It’s divided up into 3 sections, Industrial Corn, Pastoral Grass, and Personal The Forest.
Each of this book’s three parts follows one of the principal human food chains from beginning to end: from a plant, or group of plants, photosynthesizing calories in the sun, all the way to a meal at the dinner end of that food chain.
The first section, Industrial Corn, was probably the most interesting. There are a lot of facts about the American corn industry (and agriculture in general) that was quite enlightening. For example, did you know that science can detect the isotopes of carbon in human tissue and calculate how much corn a person has in their diet? Or that corn in American costs more to grow than it does to buy, and the difference is hidden by government subsidies to farmers?
Pastoral Grass, section 2, takes a look at Polyface Farm in Virginia. Unlike most of American farming that’s focused on monoculture or packing as many animals as possible into a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation), the folks at Polyface rotate crops, and animals, in the same face. They produce beef, chicken, eggs, and other things, all using the same land. They also do not sell their products for shipment, and everything stays mostly local (within a day’s drive). I found this chapter pretty interesting too, but the chicken slaughtering part was tough to read. I think it’s good to see an example of farming the way farming was meant to be, in stark contract to the American factory farming that seems to be almost ubiquitous at this point.
The final, Personal, section is my least favorite. Here, Pollan decides he must be vegetarian in order to be objective about evaluating the morals of eating meat. However, from this point on, the book takes on a less journalistic tone, and becomes mostly Pollan’s rationalization back to eating meat.
…there remains the question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral consideration, and this seems impossible to deny. And if we owe them moral consideration, how do we justify killing and eating them?
Based just on the first two sections, I think this is an amazing book, and is very insightful. It’s too bad that Pollan had to make it more about himself at the end.
3.5 out of 5 stars.