Review - Book Report/Review Example

These methods have restored the dilemma through making available foods, which were earlier regional or seasonal. The association between society and food, once moderated by tradition, now finds itself perplexed. To learn more concerning those choices, the author follows each of the food chains, which sustain us, from their source to the ultimate meal and writes an assessment of the American way of eating. About the Author Pollan was born on 6th February, 1955, in New York. He is not only a novelist/author, but also an activist, journalist and a lecturer of journalism, at the University Of California Berkeley Graduate, School Of Journalism.

Critics have referred to him as a "liberal foodie intellectual" particularly after the publication of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Along the way, the author proposes that there is a considerable nervousness between the logic of human industry, as well as the logic of nature, in that the way people eat, shows their most reflective commitment with the natural world plus that eating industrial-manufactured food hinders fatefully important environmental connections and relationships. It is easy to claim that the journalism and activism life of the author were the most influential aspects of his life that helped him come up with such a book.

Connections Pollan assesses what he refers to as “our nationwide eating disorder” in this remarkably sober book. . For example, we now know which mushrooms should be avoided, as well as which fruits we can enjoy. At the moment, as citizens of the United States what can merely be described as a nationwide eating disorder, Pollan has returned with an atavistic retaliation. The abundance of the fast-food outlet along with the modern American supermarket has thrown people back on a confusing landscape where they once more have to worry concerning which of those tantalizing morsels might kill them (Pollan 53).

At the same time, people are acknowledging that their food choices also have deep effects for the health, as well as the environment. In class, we are taught that corn is the most heavily subsidized crop in the United States. There is an overall of 45,000 food items in American supermarkets, and over a quarter of them have corn (Pollan 23). Corn has productively transformed the United States diet, as well as animals’ diet. This can be observed when Pollan examines the growth of a calf from a grazing land in South Dakota through its stay in Kansas to its frightful end.

The animal progressed to consume grass, but over half of a feedlot cow’s food originates from corn. The other half comprises of other products like meat (Pollan 25). Chicken litter along with feather meal that is feces, bedding, as well as discarded bits of feed, are acknowledged cattle feeds, as are fish, pig and chicken meal. Pollan goes on to argue that since the bonemeal and bovine meat, which cows used to consume, are now being given to pigs, chickens and fish, contagious prions could infect cattle when they are fed the protein of the animals, which have been consuming them (Pollan 67).

In maybe the most significant part of the book, the author describes what might be referred to as the