required reading for anyone who eats

My parents wisely obeyed my Christmas demands this year, well a couple of them anyway, and I was greeted with the book cover you see to the left. This book should really be read by anyone who cares about what they consume. Pollan carefully traces the origins of four meals from their most basic element to how major components of the meal are processed and sold to what the final product looks and tastes like.
Michael Pollan challenges our notions of consumption and thereby challenges us to be more aware of what it is we are consuming. Most of us stop into the supermarket or restaurant assuming we are getting at least decent quality products, but are in fact getting the end of a less than appetizing industrial food chain prodded on by government subsidies and the idea that consumers want it now and want it cheap. Pollan states,

“To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave the world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal’s pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat” (10-11).

Pollan does present rising alternatives to the pervasive industrial food chain. Most interesting are “postindustrial” farms that aim to return animals to living and eating the way they were intended, most notably on grass pastures (Most animals in industrial systems are fed corn which is contrary to all of their natural eating habits and kept in overpopulated corrals or cages). These farms also adhere to a policy of produce locally and sell locally. This is food at its purest -something I’m not entirely sure my generation has really experienced. For local farms like this in your area, you can visit http://www.eatwild.com/.
My brief blurb in no way does justice to what has been one of the most illuminating books I have read in some years. For something that is so central to our health and culture, not to mention our enjoyment, we have little idea of what is really on our plates.