Matt Quann's Reviews > The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

The Omnivore's Dilemma is definitely worth your thyme!

Have you ever thought about where that burger came from?

How about the diet of your store-bought salmon?

Are you just tired about hearing about the exhaustive origins of your food at every fancy restaurant?

Do you wish your hipster friends would stop trying to get you to forage for mushrooms?

Then I've got the book for you!

I'd been taking down the audiobook of Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals intermittently for months. It first started as a companion on a road trip, but gave way to the book I occasionally put on as I was doing some housework. At first, I found it a bit dull and slow-moving, due in no small part to Scott Brick's slow, laborious narration of the book. But as soon as I ticked up the narration speed to 1.5x, I couldn't stop finding excuses to put on my headphones and listen to this superb treatise on food.

This book is about humankind's relationship to food, the environment, and our own personal health. Earlier this year, I reviewed The Dorito Effect by Mark Shatzker, and while both books deal with food, Pollan's book is more concerned with ecology than taste and flavour. Though, it should be noted, that there are plenty of delicious sounding food descriptions littering the 16-hour listening experience.

Four Meals

The premise of Pollan's book is based around four meals: fast-food, industrial farm, self-sustaining organic farm, and one meal hunted, foraged, and prepared by Pollan himself. Using this intuitive structure, Pollan is able to progress from least enjoyable and viable to the most rewarding and delicious of his meals. It also works because Pollan digs deep into the thoughts, historical events, and effects on the larger world that have shaped our industrial food chain. Though I like to think I know a lot about food and how the human body converts that food into energy, this book made me realize how little I know about the tumultuous transition between captured solar energy and the slab of meat on my plate.

Even if, when Pollan really digs into the ubiquity of corn in North American foods, I couldn't help but thinking of this clip.

I won't attempt to condense Pollan's ideas into this simple review, but I will say that it helped me to think more fully about the meal from its origins to my plate. I'll admit that I've often been semi-interested to hear the stories and origins of my food in restaurants, but I now have a deep respect for what those restaurants are trying to accomplish. It makes more sense after listening to this book that you'd want to eat foods that are in season. Knowing where one's food comes from is an attempt to connect to that lost part of our evolutionary history, when eating meant that one had to discover, collect, and process a meal by their own hands.

I don't mind saying that this book makes me want to convert my backyard into farmland and that I began actively looking for opportunities to fish, hunt, and forage locally. Pollan makes convincing arguments, but is also an infinitely likeable guy. Pollan rarely preaches and he admits to enjoying the convenience that industrial foods provide. That Pollan is more of an everyman makes the listening experience more enjoyable, relatable, and helped me feel as if I could make some changes to my diet that would be more sustainable.

Books about food aren't for everyone, but this one makes a case for being one everyone should read or, as in my case, listen to. Indeed, though I love to read fiction, nonfiction seems to work best for me in audio format. Though the book is a tad older (originally published in 2006), it is highly relevant today when many of us have to decide between the slightly pricier local vegetables and the more affordable industrial greens. For the duration of my reading it made me a more conscious eater, and I have to say that I learned a lot more than expected! Be sure to check this one out!