Michael Pollan changed the way American adults look at their dinner. Next step: kicking kid foods off the menu – by taking his message to them.
Pollan’s 2006 blockbuster The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is being reissued next month in a kid’s version.
Retitled The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat, the young reader’s edition gets down to the meat and potatoes a little quicker. Some three hundred pages shorter and spiced up with pictures, it’s still a big undertaking for kids (think ages ten and up – maybe a precocious eight- or nine-year-old).
Not bedtime reading, but certainly food for thought, made slightly easier to chew thanks to graphs, and drawings (the cow entering the slaughter system doesn’t have to be photo-quality to make you go eeeeek!). If you have been meaning to read the original . . . and meaning to read. . . and meaning to read, it’s worth it to pick up this tasty morsel, do a quick read through, then pass it on to the kids.
Stocked with enough vegetarian-turning info, it’s not the real thing, but a good taste.
And one worth sharing with our kids. Do we HAVE to go into the whole childhood obesity crisis/diagnoses of diabetes in younger and younger kids/bla, bla, bla? It’s one of the reasons WE all read the original. So why not stick this one in the kid’s hands and say “have at?” If they won’t listen to us, maybe they’ll listen to an incredibly smart guy with cool graphics.
And as Pollan points out in his afterword, it’s been written to give kids some perspective, maybe change their habits. His own son still eats the occasional mcnugget. But his taste for Whoppers and Big Macs went the way of the cow down the slaughterhouse shoot.
Will you be picking this one up? It hits stores Oct 15.