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I read this book over the weekend at my parents house. The subtitle is A Natural History of Four Meals. I found this book to be very mixed for me. The subject of food is certainly of great interest to me. I love to eat and I enjoy most things connected to eating, including purchasing food and preparing it. Michael Pollan is a good writer too and his writing was smooth and easy to follow. There were three sections in this book : Corn, Grass, and The Forest. In each one the author traces a meal prepared in along this theme. So the first section on corn traces how corn is grown in this day and age and traces the byproducts through and shows how they are in most processed food that we buy today. That meal turned out to be a McDonalds meal for $14 that he shared with his family in his home state of California. Then he had a meal from Whole Foods Market that wrestled with the implication sof the "Organic" industry and what it has become. The meal from grass traced a meal that came through being raised in a grass fed system, mostly illustrated with the farm of Joel Salatin in Virginia. Because I know about Salatin already and find him to be a very interesting man who shares the same world view that I do and I was most interested in this section of the book. I also am a firm believer already in the value of grass fed meat and dairy and locally grown vegetables and fruits. The third section was a meal he prepared and got himself in the wilds of California (yes there are still some areas there that was somewhat untamed). Many of the points that Pollan made about locally grown food and the damages and danger in the food industry in this country I already knew and agreed with. He managed to pull some points together into a bigger picture for me though and also gave some interesting stories to flesh out my beliefs. But I found two things bothersome. First Pollan is a radical evolutionist, in my opinion, and almost every page has something related to natural selection or evolutionary changes in various species or plants. I got kind of tired of filtering this out and began to wonder how much I really agreed with him seeing that our world views are so different. The second thing that got to me was that after about 150 pages of analyzing things about food I began to wonder if this whole idea of a book like this wasn't rather myopic and over "intellectual". I certainly believe we should be thinking people but sometimes the analysis seemed to be over the top. Yet I still found much value in the book after those two things in my own mind. The fact is that our food system in this country is so far gone from how God designed things to be. We are caught in a processing trap of convenience and luxury values and we no longer know where our food comes from or who grew it or what is in it. Accountability is gone because consumers don't know the people who grew their food. As I have written before I am taking clear steps to have a different kind of life for the health of my family but also because the food tastes to much better. So over all I would still recommend this book with qualifications. |
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