What shall we have for dinner? This is the question that Michael Pollan attempts to answer in his brilliant new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The title, of course, revolves around this question, and it is the increasing thorniness of the answer, Pollan claims, that has shaped much of who modern man has become. If we are what we eat, then in order to understand who we are, we must know what it is that we are eating.

Pollan, like many who have recently made headlines on the topic of food, is not a chef or a nutritionist or any kind of food expert. But he is a reporter—of the highest caliber, as he proves in The Omnivore’s Dilemma—and the last thing I want to do is to downplay his achievement in this remarkable book. The Omnivore’s Dilemma is more than an exposé of the modern food industry; it is a philosophical treatise on the nature of food and ecology and of life itself. It is a book that will startle and anger you, but it will do more than that: it will make you hungry.

Reading this book made me want to work on a farm. It made me want to start a garden. It gave me a hunger to grow my own vegetables, to raise my own animals, to forage a few wild plants or berries, or maybe even go hunting. It made me want to feel dirt under my fingernails and the sun on my back, to understand the connection between the sun and the soil and the energy that sustains my body through the food on my plate.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma traces the stories of four meals from their origins to the table. It begins with the most stereotypical modern American meal imaginable—a McDonald’s dinner, eaten in the car—and moves, as it were, back in time, or at least back in source, through a home-cooked dinner bought entirely at Whole Foods, to one grown on a sustainable organic farm, and finally to a meal entirely hunted and gathered personally by Pollan himself. The stories of food—and indeed, of all commodities—are becoming more and more important to consumers today as people become more educated about the dark stories that often lurk behind industrial products. Pollan attempts to taste from all possible links of the food chain, not so much to condemn them as to understand what has happened to the modern eater. How did we get to be the way we are?—so entirely removed, for the most part, from the source of our food—and how does that separation affect who and what we are today as human beings? By investigating the sources and the stories of each of these meals, he attempts, not to judge the modern lifestyle, but to understand it.

Of course, certain conclusions are almost forgone. Obviously the Whole Foods meal is a lot healthier than McDonald’s. The sustainable farm, surprisingly, is more different from the Whole Foods meal than one might expect. Pollan draws a line between the industrial world of “Big Organic”—in which food, though pesticide-free, may well come from beef raised on feedlots and vegetables grown using multiple inputs—and local, sustainable farming, in which a closed-loop system allows the farm to be completely self-sufficient and food is only sold to local consumers, eliminating the need for oil-powered transportation. The farmer that Pollan chooses for his third meal, Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, becomes the hero of the book, with his insistence on humane methods, absolute transparency, and local sustainability. A self-described “Christian environmentalist libertarian,” Salatin indoctrinates Pollan in his theories of sustainable farming and the need for localization of the food system.

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