The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

The whole of nature,”wrote the English author William Ralph Inge, “is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.”)

The great advantage of being a “reasonable creature,” Franklin remarks, is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do.

So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts too—animals that urinate, defecate, copulate, bleed, die, stink, and decompose.