Review Of The Omnivore's Dilemma By Michael Pollan

We come across varieties of food everyday, but we know very little about where it comes from and their history. Reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma opened my eyes to all that goes into producing what I eat. Pollan explores three different modern food chains in his book: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. He put together his investigation into four meals: a fast food meal eaten in the car, an organic meal from Whole Foods, an organic meal from a family run farm, and, lastly, a meal for which he gathered, grew and hunted all the ingredients. Reading through his journey we find that we nearly always prioritize abundance and want to create as much food as possible at as cheap of a price as we can. Thinking about food

I originally thought about the word organic as fruits and vegetables picked freshly from the branches of a tree and packaged into stores and chickens wandering large fields, I realize that it is not that simple. Michael Pollan traced some of his organic purchases back to their sources and discovers that there are organic feedlots, organic dairy cows whose lives are not any nicer than the conventional, and organic “free-range” chickens whose only access to the outside world is a small door in their shed, which is only open for about two weeks. “The organic movement, as it was once called, has come a remarkably long way in the last thirty years, to the point where it now looks considerably less like a movement than a big business” (Pollan 138). My thoughts now on organic foods at supermarkets such as Wegmans and Walmart is that the animals aren’t treated as great as conventional foods. I’ve realized that the extra cost of organic that I pay is largely because of the transportation. Transportation is a large cost which is why we are not actually spending so much on the food itself but the shipping expenses. It is a mistake to assume that the word organic means more healthier as it may appear to have been heavily