Zusatztext Gold Medal in Nonfiction for the California Book Award • Winner of the 2007 Bay Area Book Award for Nonfiction • Winner of the 2007 James Beard Book Award/Writing on Food Category • Finalist for the 2007 Orion Book Award • Finalist for the 2007 NBCC Award "Thoughtful, engrossing . . . You're not likely to get a better explanation of exactly where your food comes from." The New York Times Book Review "An eater's manifesto . . . [Pollan's] cause is just, his thinking is clear, and his writing is compelling. Be careful of your dinner!" The Washington Post "Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." The New Yorker "If you ever thought 'what's for dinner?' was a simple question, you'll change your mind after reading Pollan's searing indictment of today's food industry-and his glimpse of some inspiring alternatives . . . I just loved this book so much I didn't want it to end." The Seattle Times Michael Pollan has perfected a toneone of gleeful irony and barely suppressed outrageand a way of inserting himself into a narrative so that a subject comes alive through what he's feeling and thinking. He is a master at drawing back to reveal the greater issues. Los Angeles Times Michael Pollan convincingly demonstrates that the oddest meal can be found right around the corner at your local McDonald's . . . He brilliantly anatomizes the corn-based diet that has emerged in the postwar era. The New York Times [Pollan] wants us at least to know what it is we are eating, where it came from and how it got to our table. He also wants us to be aware of the choices we make and to take responsibility for them. It's an admirable goal, well met in The Omnivore's Dilemma . The Wall Street Journal A gripping delight . . . This is a brilliant, revolutionary book with huge implications for our future and a must-read for everyone. And I do mean everyone. The Austin Chronicle As lyrical as What to Eat is hard-hitting, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals may be the best single book I read this year. This magisterial work, whose subject is nothing less than our own omnivorous (i.e., eating everything) humanity, is organized around two plants and one ecosystem. Pollan has a love-hate relationship with 'Corn,' the wildly successful plant that has found its way into meat (as feed), corn syrup and virtually every other type of processed food. American agribusiness' monoculture of corn has shoved aside the old pastoral ideal of 'Grass,' and the self-sustaining, diversified farm based on the grass-eating livestock. In 'The Forest,' Pollan ponders the earliest forms of obtaining food: hunting and gathering. If you eat, you should read this book. Newsday Smart, insightful, funny and often profound. USA Today The Omnivore's Dilemma is an ambitious and thoroughly enjoyable, if sometimes unsettling, attempt to peer over these walls, to bring us closer to a true understanding of what we eatand, by extension, what we should eat . . . It is interested not only in how the consumed affects the consumer, but in how we consumers affect what we consume as well . . . Entertaining and memorable. Readers of this intelligent and admirable book will almost certainly find their capacity to delight in food augmented rather than diminished. San Francisco Chronicle On the long trip from the soil to our mouths, a trip of 1,500 miles on average, the food we eat often passes through places most of us will never see. Michael Pollan has spent much of the last five years visiting these places on our behalf. Salon.com The author of ...

Autorentext

Michael Pollan is the author of seven previous books, including 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's also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

Klappentext

**"Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." —The New Yorker

One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year and Winner of the James Beard Award

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A World Appears, This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, In Defense of Food and Food Rules**

What should we have for dinner? Twenty years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and—with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his groundbreaking 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. Twenty years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform.

Leseprobe

INTRODUCTION

Our National Eating Disorder 

What should we have for dinner?

This book is a long and fairly involved answer to this seemingly simple question. Along the way, it also tries to figure out how such a simple question could ever have gotten so complicated. As a culture we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety. Somehow this most elemental of activities—figuring out what to eat—has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help. How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?

For me the absurdity of the situation became inescapable in the fall of 2002, when one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table. I’m talking of course about bread. Virtually overnight, Americans changed the way they eat. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia seized the country, supplanting an era of national lipophobia dating to the Carter administration. That was when, in 1977, a Senate committee had issued a set of “dietary goals” warning beef-loving Americans to lay off the red meat. And so we dutifully had done, until now.

What set off the sea change? It appears to have been a perfect media storm of diet books, scientific studies, and one timely magazine article. The new diet books, many of them inspired by the formerly discredited Dr. Robert C. Atkins, brought Americans the welcome news that they could eat more meat and lose weight just so long as they laid off the bread and pasta. These high-protein, low-carb diets found support in a handful of new epidemiological studies suggesting that the nutritional orthodoxy that had held sway in America since the 1970s might be wrong. It was not, as official opinion claimed, fat that made us fat, but the carbohydrates we’d been eating precisely in order to stay slim. So conditions were ripe for a swing of the dietary pendulum when, in the summer of 2002, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story on the new research entitled “What if Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat?” Within months, supermarket shelves were restocked and restaurant menus rewritten to reflect the new nutritional wisdom. The blamelessness of steak restored, two of the most wholesome an…