Michael Pollan is the author of five books: Second Nature, A Place of My Own, The Botany of Desire, which received
the Borders Original Voices Award for the best nonfiction work of 2001 and was recognized as a best book of the
year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon, and the national bestellers, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and
In Defense of Food.
A longtime contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan is also the Knight Professor of Journalism
at UC Berkeley. His writing on food and agriculture has won numerous awards, including the Reuters/World Conservation
Union Global Award in Environmental Journalism, the James Beard Award, and the Genesis Award from the American
Humane Association.
Summary
A New York Times bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner? Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us-whether industrial or organic, alternative or processed-he develops a portrait of the American way of eating
Table of Contents
Introduction : our national eating disorder 1
1 The plant : corn's conquest 15
2 The farm 32
3 The elevator 57
4 The feedlot : making meat 65
5 The processing plant : making complex foods 85
6 The consumer : a republic of fat 100
7 The meal : fast food 109
8 All flesh is grass 123
9 Big organic 134
10 Grass : thirteen ways of looking at a pasture 185
11 The animals : practicing complexity 208
12 Slaughter : in a glass abattoir 226
13 The market : "greetings from the non-barcode people" 239
14 The meal : grass-fed 262
15 The forager 277
16 The omnivore's dilemma 287
17 The ethics of eating animals 304
18 Hunting : the meat 334
19 Gathering : the fungi 364
20 The perfect meal 391
