Unwilling to accept the food industry’s account of where beef comes from, Michael bought a steer in Kansas to follow the life cycle of a kernel of corn from the laboratory to the feed bin to the restaurant where the beef is served. It’s a harrowing tale, and since the moment I heard him tell it, I have not served corn-fed beef of any kind. I was Pollanized — and I am not alone.

In the Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc. and in his books Food Rules and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael, 55, tells complex stories in an engaging voice. When he speaks live, I’ve seen thousands grip their seats as they realize what our food system has become and how badly we need to fix it.

Michael’s rock-star status isn’t just about his rigor or brilliance. He thinks about the ethical bonds that connect our bodies, farms and food. In so doing, he has become an example to the rest of us.

I’ve spent the past five years exploring this daunting food landscape, following the industrial food chain from the Happy Meal back to the not-so-happy feedlots in Kansas and cornfields in Iowa where it begins and tracing the organic food chain back to the farms. My aim was simply to figure out what–as a nutritional, ethical, political and environmental matter–I should eat. Along the way, I’ve collected a few rules of thumb that may be useful in navigating what I call the Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Don’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Imagine how baffled your ancestors would be in a modern supermarket: the epoxy-like tubes of Go-Gurt, the preternaturally fresh Twinkies, the vaguely pharmaceutical Vitamin Water. Those aren’t foods, quite; they’re food products. History suggests you might want to wait a few decades or so before adding such novelties to your diet, the substitution of margarine for butter being the classic case in point. My mother used to predict “they” would eventually discover that butter was better for you. She was right: the trans-fatty margarine is killing us. Eat food, not food products.

Avoid foods containing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It’s not just in cereals and soft drinks but also in ketchup and bologna, baked goods, soups and salad dressings. Though HFCS was not part of the human diet until 1975, each of us now consumes more than 40 lbs. a year, some 200 calories a day. Is HFCS any worse for you than sugar? Probably not, but by avoiding it you’ll avoid thousands of empty calories and perhaps even more important, cut out highly processed foods–the ones that contain the most sugar, fat and salt. Besides, what chef uses high-fructose corn syrup? Not one. It’s found only in the pantry of the food scientist, and that’s not who you want cooking your meals.

Spend more, eat less. Americans are as addicted to cheap food as we are to cheap oil. We spend only 9.7% of our income on food, a smaller share than any other nation. Is it a coincidence we spend a larger percentage than any other on health care (16%)? All this “cheap food” is making us fat and sick. It’s also bad for the health of the environment. The higher the quality of the food you eat, the more nutritious it is and the less of it you’ll need to feel satisfied.

Pay no heed to nutritional science or the health claims on packages. It was science that told us margarine made from trans fats is better for us than butter made from cow’s milk. The more I learn about the science of nutrition, the less certain I am that we’ve learned anything important about food that our ancestors didn’t know. Consider that the healthiest foods in the supermarket–the fresh produce–are the ones that don’t make FDA-approved health claims, which typically festoon the packages of the most highly processed foods. When Whole Grain Lucky Charms show up in the cereal aisle, it’s time to stop paying attention to health claims.

Shop at the farmers’ market. You’ll begin to eat foods in season, when they are at the peak of their nutritional value and flavor, and you’ll cook, because you won’t find anything processed or microwavable. You’ll also be supporting farmers in your community, helping defend the countryside from sprawl, saving oil by eating food produced nearby and teaching your children that a carrot is a root, not a machine-lathed orange bullet that comes in a plastic bag. A lot more is going on at the farmers’ market than the exchange of money for food.

How you eat is as important as what you eat. Americans are fixated on nutrients, good and bad, while the French and Italians focus on the whole eating experience. The lesson of the “French paradox” is you can eat all kinds of supposedly toxic substances (triple crème cheese, foie gras) as long as you follow your culture’s (i.e., mother’s) rules: eat moderate portions, don’t go for seconds or snacks between meals, never eat alone. But perhaps most important, eat with pleasure, because eating with anxiety leads to poor digestion and bingeing. There is no French paradox, really, only an American paradox: a notably unhealthy people obsessed with the idea of eating healthily. So, relax. Eat Food. And savor it.

Right there, Michael Pollan tells us, is the problem with the way we eat now. We’re clueless. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press; 450 pages), he tries to cut through this fog of unknowing. The title refers to the predicament of animals, including rats and humans, that can eat just about anything, whether it’s bad for them or not. He has no doubt that much of what we eat is bad for us, for the animals we feed on and for the environment. The author of Second Nature and The Botany of Desire, Pollan is willing to go to some lengths to reconnect with what he eats, even if that means putting in a hard week on an organic farm and slitting the throats of chickens. He’s not Paris Hilton on The Simple Life.

Pollan divides our food sources into four categories. One is industrial, meaning giant agribusiness. Then there are the two kinds of organic, large and small scale. Finally there’s anything hunted and foraged. He goes on an adventure down each food chain, fattening a beef calf for market or following the path of industrial corn all around the country. Each trip ends in a meal made of foods from that category.

Modern agriculture leaves him deeply troubled. He marvels at how massive surpluses of corn, made possible by the use of noxious chemical fertilizers and pesticides, have led to the rise of huge feedlots where cattle are pumped full of antibiotics and corn-based feed to hasten them to their fate as cheeseburgers. Organic farming? It has its virtues, but he discovers that our visions of contented cows and free-range chickens don’t always match the realities. In a final lunge toward authenticity, he forages for mushrooms in a burned-over pine forest and shoots a wild pig, a primal confrontation that briefly reduces Pollan, an inexperienced hunter, to a state of near panic as he pulls the trigger while the pigs madly scatter. But in this clearheaded and sometimes heartbroken book, that would be the only time he gets seriously confused.