Rating: - Best book on food ever
This is the third book by Pollan I've read, each one better than the other. If you're concerned about the food you and your family are eating, read this and start to improve your lives.

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Rating: - the omnivores dilemma
this book was in excellent condition. i will always order my books this way. so far i've ordered about ten books and have had great experiences.

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Rating: - Incredible Information on Why We Are Sick Today
I loved how the author took you step by step through the problems in today's food industry and spelled out why you can't just go to the store, buy food, and think that your decisions not only impact your health, but the environment as well. If we want America to be healthy, we must be more conscious of our eating habits and decisions.

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Rating: - Reading this might change your life -- be careful
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
I have to caution you that reading this book might make you never want to eat corn-fed beef again. I won't ruin it for you, but since I read this book I can't eat anything but free-range chicken and grass-fed beef. That stuff isn't easy to find and ain't cheap to buy. So beware. Once you know what Michael Pollan explains, you can't un-know it. Or you have to suppress it with a herculean denial effort. So you've been warned.
Having said that, I'm glad I read this book and I'm grateful to have been taught the truth. Animals deserve our respect, especially if we're going to eat them.

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Rating: - Great, now everybody believes in Pollan's imaginary "corn test"
This book was well written and the author obviously put his heart, soul, and lots of research into it. But it bears the inevitable mark of a book written by a person who is a novice in the subject he is writing about. It is journalism, not research - and far from science. There is way too much sensationalism and jumping to conclusions for my taste.

One thing that significantly annoyed me was Pollan's "wild" meal, of which nearly all the calories, except for the pork, were from store-bought, cultivated foods. He wouldn't buy one or two organic veggies to embellish a Burger King value meal and then call it an "organic" meal, so why did he do something comparable with his foraged meal?

I was also disgusted with the elitism that he expressed again and again throughout the book. I was surprised by his blatant condescension toward Joel Salatin, which reveals a deep-seated us-and-them worldview. He comes to no conclusion, no solution, in this book, because an obvious part of the solution to a sustainable food system is that more people need to be ivolved in growing food and feeding themselves. He doesn't want to do this himself; he feels that it is beneath him, so certainly he is not going to lead the discussion to this most appropriate end place.

An example of Pollan's poor scholarship is his discussion of a test that supposedly can tell how much corn a person is composed of. I teach about food, and have been hearing people talk about this "corn test" ever since the book came out. But there is no such test. The test he mentions can only differentiate between plants using two types of photosynthetic process: C3 and C4. Corn is a C4 plant. The test tells you how much of an organism's tissue is derived from c4 versus c3 plants. This would be a "corn test" only if corn was the only c4 plant. But there are thousands of others, and many of them are common foods. Like sugar cane. The "corn test" cannot even differentiate cane sugar from corn syrup. It also cannot differentiate grass-fed from corn-fed beef, as the grasses and forbs on many range areas, particularly in the arid west, are primarily c4. It seems that Pollan got the idea from a specific study in which archeologists sampled bones from one specific area of Mexico. The archeologists presumed that when a shift in c3/c4 ratios (toward more c4) was seen in the bones, that this represented the shift from a diet of acorns and avocadoes as staples to one of corn and amaranth as staples. If the assumptions are correct, this may be true, but the way Pollan wrote of this test was egregiously misleading. As an author read by millions, one has a respionsibility not to spread this sort of misinformation; now, due solely to his lack of either diligence or intelligence (and I'm assuming the faormer), it will permeate our culture for a generation.

But hey, it's an entertaining read, and it generates thought. I know this review sounds very negative, but I liked the book even if parts of it made me seethe. Definitely get it, read it, and contemplate.