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

by Michael Pollan

Supermarket Pastoral is a most seductive literary form, beguiling enough to survive in the face of a great many discomfiting facts. I suspect that’s because it gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for safe food, but for a connection to the earth and to the handful of domesticated creatures we’ve long depended on. Whole Foods understands all this better than we do. One of the company’s marketing consultants explained to me that the Whole Foods shopper feels that by buying organic he is “engaging in authentic experiences” and imaginatively enacting a “return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact.” This sounds a lot like Virgilian pastoral, which also tried to have it both ways. In The Machine in the Garden Leo Marx writes that Virgil’s shepherd Tityrus, no primitive, “Enjoys the best of both worlds—the sophisticated order of art and the simple spontaneity of nature.” In keeping with the pastoral tradition, Whole Foods offers what Marx terms “a landscape of reconciliation” between the realms of nature and culture, a place where, as the marketing consultant put it, “people will come together through organic foods to get back to the origin of things”—perhaps by sitting down to enjoy one of the microwaveable organic TV dinners (four words I never expected to see conjoined) stacked in the frozen food case. How’s that for having it both ways?