If you really want to understand where your food comes from, then Pollan’s book is a must-read. Whether you eat at McDonalds, Whole Foods or at your local Farmer’s Market this book will help you understand the impact that your food choices have on the world. I will never look at either industrial agriculture or organic agriculture in the same way. Highly recommended.

Book of the year so far (keep in mind, it’s the beginning of March). I really enjoyed Pollan’s writing style – the book was fairly conversational, which made it easy to read, but was very informative throughout. I also liked the way he organized the content into the 3.5 different families of food and further broke down each section – the repetition and order made it very easy to read and to relate the sections one to the other.

I really enjoyed the first two sections – industrial and organic/“local sustainable”. They both opened my eyes up quite a bit – I didn’t fully realize the extent to which corn had pervaded our food chain, and the problems and modifications that that’s caused. I was also unaware of exactly how little the “organic” designation bought us on food (although I did know that I enjoy calling non-organic food as “inorganic” – the absurdity!), and I really enjoyed the description of the differences between industrial organic and smaller, sustainable, grass-based farming.

The last section – hunting and gathering – didn’t thrill me quite as much, although it was still well worth reading. I think I was turned off by the discussion of the ethics of eating animals, partly because (like most people, I suspect) I sometimes feel guilty about eating animals, especially animals that probably didn’t have very enjoyable lives, and thinking about that isn’t a lot of fun for me. Also, I found that the discussion veered more and more toward Pollan relating other writers’ and philosophers’ views on these matters, leaving behind some of the fact-based format of the previous sections (although we did get a fair bit of Salatin’s opinions in the middle section). Finally, I think that the hunter/gatherer section just didn’t apply to me, in that I know I’m not going to run out and become a hunter or gatherer, but I might (do) eat industrially produced food and might (do, but less so) eat more organic and/or sustainably and locally grown foods.

Read the book, it’s kind of like a Guns, Germs, and Steel that deals with present-day food issues, instead of food issues from 11,000 years ago.