The Omnivore's Dilemma

Posted by: stak
Tags: books
Posted on: 2012-11-28 18:50:27

A book that I read recently is The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. For uninteresting reasons I actually ended up reading both the Young Reader's edition and the regular edition. I highly recommend the Young Reader's edition, and only moderately recommend the regular edition.

The book traces 4 different meals back to their ingredient components. Doing so provides a pretty good picture of what the food industry is like (at least in North America), and was quite eye-opening. This is one of those books that has no real pre-requisites to fully understand, and almost certainly has something new for everybody. More importantly, it doesn't try to change your mind about anything - the author describes what he found, as well as his own feelings and thoughts on the topics; what you choose to do with the information is entirely up to you.

The reason I recommend the Young Reader's edition over the regular edition is simply that it's got 90% of the content in about 60% of the words. The regular edition has a lot of the author waxing philosophical and/or poetic and those bits weren't really that interesting to me. There were also some additional tidbits of information here and there but not enough to be worth it for the average reader.

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