The Omnivore's Dilemma Book Review

How come Americans are obsessed with food (new diets, restaurants, television shows, the list goes on and on) but no one cares or knows where their food came from and how it got on the shelf at the supermarket? The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan teaches readers about the importance of being educated about where your food comes from and how to make your own decisions about what and how to eat. Humans, as omnivores, have too many options for food and we don’t know what is good for us. Pollan argues that many diets and information from professionals are false, Americans have no tradition or cultural foods, and the human instinct of not eating bitter foods is no excuse to stop eating nutrient packed foods. First, Pollan talks about how many people throughout history that were supposed to be experts, for example Dr. Kellogg, came up with some strange theories that many people believed, but we later discovered were not true. Americans follow these “food fads” and so they don’t have consistent eating habits through time. The book says “We don’t have any strong food traditions to guide us, so we seek food advice from ‘experts.’ This may be one reason we have so many diet fads in this

It would be significantly easier if you just ate what generations before you did, but in this day and age, with people from all over the world living in the United States, we have too many options for food. Michael Pollan says “They learned how to cook and and prepare those foods and passed all this knowledge onto their children. You grew up knowing what to eat and how to cook it” (91). This quote demonstrates that people from other countries, ones that do have a strong food culture, don’t have the same problems of not knowing what and how to eat, like many Americans do. Not having traditional foods and ethnic foods shows again how we have an abundance of options for food, which is not necessarily a good