TracyFood

Ask TracyFood: yay for book questions! 13 July 2007 11:21 pm

Posted by Tracy in : Michael Pollan, advice, agriculture, books, cheese, friends, politics, vegan, vegetarian , trackback

I was going to do a Foto Friday today, all about the delicious cheese I brought back from my trip to the Netherlands last month, and maybe even the sandwich I made with some of it on Monday, but Penny wrote me and she said it would be cool if I based an Ask TracyFood entry on my response:

So Penny wrote:

So I have a question about a book, and I think you can answer it. I keep hearing about The Omnivore’s Dilemma. You know about me and food and all that, and my question is do you think it’s worth my time to read this, or will I just be like “go vegan already” and really not the book’s target audience?

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Dear Penny,

So first of all, you’re not the only person I know who read the “omnivore” part of the title as a reference to non-veg(etari)an eating, but aside from that vaguely misleading little phrasing problem (which is corrected by the subtitle, “a natural history of four meals”) it’s a pretty interesting book, even if it’s sort of full of stuff you might already know. Basically, Pollan writes a very in-depth analysis of four meals, starting with his attempts to track their ingredients back to their original plant and animal sources, but he writes a whole bunch about the history and politics of food along the way. The four meals, by the way, are meant to encapsulate different food systems or food chains: industrial, industrial organic, small-scale organic (local food sort of fits in here), and hunter-gatherer (although this last one sort of bothered me because the meal Pollan cooks with his exhaustively described h-g ingredients sure uses an awful lot of, oh, I don’t know, flour?) It’s well-written, a fun and easy read for general audiences, and as such got a lot of people’s attention about modern food systems, especially large-scale industrial ones, involve (not to put too fine a point on it) a lot of fucked-up shit, and that’s pretty much all good no matter how I slice it. I also really liked the chapters about the history of the organic food movement and how everybody’s jumping on that very profitable bandwagon these days, because I read them at a time when I was starting to sort of burn out on working at the hippie natural foods grocery store, where everyone was freaking out about the possibility of competing with Whole Foods, never mind the fact that fracking Wal*Mart was getting into the organic food business at around that time. (For a while I wanted to write a book about the hippie food freakout and the next big thing it would spawn, but now I think that project should wait for a little more time and perspective and maybe, y’know, an actual clue as to what that next big thing might be.)

All that said about The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I still think Pollan’s second book, The Botany of Desire, is even better: the subtitle is “a plant’s eye view of the world” and it’s all about the ways people have been domesticated by plants, with four key examples: apples, tulips, cannabis, and potatoes. (One neat thing about Pollan’s book Second Nature, which I somehow neglected to mention in all my week’s worth of entries about it last month is how it’s fun to read that book and spot the beginnings of the idea that people are domesticated by plants.) In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Pollan performs a similar analysis on corn, and how it’s in just about every part of the standard American diet. Again, stuff you and I already know, but presented in a way that’s pretty entertaining to read and so a lot of people read it, to the point where you can refer to the book as a useful shorthand for a lot of big picture food system stuff that I think a lot more people are beginning to think about, which is excellent (both the spread of wider awareness and the useful shorthand). However, for you I recommend a similar book which does the “really look at where food comes from” trick only with an emphasis on ethics — The Way We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, subtitled, “Why Our Food Choices Matter.” Hot damn are you ever that book’s target audience. It’s like The Omnivore’s Dilemma only with all the “go vegan already” you could possibly hope for. The prose is a little less smooth, in part because of the two authors thing but also because Peter Singer is not a professional writer but rather a professional philosopher and a stupendously badass one at that. And now between writing this and replying to my mom’s comment/query about it last week, maybe I’m motivated enough to revisit all the notes I took on The Way We Eat when I read it a few months back, and maybe use them to write a book review for my big series of posts about why I’m the worst vegetarian ever. Thanks Penny! I hope this helped!