The Omnivore's Dilemma
Four meals, traced all the way down: a McDonald's lunch eaten in a moving car, a Whole Foods basket, a dinner from Joel Salatin's grass farm, and one meal Pollan hunts and forages himself. The route runs through the cornfields of Iowa, feedlots, and the marketing of the word organic. The book that made a generation ask what it was actually eating.
The alternatives he lands on are unavailable to anyone working paycheck to paycheck, and readers see a “well-off white man oversimplifying an incredibly complex issue,” one reading the politics as something that “reads like a Libertarian Manifesto.” He reaches a pro-meat conclusion without ever visiting an industrial slaughterhouse, which readers call “his attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance.” The hunting chapter draws the sharpest backlash, its “florid, masturbatory prose” more about Pollan than the animal, and the book “loses its way towards the end.” And readers with farming backgrounds call the subsidy figures “woefully out of date.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
