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Pollan shows that corn-fed animals and fish don't have the same nutritional value as grass-fed animals; farmed salmon, for example, do not have the same omega-3 levels as their wild counterparts. By changing the diet of the animals we raise, we are changing ourselves. And it only takes a look at the soaring obesity rates to realize it is not for the better.

But the two portions of The Omnivore's Dilemma that I found most engaging explored the organic food industry (an oxymoron in itself) and sustainable farming. In the segment on sustainable agriculture (which he comes closest to idealizing of any of the four food systems), Pollan lauds a small Christian operation called Polyface Farms in Virginia as a model of what agriculture can aspire to. By using a more holistic, humane approach to land use and consuming locally and seasonally, rather than globally, sustainable farming seems to solve many of the problems created by industrial agriculture. Good reading, although many will wonder if it's viable on a large scale. To function on an ongoing basis, this sort of agriculture requires a heart-and-mind change on the part of the consumer. No small thing.

When Pollan examines the organic grocery business—"Big Organic"—he had me from the first page. What does organic really mean? With Wal-mart's recent announcement that it's jumping into the organic foods world, we need to know. And if I'm justifying my budget-busting trips to Whole Foods in the name of God, small-farming, and sustainable agriculture, I don't want to be hoodwinked.

Pollan traces the organic foods movement back to the writings of Sir Albert Howard, whose 1940 Testament  informed Rodale's magazine Organic Gardening and Farming and the writings of Wendell Berry (who is quoted liberally through Pollan's book). Howard had the arresting idea that we need to treat "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject." With this in mind, Pollan takes a deeper look at where the food from places such as Whole Foods now comes from. He also looks at such oddities as "organic microwavable TV dinners" and the article by nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow, "Can an Organic Twinkie Be Certified?" (The answer is yes.) This is journalism at its best.

Then Pollan, a master wordsmith, takes on the genre he calls Supermarket Pastoral, "a most seductive literary form, beguiling enough to survive in the face of a great many discomfiting facts." Why so? "I suspect …   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." What about dairy farms where cows have "access to pasture?" What exactly is "pasture?' and what is "access?" What is a "free-range chicken?" (The term, Pollan shows through a fascinating trip through a poultry house, is largely a joke, an empty conceit.)

Petroleum is another problem. What about the ethics of trucking "organically grown asparagus from Argentina" to America's suburbs in January? What are the economics of fuel and the cost to the people of Argentina, whose land is feeding Americans? The food industry, Pollan points out, burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States. And most "organic farming" is done on organic industrial farms, a contradiction in terms that Pollan explores at length in the fields of California. "Is there anything wrong with this picture? I'm not sure, frankly," Pollan concludes. What he finds is "a much greener machine, but a machine, nonetheless."

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June (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50