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.”)

For once, I was able to pay the full karmic price of a meal.

point of view the arrangement appears even cleverer. The existential challenge

Shopping at Whole Foods is a literary experience, too. That’s not to take anything away from the food, which is generally of high quality, much of it “certified organic” or “humanely raised” or “free range.” But right there, that’s the point: It’s the evocative prose as much as anything else that makes this food really special, elevating an egg or chicken breast or bag of arugula from the realm of ordinary protein and carbohydrates into a much headier experience, one with complex aesthetic, emotional, and even political dimensions.

“One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.”

green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the

entered a new kind of ecological niche in nature, one that some anthropologists have labeled “the cognitive niche.” The term seems calculated to smudge the line between biology and culture, which is precisely the point.

Brillat-Savarin writes, “the machinery of taste attains a rare perfection in man,” making “man the only gourmand in the whole of nature.”

In fact, the “happy life and merciful death” line is how Jeremy Bentham justified his own meat eating. Yes, the philosophical father of animal rights was himself a carnivore. In a passage seldom quoted by animal rightists Bentham defended meat eating on the grounds that “we are the better for it, and they are never the worse…. The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.”

What shames at least some of us about hunting is the same thing that shames us about every other reminder of our origins: that is, the incompleteness of our transcendence of our animal nature.

The hunter—or at least the grown-up hunter, the uneasy hunter—recognizes the truths disclosed in both views, which is why his joy is tempered by shame, his appetite shadowed by disgust.

A cynical person might say that cooking like this—with ambition—is really just another way of showing off, a form of what might be called conspicuous production. It says, I have the resources, sophistication, and leisure time to dazzle you with this meal.

Perhaps the perfect meal is one that’s been fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this meal. But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted.

we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.