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

by Michael Pollan

Some remarkable changes have taken place in the food and farming landscape since this book was published in 2006. Consider this handful of statistics, each in its own way an artifact of the “where-does-my-food-come-from” question: There are now more than eight thousand farmers markets in America, an increase of 180 percent since 2006. More than four thousand school districts now have farm-to-school programs, a 430 percent increase since 2006, and the percentage of elementary school with gardens has doubled, to 26 percent. During that period sales of soda have plummeted, falling 14 percent between 2004 and 2014. The food industry is rushing to reformulate hundreds of products to remove high fructose corn syrup and other processed-food ingredients that consumers have made clear they will no longer tolerate. Sales of organic food have more than doubled since 2006, from $16.7 billion in 2006 to more than $40 billion today. The kind of grass-finished beef and pastured eggs that Joel Salatin produces at Polyface Farm were so exotic in 2006 that national sales figures for them didn’t exist; now, you can find these foods in many supermarkets, and both categories are growing by double digit percentages each year. (Carl’s Junior, the fast food chain, introduced a grass-fed hamburger in 2014.) From California to Georgia, there are now hundreds of farms modeled on Polyface’s intricate choreography of animals. And Joel Salatin himself has become an international celebrity farmer, a soc...