I thought that The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan was a wonderfully interesting read and was delighted when it wasn’t, as I had first imagined, a book about being vegetarian or vegan, but rather was a book about where America’s food comes from and what that does to the population.

I’m sure there are a thousand reviews of the book out there and I don’t have a lot to say about it other than I enjoyed it but here are a few parts that really stood out for me.

• Just how messed up commercial feedlot meat production is, that isn’t how you treat food.
• How petroleum dependent big agriculture is.
• How right the grass farmers at the beyond organic farm seemed to have it. Sunlight in, food out.

Anyway, my copy of In Defense of Food by the same author just arrived and I’m pleased to see it is a relatively light 200 pages, about a third of the length of Omnivore’s… and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in. The book is subtitled An eater’s manifesto and if there’s one thing that I really enjoy it is eating.

We’ve linked to it before but here’s an article by the same author that will give you a taster for Pollan’s writing on food.

Link to the NYT article.

Link to In Defense of Food at Amazon

Link to The Omnivore’s Dilemma at Amazon