Pollan (The Botany of Desire) examines what he calls "our national eating
disorder" (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this
remarkably clearheaded book. It's a fascinating journey up and down the
food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen
dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll
certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.Pollan
approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way
we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world."
All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi.
"[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely
what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living
creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods
from petroleum, at least not directly."Pollan's narrative strategy is
simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with
a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car.
Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds
the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the
fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes
up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets.Indeed,
one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in
the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than
a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean
nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has
exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-
getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have
made a corn field seem so sinister.Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with
items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big
organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia
farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted.
This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful
a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's
also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International
Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from
a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into
the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go hunting with
Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as
we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota.

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