★★★☆☆ The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan
Advice I am not going to follow
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
Advice I am not going to follow
Michael Pollan is a person who cares deeply about food. I am not (which is a little strange, since I worked 31 years as a neuroscientist studying feeding behavior).
“Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.”
― Socrates
I am definitely a person who eats to live.
There are a few books in what I call the "history of substances" genre, for instance The True History of Chocolate, A Perfect Red, or A History of the World in 6 Glasses. I find these fascinating and would be happy to find more. I picked up The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals because I thought they were books in this vein, and The Omnivore's Dilemma was getting a lot of love from my friends.
Well, my hopes were not completely disappointed. The Omnivore's Dilemma does indeed contain fascinating information about the history of foods, and why we eat them. But what I found frustrating is that it is not enough for Pollan to inform us about foods -- he also wants to tell us what we should think about them. He wants us to be invested in our food, to care deeply about what we eat and to spend a lot of time thinking about it and working on it. He wants us to know that there are huge problems with the way we make and prepare our food (he's not wrong about that). To the extent that he proposes solutions, they sound to me like Luddism, or like problems that can only be addressed politically, but are out of the reach of most individuals
For me personally, what Pollan wants is not going to happen. I eat because I have to, and most of what I eat is what I can pick up in the grocery store and eat with little preparation. I have much better things to do with my time than spend the time worrying about food that Pollan apparently does. Well, it's his profession, but it is not mine, and it is not most people's. Pollan is impractical.