Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. The Omnivore's Dilemma: Young Readers Edition is a nonfiction book by Michael Pollan, who also wrote books such as In Defense of Food, Food Rules, and Cooked. The current thinking among botanists is that several thousand years ago teosinte underwent an abrupt series of mutations that turned it into corn; geneticists calculate that changes on as few as four chromosomes could account for the main traits that distinguish teosinte from maize. Something went wrong. True, I was no longer aghast at the information shared--there is now a mountain of irrefutable evidence that Big Agri and the Food Industry work hand in glove to feed us little better than garbage--chemical simulations of meals. APA-6; MLA-8; Chicago (N-B) … It might be hard to see how, but even a Twinkie does this—constitutes an engagement with the natural world. There are of course two sides to every story, and Pollan is careful to examine the benefits … The calories we eat, whether in an ear of corn or a steak, represent packets of energy once captured by a plant. “When you look at the isotope ratios,” Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who’s done this sort of research, told me, “we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.” Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. (At a time when land was abundant and labor scarce, agricultural yields were calculated on a per-seed-sown basis. I think its a great book if you care about what you eat, where it comes from and how it was grown/raised. The organic apple or the conventional? We can bite like a carnivore, or chew like an herbivore, depending on the dish. One way to think about America’s national eating disorder is as the return, with an almost atavistic vengeance, of the omnivore’s dilemma. We rely on our prodigious powers of recognition and memory to guide us away from poisons (Isn’t that the mushroom that made me sick last week?) Centuries before the Pilgrims arrived the plant had already spread north from central Mexico, where it is thought to have originated, all the way to New England, where Indians were probably cultivating it by 1000. With the advent of the F-1 hybrid, a technology with the power to remake nature in the image of capitalism, Zea mays entered the industrial age and, in time, it brought the whole American food chain with it. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. The dilemma—what to have for dinner when you are a creature with an open-ended appetite—leads Pollan (Journalism/Berkeley; The Botany of Desire, 2001, etc.) Our eating also constitutes a relationship with dozens of other species—plants, animals, and fungi—with which we have coevolved to the point where our fates are deeply entwined. But that's only because of the power they wield. Greedy for carbon, C-4 plants can’t afford to discriminate among isotopes, and so end up with relatively more carbon 13. Agriculture has done more to reshape the natural world than anything else we humans do, both its landscapes and the composition of its flora and fauna. Something organic? After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Corn’s dual identity, as food and commodity, has allowed many of the peasant communities that have embraced it to make the leap from a subsistence to a market economy. Corn’s success might seem fated in retrospect, but it was not something anyone would have predicted on that day in May 1493 when Columbus first described the botanical oddity he had encountered in the New World to Isabella’s court. This one plant supplied settlers with a ready-to-eat vegetable and a storable grain, a source of fiber and animal feed, a heating fuel and an intoxicant. What forest or prairie could hope to match it? THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA By Michael Pollan. Indeed, in the last few years a whole catalog of exotic species from the tropics has colonized, and considerably enlivened, the produce department. (As one scientist put it, carbon supplies life’s quantity, since it is the main structural element in living matter, while much scarcer nitrogen supplies its quality—but more on that later.) understanding our present predicarnents surrounding food. Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat, when all went well, was something less than 50:1. Naturalists regard biodiversity as a measure of a landscape’s health, and the modern supermarket’s devotion to variety and choice would seem to reflect, perhaps even promote, precisely that sort of ecological vigor. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 8, 2018. Children of the Corn Toronto Star, May 14, 2006 This is simply one of the best books ever written about the state of … Since monoculture is the hallmark of the industrial food chain, this section focuses on a single plant: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass we call corn, which has become the keystone species of the industrial food chain, and so in turn of the modern diet. Yet in time, the plant of the vanquished would conquer even the conquerors. The author identifies three: the one controlled by agribusiness; the pastoral, organic industry that … THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA . What set off the sea change? Available in PDF, ePub and Kindle. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. This is essentially what a C-4 plant does. This book was definitely thought-provoking and enlightening, though it's not written in a way that will necessarily lead you to a particular outcome - it didn't feel to me like the author was driving a vegetarian/vegan/revolutionary/radical agenda. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Either way, it’ll earn you a measure of neighborly derision and hurt your yield. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. It had to multiply its yield by an order of magnitude, which it did by learning to grow shoulder to shoulder with other corn plants, as many as thirty thousand to the acre. And though my journeys did take me to a great many states, and covered a great many miles, at the very end of these food chains (which is to say, at the very beginning), I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt. This proposition is susceptible to scientific proof: The same scientists who glean the composition of ancient diets from mummified human remains can do the same for you or me, using a snip of hair or fingernail. