, agriculture is the original solar “technology,” and sustainable farmers have shown us how we might put our food system back on a foundation of sunlight. For example, when you take cattle off their typical feedlot diet of grain and allow them to eat grass, those hamburgers put less pressure on the prices of both oil and grain.

That brings me to the third, and perhaps least tractable, factor behind the run-up in world grain prices: the growing appetite for meat in places like China and India. Most of the world’s grain goes to feed animals, not people, and meat is a very inefficient use for that grain–it takes 10 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. There would be plenty of grain for everyone if we actually ate it as food and didn’t use it to make meat. Reducing world meat consumption–or feeding our food animals differently–would leave more grain for the world’s hungry.

It comes down to this: the world’s agricultural lands make up a precious and finite resource; we should be using it to grow food for people, not for cars or cattle.

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.”