Let me just say how MUCH I loved this book. It was incredibly informative and beautifully put together, saying much about the American diet and why we eat what we do. I mean, who KNEW that corn was in almost EVERYTHING!!! I have to wonder if one can really escape corn in this country! Other memorable sections were the pages he spent describing hunting wild boars in CA, the ubiquitousness of Iowa corn, why Polyface farms in Virginia is such a gift and how wild mushrooms taste upon harvest. Michael Pollan has long been one of my favorite authors with The Botany of Desire being especially good. If you’re curious about WHERE your food comes from, I highly encourage you to read this book.

Below you’ll find some of my favorite quotes:

“A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn…to wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. 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. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find…Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins…there are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn…even in produce on a day when there’s ostensibly no corn for sale you’ll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce’s perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in” (pp. 18-19).

“Corn was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsisted during their passage to America” (p. 26).

“After Nixon’s 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizers factories. Without them, China would probably have starved” (p. 43).

“The United Nations reported that in 2000 the number of people suffering from overnutrition - a billion - had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition - 800 million” (p. 102).

Here’s something interesting about the concept of Supersizing food:

“Until his death in 1993, [David] Wallerstein served on the board of directors at McDonald’s, but in the fifties and sixties he worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas, where he labored to expand sales of soda and popcorn - the high-mark-up items that theaters depend on for their profitability…Wallerstein tried everything he could think of to goose up sales - two-for-one deals, matinee specials - but found he simply could not induce customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish. Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda - a lot more - as long as it came in single gigantic serving” (p. 105).

“Before we got off the phone, I asked Salatin if he could ship me one of his chickens and maybe a steak, too. He said that he couldn’t do that. I figured that he meant he wasn’t set up for shipping, so offered him my FedEx account number. “No, I don’t think you understand. I don’t believe it’s sustainable - or ‘organic’, if you will - to FedEx meat all around the country. I’m sorry, but I can’t do it.” This man was serious. “Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn’t mean we should do it, not if we’re really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism. I’m afraid if you want to try one of our chickens, you’re going to have to drive down here to Swoope to pick it up” (p. 133).

“Rozin found that the rat minimizes the risk of the new by treating its digestive tract as a kind of laboratory. It nibbles a very litle bit of the new food (assuming it is food) and then waits to see what happens. The animal evidently has a good enough grasp of causality (”delayed learning,” as the social scientists call it) to link a stomach ache in the present to something it ingested a half hour before, and a good enough memory to store that finding as a lifelong aversion to that particular substance. (This is what makes poisoning rats so difficult.)” (p. 288).

“Pregnant women are particularly sensitive to bitter tastes, probably an adaption to protect the developing fetus against even the mild plant toxins found in foods like broccoli. A bitter flavor on the tongue is a warning to exercise caution lest a poison pass what Brillat-Savarin called the sense of taste’s “faithful sentries” (p. 291).

So…you get the idea. Highly informative and easy to digest (pardon the pun). In the end, what Pollan analyzes is that we, Americans, do not have a culture of food, like the French. Instead, we have had cultures bring their food here, but we don’t have any national sense of food. Instead, we’re struggling with what to even eat these days!

As Pollan wrote on p. 301: “Fats or carbs? Three squares or continuous grazing? Raw or cooked? Organic or industrial? Veg or vegan? Meat or mock meat?…is it any wonder Americans suffer from so many eating disorders? In the absence of any lasting consensus about what and how and where and when to eat, the omnivore’s dilemma has returned to America with an almost atavistic force.”

Thoughts?