Book Review - the Omnivores Dilemma

Book Review

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is a book divided into three parts: Part I: Industrial/Corn; Part II: Pastoral/Grass; and Part III: Personal/The Forest. The third part, which consisted of chapters 15-17, was of particular interest to me because I felt it addressed the "meat" (pun intended) of the "Omnivore's Dilemma". For instance, chapter 15 discussed the author's desire to perform an exercise of eating only as our human ancestors once did: by hunting, gathering and growing; in chapter 16 the author specifically defined the "omnivore's dilemma"; and in chapter 17 Pollan surveyed the ethics of killing animals for the purpose of eating meat.

I am an omnivore - I eat everything - I am not vegetarian, vegan, nor is being kosher or halal a pre-requisite for the food that I eat. Furthermore, while I have been hunting in the past, and have also grown my own tomatoes, basil and chili peppers, I have never foraged (or gathered natural foods) for berries, nuts or fungi. Thus, I was both able to relate with the author in his pursuit of exercising a diet which was purely hunted and grown by himself, but was inexperienced in foraging, or gathering wild foods. Nevertheless, Pollan had never been hunting, nor had he ever shot a gun before, though he had foraged as a young child and grown his own garden foods in the past. Therefore, while Pollan and I had both grown our own foods before, he had never shot a gun or hunted, whereas I had, but I had never foraged, though he had. Still, I found Pollan's quote from Henry David Thoreau most amusing, because my father would have certainly agreed: "'We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,' he wrote in Walden. 'He is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.'"

I did however find I shared some similarity with the author, Pollan, in his shared account as a youth, when his mother used to "inculcate" extreme fear about eating unknown mushrooms and fungi in the wild. My parents also used to tell me the same thing - especially my father when I would go hunting for quail or ducks. He used to tell my brother and me, "Don't eat anything, or pick anything off the ground or bushes - we are here to hunt, not cherry-pick!" I must admit, even as a young man, hunting with my dad, I wondered why it was that we could not pick any wild fruits and vegetables when we were hunting wild meat to cook and eat ourselves. However, upon learning from the author that the "omnivore's dilemma" (as was eloquently coined by the U Penn psychologist, Paul Rozin) is itself the concept that determining which wild plants and fruits can be foraged in the wild to be used for food is the most difficult, I now understand why father was isolating his teaching task to only show us how to hunt, first, without engaging in the burdensome task of testing wild foods.

Chapter 16 was very inspiring, since I had learned the omnivore's dilemma and had experienced parental caution about gathering wild foods. I was most excited to learn that in fact it can still be safe to find wild foods by picking and gathering them. I must say that I loved hunting with my father, though we never really went for really big animals, but in an experimental mindset, like that of the author, it would be nice to know that one is able to survive in the wild - and foraging is important to supplement a balanced natural meal. I found it very interesting that foraging does accentuate Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" in the most ruthless sense: while omnivores are faced with a "bounty from nature," it is the task of identifying which foods are safe and which are not that is the natural selection of the fittest creatures - if you eat something and you die, then you were not fit for the task.

However, I also found chapter 16 interesting because my father used to always say, "you are what you eat," by which he implied that if you ate healthy foods then you would in turn be healthier, if ate junkie foods, then you would be junkie - but also, literally, your cells are made up of the things that you eat. However, in this chapter, I found that according to Levi-Strauss, "food must be 'not only good to eat, but also good to think.'" This concept prompted a memory about my great-grandmother who used to say to me and my mother that we should not ignore our appetite. She used to explain that our cravings were a way for our bodies to communicate with us, explaining to us that perhaps we had some mineral, vitamin or protein deficiency. She used to explain with great confidence that craving chocolate or coffee