The Omnivore's Dilemma
“Award-winning narrator Scott Brick—truly one of the best in the business—takes the listener on a mesmerizing adventure to find some answers. The investigation could have bogged down in Pollan’s exhaustive details, but Brick captures each experience with a tempo and emotional coloring all its own.”
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Author of How to Change Your Mind and the #1 New York Times bestsellers In Defense of Food and Food Rules
What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
A few facts and figures from The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals:
Of the 38 ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, there are at least 13 that are derived from corn. 45 different menu items at Mcdonald’s are made from corn.
One in every three American children eats fast food every day.
One in every five American meals today is eaten in the car.
The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States—more than we burn with our cars and more than any other industry consumes.
It takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.
A single strawberry contains about five calories. To get that strawberry from a field in California to a plate on the east coast requires 435 calories of energy.
Industrial fertilizer and industrial pesticides both owe their existence to the conversion of the World War II munitions industry to civilian uses—nerve gases became pesticides, and ammonium nitrate explosives became nitrogen fertilizers.
Because of the obesity epidemic, today’s generation of children will be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than their parents’ life expectancy.
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