Friday, March 25, 2011

Pollan, Michael (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

Holy crap. Every single person in the United States has to read this book. In fact, it should be a national directive. Isn't Michelle all het up about food? Can't she make every adult read this? We need to give our First Persons more power, I guess.

Besides the subject matter (more on that in a sec), the main reason to read this is the stellar quality of the writing. It is rare to run across a writer capable of so much: editing himself (both globally and per sentence), while at the same time thoroughly describing something and leading you to the next sentence/paragraph/page seamlessly. I was constantly astounded by this.

Subject matter! Wow. I had my eyes opened. And we eat really, really well in our house, in general. We have an organic farm share, get dairy delivered direct from cows milked that morning, pick up honey and eggs and fruit from the farmer's market, and do our darndest (well, I do) to get grass-fed lamb and chicken. (For some reason, that latter thing is the hardest.) But after reading about corn! in! all! your! food!, I went and took a look at the packaged stuff we can't avoid using, and yes. It is all full of corn. Corn in miniscule amounts, but it's still corn.

In fact, I double-dog dare ya to look at your typical Morton salt container.

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