Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 11-15 of 569
 Omnivore's Dilemma October 12, 2009
A. Byers (Longmont, CO USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is an amazing insight into our food supply. As a result of reading it I have made dramatic changes to my diet - all for the good of the planet as well as my family's health. I'm grateful for the insight this author has provided.
 Used book just as described October 11, 2009
Alysia M. Paaluhi (Mililani, HI)
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
The book I bought from this seller came just as described, and within the specified shipping time. I would buy again.
Know where your food comes from October 11, 2009
tech collector (Midwest, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The story of one man seeking to understand the various paths by which food is available to us omnivores. Written with little opinion, the overall theme is we need to individually think about the full pipeline of the food we eat, be comfortable with it or change, and respect the food we have and its sources.
 Timely topic, but hard to read October 10, 2009
Mary F. Balmer (St Louis MO, USA)
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
Book was chosen by my Book Club. First time in ten years, I did not finish the selection. Just couldn't stay awake! However, my friends for the most part enjoyed it, and we had a lively discussion.
Good Read but Self-Indulgent October 4, 2009
Jiang Xueqin (Toronto, Canada)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
According to Michael Pollan, the omnivore's dilemma is that if you can eat everything you're not entirely sure what to eat. If that sounds lame and obvious that's because it is, and there are long sections of the book where the author engages in self-indulgent and pointless philosophizing. Nevertheless, the book is informative enough in certain sections and entertaining enough in others to make it a worthwhile read.
For his structure Michael Pollan creates two dichotomies. The first is between corn, the plant that underlies the omnipresent industrial food system, and grass, the plant that harks back to a more innocent and healthier age of man. The second is between two meals: a quick cheap McDonald's meal that Michael Pollan's family eats in their car, and another meal that the author has to spend many months hunting and foraging, entertaining adventures that the author spends many chapters recounting. According to Michael Pollan, both meals are not really possible but while we know that the latter is clearly unsustainable we fail to see that in the former.
Michael Pollan is annoying and pretentious as an intellectual but as a journalist he does manage to find interesting people doing interesting things. By far the most interesting section of the book is on Joel Salatin, a self-described "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer" who has ingeniously created his own self-sufficient eco-system called Polyface Farm. Just as it's not really possible to replicate the author's hunting and foraging of a meal, it's also not really possible for farmers to replicate Joel Salatin's eccentric genius in creating a small profitable farm in defiance of the industrial food system.
So what exactly is Michael Pollan's point? As we can observe from his final section where he waxes poetic about the beauty of hunting wild boar and foraging for wild mushrooms the author doesn't have any point because he's too entrenched in comfort in Berkeley, California to really care about the dangerous and serious ramifications of the industrial food system. [...]
Showing reviews 11-15 of 569
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