Michael Pollan: Omnivore's Dilemma

Reason for reading this book was a very Berkeley one. My colleague was supposed to be organising a series of diners/discussions on food politics and we were all supposed to read Pollan's book. It is quite infamous in Berkeley circles.

I have several reservations about this book. The biggest problem is that it reads as a really long in-flight magazine article. The dude is a journalist and it shows. There is no scholarly rigour, it is mostly a readable entertaining prose, more like a travel documentary rather than a serious book about food. If you like a genre like this, then you might like the book, but it is not very intellectual. Having stated this, the book is still worth reading because of the factual information it provides; it gives several convincing arguments against industrial production of food and puts my dislike of Whole Foods / recent fad on organic food on a firmer basis. Finally, some of the Salatin's methods described in the book are just genius and this book has convinced me that this might be the way to go, after all.