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

by Michael Pollan

It would not be apt to confuse protein bars and food supplements with meals or breakfast cereals with medicines.

Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature’s ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature’s complexities,

The fact that today one so often does suggests a pretty good start on a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain.

So that’s us: processed corn, walking.