Pig Hunting Corn Haters

After about six months of off and on reading, I finally finished The Omnivore's Dilemma. In it, UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan traces the origins and processes behind several different food chains: industrial, industrial/big organic, local, and self-obtained. It becomes obvious pretty early on that he has serious reservations about the ludicrous ways American industrial agriculture sets about dealing with the annual surplus of corn, but how practical is it really to expect us all to hunt pigs in the Northern California foothills or gather our own mushrooms in the streets of Berkeley?

Pollan raises more questions than he answers in this peek behind the curtain and, unintentionally or otherwise, it starts to feel like a ploy to get us to buy his latest book, an unofficial sequel titled In Defense of Food. I haven't gotten around to reading this one yet, at least in part because I think its tag line sums up his answer pretty well: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Are pesticides bad for you? Of course. Is fast food healthy? Certainly not in the quantities a lot of people eat it. A lot of it just comes down to common sense, though. If you eat a lot of fatty, processed foods, you're not going to be healthy. If all you eat is spinach, you're not going to be healthy. Moderation and logic will take you a long way...

So, did The Omnivore's Dilemma change my life? I suppose. I'm more cognizant of what goes into some of the processed foods I love (although it's nothing I didn't already know from reading Fast Food Nation or watching Super Size Me). I value local food more than I did before (although like the New Yorker article I linked to a while ago, if the local food isn't season it's probably just as bad if not worse than food that's been trucked across the country).

Oh, and apparently since I live east of Columbus, I'm environmentally better off drinking wine from France than from the Northern California vineyards I grew up near. So there you have it.