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

by Michael Pollan

all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules.

the good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but the same knowledge.

“Men have become the tools of their tools.”

As cannibal tribes have discovered, eating the flesh of one’s own species carries special risks of infection.

The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.)

taste is as much a matter of what’s in the head as it is about molecules dancing on the tongue,

People began processing food to keep nature from taking it back:

In the typical formulation, corn supplies the carbohydrates (sugars and starches) and soy the protein; the fat can come from either plant.

“The further a product’s identity moves from a specific raw material—that is, the more processing steps involved—the less vulnerable is its processor”

One reason that obesity and diabetes become more prevalent the further down the socioeconomic scale you look is that the industrial food chain has made energy-dense foods the cheapest foods in the market, when measured in terms of cost per calorie.

corn is everywhere in our meal, but in unspecified amounts.

Because a healthy soil digests the dead to nourish the living, Salatin calls it the earth’s stomach.

We come here to eat the animals that ate the grass that we (lacking rumens) can’t eat ourselves.

how could such plants be any more nutritious than the soil in which they grew?

What works is what survives.

science is mostly a tool for describing what works and explaining why it does.

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

“Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?”

Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing.

Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren’t).

Apart from fruits, which have a declared interest in becoming another species’ lunch (this being their strategy for spreading their seeds), and grasses, which welcome grazing as a strategy to keep their habitat free of shady competitors, most wild foods are parts of plants or animals that have no interest in being eaten; they evolved defenses to keep themselves whole.

“[C]uisines embody some of a culture’s accumulated wisdom about food.”

Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations.

Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter—this quantity of sacrificed life—just before the body takes its first destructive bite.

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.

“Journalists are at best short-term visionaries. Any more than that, no one would read them.”)