The Omnivore's Dilemma - Young Readers Edition

This work of narrative nonfiction follows Michael Pollan as he acts as a "food detective," tracing four distinct food chains (industrial, industrial organic, local sustainable, and hunter-gatherer) from their origins to the plate, each ending with a meal. The book is organized around the omnivore's dilemma: Because humans can eat almost anything, they lack built-in instincts about what is safe or good to eat, a problem compounded in modern America, where thousands of food products are available but consumers know almost nothing about how their food is produced. Pollan's investigation began after reporting assignments shattered his idealized image of American farming: a visit to a 15,000-acre potato farm in Idaho and a drive past a massive cattle feedlot in California's Central Valley.

Part One traces the industrial food chain, which begins and ends with corn. Pollan reveals that more than a quarter of the roughly 45,000 items in an average supermarket contain corn, whether as high-fructose corn syrup, modified starch, or feed for livestock. He explains corn's rise from teosinte, a wild Central American grass, to the dominant crop in American agriculture. He visits George Naylor, an Iowa farmer whose 470-acre operation grows only corn and soybeans. Naylor's grandfather raised diverse crops and livestock; now mechanization and government subsidies have pushed out the animals, the variety, and most of the people. Hybrid seeds introduced in the 1930s quadrupled yields but forced farmers to buy new seed each year. The postwar conversion of a munitions plant to fertilizer production transformed farming from a solar-powered ecological loop into a fossil-fuel-dependent system. The environmental costs are severe: Excess nitrogen creates a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico nearly the size of Connecticut, and the Naylors do not drink their own well water because of contamination.

Pollan traces how U.S. farm policy shifted in the early 1970s from stabilizing crop prices to encouraging maximum production through direct subsidies, driving prices below the cost of production and benefiting agribusiness corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. At a grain elevator in Farnhamville, Iowa, a facility where harvested grain is stored and blended, he finds a huge surplus sitting in the rain. He follows the corn to Poky Feeders, a feedlot where he reunites with steer number 534, a calf he purchased to track through the meat system. Cattle evolved to eat grass using a specialized stomach called a rumen, but feedlot corn diets cause bloat, acidosis, and liver damage; the animals survive only through constant antibiotics, which breed resistant bacteria. Pollan connects the flood of cheap, processed corn to the obesity epidemic, noting that supersized portions exploit instincts evolved during scarcity. For his industrial meal, he takes his wife, Judith, and son, Isaac, to McDonald's. A lab analysis reveals the corn content of their food: The soda is 100 percent corn-derived, the milkshake 78 percent, and the cheeseburger 52 percent. The family consumes 4,510 calories in under 10 minutes.

Part Two examines the industrial organic food chain. Pollan shops at Whole Foods, drawn to labels promising "free-range" and "cage-free" products, then investigates what "organic" means at industrial scale. He visits Gene Kahn, who founded Cascadian Farm as a hippie commune in 1972; it is now owned by General Mills, and the original farmstead serves only as a photo backdrop for packaging. At Earthbound Farm, which produces 80 percent of America's organic lettuce, a one-pound box of prewashed salad requires over 4,600 calories of fossil fuel to produce yet contains only 80 food calories. At Petaluma Poultry, "Rosie," the free-range chicken on the label, lives in a shed with 20,000 birds; a small door to a yard stays shut until the birds are five weeks old, by which time none venture outside. Pollan concludes that industrial organic food is a genuine improvement, substituting compost and natural pesticides for synthetic chemicals, but it remains nearly as dependent on fossil fuels and can involve misleading labels.

Part Three follows the local sustainable food chain at Polyface Farm near Swoope, Virginia, run by Joel Salatin and his family. Salatin calls himself a "grass farmer" because everything on his 100 acres of pasture and 450 acres of forest depends on the solar energy captured by grasses. He moves cattle to fresh pasture every evening, giving grasses time to recover. Three days later, Salatin moves in the Eggmobile, a portable henhouse whose 400 laying hens scratch apart cowpats to eat fly larvae, eliminating parasites while fertilizing the pasture. Broiler chickens rotate in floorless pens, turkeys move through the orchard, and in winter, pigs root through composting barn bedding to aerate it. The farm produces impressive yields without antibiotics or chemical inputs, leaving the land in better condition each year.

On processing day, Pollan helps slaughter 300 chickens, personally killing about a dozen, and reflects that the most troubling aspect is how quickly the work becomes routine. Salatin insists on transparency: Customers can watch, and lab tests show his chickens carry lower bacteria counts than supermarket birds. Pollan prepares his local sustainable meal at a friend's house: brined, applewood-grilled Polyface chicken, sweet corn, garden salad, and a chocolate soufflé made with the farm's bright orange-yolked eggs. Grass-fed animals, he explains, produce healthier meat with more omega-3 fatty acids and less saturated fat. The chicken tastes intensely flavorful, and the meal stretches into a long evening of conversation about the food chain from grass to plate.

Part Four follows the hunter-gatherer food chain. Pollan sets out to prepare a meal entirely from foods he has hunted, gathered, and grown himself, enlisting Angelo Garro, a Sicilian-born San Francisco blacksmith, as his guide. Before hunting, Pollan reads Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, which argues that causing animal suffering cannot be morally justified. He temporarily becomes a vegetarian but concludes that killing animals for food is not wrong in principle; what matters is how they live and die. Angelo takes Pollan hunting for feral pigs in Sonoma County. On the first hunt, Pollan spots pigs but has forgotten to chamber a round; on a second hunt, he kills a large sow with a clean shot. He feels pride and thankfulness, then shame upon seeing a photograph of himself grinning behind the bleeding animal. Angelo also teaches Pollan to hunt chanterelle mushrooms beneath oak trees and gather morels, another edible wild species that fruits in burned forests, in the Eldorado National Forest.

For his final meal, Pollan sets strict rules: Everything must be hunted, gathered, or grown by him, including at least one animal, vegetable, and fungus. His attempt to gather salt from San Francisco Bay produces a greasy, chemical-tasting product he abandons. The menu includes fava bean toasts, boar pâté, egg fettuccine with morels, braised and grilled wild pig, garden salad, bing cherry tart, and Angelo's homemade wine. At dinner, conversation centers on the forests and fields the food came from. Pollan calls it the Perfect Meal, not for the cooking but for the connection everyone feels to the food, the land, and each other.

In an afterword, Pollan acknowledges that the book complicates readers' food choices but argues that knowledge is better than ignorance. He describes how his own family now avoids feedlot meat and fast food, buys grass-fed beef and organic produce, and shops at farmers' markets. He encourages readers to "vote with your fork" by choosing foods that reflect their values, and offers three guiding principles: Eat real food, buy real food, and eat real meals. Young people, he stresses, can exercise this vote three times a day without waiting until they are old enough to cast a ballot.