The News and Observer has an article about Michael Pollan’s upcoming visit to the National Humanities Center.
Pollan’s book, published this year by Penguin Press, is about its title: the plethora of food choices facing the typical American. In it, he traces the paths of four meals:
* an industrial-produced meal (McDonald’s) consumed the way a fifth of all American meals are consumed, i.e., in the car;
* a meal made from organic ingredients purchased from the upscale Whole Foods;
* one relying on his own hunter-and-gatherer wiles (for the main course, he shoots and slaughters a wild boar);
* a chicken dinner from a Virginia farm practicing sustainable agriculture.
That industrial meal, Pollan writes, is behind what he calls our “national eating disorder.” It’s a disorder, he says, that not only fuels our obesity epidemic but makes us increasingly vulnerable to unpredictable supplies of foreign oil.
Read the rest of the article on the News and Observer’s website.