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth. One of every four Americans lived on a farm when Naylor’s grandfather arrived here in Churdan; his land and labor supplied enough food to feed his family and twelve other Americans besides. But corn enjoyed certain botanical advantages that would allow it to thrive even as the Native Americans with whom it had coevolved were being eliminated. Another theme, or premise really, is that the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. The supermarket provides a prime example of the ways the ancient evolutionary “omnivore’s dilemma” perpetuates itself in modern human culture. BUT It isn't easily achieved, American Indians were the world’s first plant breeders, developing literally thousands of distinct cultivars for every conceivable environment and use. Yet because those seeds are now trapped in a tough husk, the plant has lost its ability to reproduce itself—hence the catastrophe in teosinte’s sex change. This is one of the ways in which the imperatives of biology are difficult to mesh with the imperatives of business. To take the wheel of a clattering 1975 International Harvester tractor, pulling a spidery eight-row planter through an Iowa cornfield during the first week of May, is like trying to steer a boat through a softly rolling sea of dark chocolate. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free. It’s as though every time you opened your mouth to eat you lost a quantity of blood. This magisterial work, whose subject is nothing less than our own omnivorous (i.e., eating everything) humanity, is … You won't want it if you read this book. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. And it surely would not be nearly so fat. Michael Pollan helps you answer this now so complicated question in his 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, named one of the five best non-fiction books of the year by The New York Times. The usual way a domesticated species figures out what traits its human ally will reward is through the slow and wasteful process of Darwinian trial and error. 2006, Print. It not only was a national bestseller and named a best book of the year by five publications including The New York Times, but it also galvanized a new national conversation on food, as evidenced by regular news articles and food pieces that cite your book. I would recommend this book to anybody, not only interested in food but human nature, the relationships between plants, animals, and fungi, government, and an opportunity for a richer, more natural life. How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world’s greatest success stories. Other have commented on the good parts of the book (and it IS very good), so I will comment on just one aspect that I found a bit distracting. So I set out to try to solve the modern omnivore’s dilemma. GET BOOK! The free corn sex I’ve described allowed people to do virtually anything they wanted with the genetics of corn except own them—a big problem for a would-be capitalist plant. But for omnivores like us (and the rat) a vast amount of brain space and time must be devoted to figuring out which of all the many potential dishes nature lays on are safe to eat. Our digestive tract is also good at digesting different types of foods. It’s difficult to control the means of production when the product you’re selling can reproduce itself endlessly. The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn. I didn't find it too bias, I thought maybe the author was slightly judgmental of industrial food, however after experiencing what goes on there I can see why he would be, even if he was trying not to be. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. ), The trick doesn’t yet, however, explain how a scientist could tell that a given carbon atom in a human bone owes its presence there to a photosynthetic event that occurred in the leaf of one kind of plant and not another—in corn, say, instead of lettuce or wheat. He's also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. You are what you eat, it’s often said, and if this is true, then what we mostly are is corn—or, more precisely, processed corn. The sight of such soil, pushing up and then curling back down behind the blade of his plow like a thick black wake behind a ship, must have stoked his confidence, and justifiably so: It’s gorgeous stuff, black gold as deep as you can dig, as far as you can see. Lacking any such local experience, wheat struggled to adapt to the continent’s harsh climate, and yields were often so poor that the settlements that stood by the old world staple often perished. Americans eat much more wheat than corn—114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. After water, carbon is the most common element in our bodies—indeed, in all living things on earth. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food, Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us. The initial deposit was made by the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier ten thousand years ago, and then compounded at the rate of another inch or two every decade by prairie grasses—big bluestem, foxtail, needlegrass, and switchgrass. No part of the big grass went to waste: The husks could be woven into rugs and twine; the leaves and stalks made good silage for livestock; the shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. In recent years some of this supermarket euphemism has seeped into Produce, where you’ll now find formerly soil-encrusted potatoes cubed pristine white, and “baby” carrots machine-lathed into neatly tapered torpedoes. How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs of nature into some of the great delights of human culture? We earthlings are, as they say, a carbon life form. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! Looked at another way, corn was the first plant to involve humans so intimately in its sex life. The human omnivore has, in addition to his senses and memory, the incalculable advantage of a culture, which stores the experience and accumulated wisdom of countless human tasters before him. We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too. If what goes on in the US eventually comes here, we had brace ourselves. And, most recently, industry has allowed us to reinvent the human food chain, from the synthetic fertility of the soil to the microwaveable can of soup designed to fit into a car’s cup holder. Find all the books, read about the author, and more. ), Corn won over the wheat people because of its versatility, prized especially in new settlements far from civilization. To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal’s pain but in our pleasure, too. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh” can all be derived from corn. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system—a patch of soil, a human body—and the health of one is connected—literally—to the health of the other. From corn, most of it in the United States on August 2, 2017 it from! 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