Table of Contents

Introduction: Our National Eating Disorder

I Industrial

Corn

One: The Plant: Corn's Conquest

Two: The Farm

Three: The Elevator

Four: The Feedlot: Making Meat

Five: The Processing Plant: Making COmplex Foods

Six: The Consumer: A Republic of Fat

Seven: The Meal: Fast Food

II Pastoral

Grass

Eight: All Flesh is Grass

Nine: Big Organic

Ten: Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture

Eleven: The Animals: Practicing Complexity'

Twelve: Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir

Thirteen: The Market: "Greetings from the Non-Barcode People"

Fourteen: The Meal: Grass-Fed

III Personal

The Forest: (Hunting and Catering)

Fifteen: The Forager

Sixteen: The Omnivore's Dilemma

Seventeen: The Ethics of Eating Animals

Eighteen: Hunting: The Meat

Nineteen: Gathering: The Fungi

Twenty: The Perfect Meal

Acknowledgments

Sources

Index

About the Author

Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Made the Modern World. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. 

Reviews

"'When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety,' Pollan writes in this supple and probing book. He gracefully navigates within these anxieties as he traces the origins of four meals—from a fast-food dinner to a "hunter-gatherer" feast—and makes us see, with remarkable clarity, exactly how what we eat affects both our bodies and the planet. Pollan is the perfect tour guide: his prose is incisive and alive, and pointed without being tendentious. In an uncommonly good year for American food writing, this is a book that stands out." —from The New York Times Book Review's “10 Best Books of 2006”

"'When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety,' Pollan writes in this supple and probing book. He gracefully navigates within these anxieties as he traces the origins of four meals-from a fast-food dinner to a "hunter-gatherer" feast-and makes us see, with remarkable clarity, exactly how what we eat affects both our bodies and the planet. Pollan is the perfect tour guide: his prose is incisive and alive, and pointed without being tendentious. In an uncommonly good year for American food writing, this is a book that stands out." -from The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2006"