The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan, Penguin Books, 2006

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver, HarperCollins, 2007

If you’re an American you’ll probably put just about anything into your mouth – if an ad has told you it’s food, that is. A pair of recent bestsellers have struggled with the strange and dysfunctional situation American eaters find themselves in, and both books offer some suggestions for a way out. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle are alarm-sounding examinations of American eating, one more sentimental than the other. 

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan looks at American food consumption through the eyes of an omnivore. The dilemma in question is the choice an omnivore – a creature who can eat just about anything – faces when trying to decide what to eat. A koala, for example, doesn’t have the problem; it’s eucalyptus leaves or nothing. But humans can digest almost anything, so we’ve had to juggle a complicated set of concerns when building our menus: What is most nutritious? What is poisonous? What is easiest to hunt or gather? What tastes best? Pollan gets scientific and detailed as he delves into the specifics of our historical dilemma. 

The conceit of Pollan’s book is the attempt to trace a few meals through their respective food chains, from their origins in solar energy absorbed by plants to their final form on his plate (if there is, in fact, a plate involved). He first follows the industrial food chain – genetically modified corn, factory farms and feedlots, processing plants, McDonald’s – to a fast-food meal that he and his family eat in their car. Later he uncovers the organic food chain – first the “industrial organic” complex that simply eschews chemical fertilizers and other chemicals in an otherwise industrial model, then visiting a small organic farm in Virginia run by a libertarian farmer who “opts out” of just about everything that America stands for. Finally, Pollan hunts and gathers his own meal with the help of some European-Californian gourmands who show him how to hunt boar and mushrooms. In the process, Pollan analyzes the ethical conundrums we encounter as we decide what we’ll eat and how we’ll get our food. 

Kingsolver is less intellectual in her pursuit, although she addresses most of the same big issues that Pollan does. When the best-selling author moved from Tucson to a farm in Virginia, she and her family were determined to revamp their way of eating (at least for a year). Whenever possible their food would be “local” (a buzzword that has replaced “organic” as the ethically desirably label for food), and they would grow as much of their own food as they could. Her documentation of the year is enveloped in an awe-struck observation of her garden, the local farms and the amazing bounty of nature. 

Pollan is primarily concerned with meat and Kingsolver with vegetables, although Pollan isn’t strictly carnivorous and Kingsolver isn’t vegetarian. Pollan’s method of discovering his food’s roots is to confront the unpleasant stuff you have to confront when you kill and gut your own dinner. He follows a steer up to the door of the slaughterhouse (and imagines what goes on inside), kills chickens on an organic farm and hunts down and shoots a wild pig. He doesn’t particularly like any of it, but he deals with it. Kingsolver, on the other hand, chooses to devote her energy toward the herbiferous side of her diet and the joy that comes from growing your own dinner; she gardens and gathers, patronizes local farmers, cooks and creates. Maybe it’s a gender thing, but Kingsolver’s book is much less violent than Pollan’s (Kingsolver does kill her own chickens, but animal death is overall much less prevalent in her book). 

Both Kingsolver and Pollan identify the central American problem as the lack of a food culture. People in other countries have a complex set of rules and traditions surrounding their consumption of food, not to mention distinct and established cuisines: Italians eat their own food in their own ways, and so do the French and most other cultures around the world. In the absence of food traditions Americans have allowed marketing to create their food culture, and so they eat anything that advertising tells them to eat and don’t know when to stop. Marketers have an interest in promoting edible industrial products that can be produced cheaply, and they convince the public to eat more of it than they need or really want. 

The solution to this problem, both authors claim, is for us as Americans to become fully aware of what we are eating and to raise our standards when it comes to food. But neither of them convincingly argues that a food-centric culture could ever work in America. Both insist that local-organic-sustainable-ethical eating is not solely the province of the affluent, but neither acknowledges the fact that millions of Americans simply cannot afford to pay $20 for a chicken or $7 for a gallon of milk. When asked how a local food chain could feed New York City, Pollan’s libertarian farmer replies “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?” Pollan never explains how his ideal food chain could affordably feed 300 million people. 

The principal difference between the two books is that Kingsolver’s has the potential to make you hungry – and to make you think that you might even be able to grow some of the stuff you eat. Pollan’s book, on the other hand, is more likely to make you think fasting would be a better idea. His unappealing mentors – grumpy libertarians and Euro food snobs –taint the menus they prepare, and the gore of meat-eating is stomach-turning. As he presents it, the American food situation seems hopeless, a dilemma indeed. But even though she presents the same problems, Kingsolver, with her slightly more cheery outlook, is less depressing. She just makes you want to make your own cheese.

Evan Gillespie is a former Fort Wayne native living in South Bend.