Recommended reading

I just finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I commented on it at Darryl’s website a while back, and will add here that it’s one of those books, like Erich Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, that’s bound to get you thinking more about what goes into the food you eat.

From the introduction:

Folly in the getting of our food is nothing new. And yet the new follies we are perpetrating in our industrial food chain today—by replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize—we are today taking unprecedented risks with our health and the health of the natural world.

…how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world: this book is probably not for them; there are things in it that will ruin their appetite. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kind of pleasures that are only deepened by knowing.