The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Introduction Summary & Analysis

Michael Pollan begins by explaining that The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a “long and fairly involved answer” to the question, “What should we have for dinner?” He points out that, though this question is seemingly rather straightforward, deciding what to eat has become something that requires a “remarkable amount of expert help.” Indeed, it is this unexpected complexity that has prompted him to consider why, exactly, contemporary cultures—especially in America—have found themselves needing “investigative journalists” to reveal the origins of their food. He stumbled upon this conundrum in 2002, he explains, when Americans largely cut bread and other carbohydrates out of their diets in an attempt to lead healthier lives, a decision inspired by the highly popular Atkins diet, which encouraged eaters to consume as much red meat as they wanted as long as they stayed away from bread and pasta.

Pollan traces the decline in American consumption of bread and pasta during the Atkins fad of 2002. After three decades of avoiding red meat because of the Carter administration’s warnings against it, suddenly Americans embraced the idea of eating as much meat as they wanted—so long as they abstained from the carbohydrates they’d previously been shoveling down as a substitute. Since people were eating less bread and pasta, “bakeries and noodle firms” plunged into bankruptcy. “So violent a change in a culture’s eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder,” Pollan writes, suggesting that if American culture had actual “traditions surrounding food and eating,” the nation wouldn’t feel the need to frantically change its eating behaviors to reflect the day’s most recent diet craze. And not only would a country with a “stable culture of food” be less vulnerable to harebrained culinary fads, he writes, it would also “not be nearly so fat.”

Other countries—like Italy or France—approach the question of what they should eat for dinner with more simplicity, allowing themselves to follow the “quaint and unscientific criteria” of “pleasure and tradition.” Of course, this means that although they sometimes eat technically “unhealthy” foods, they ultimately “wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating” than Americans. Pollan notes that Americans call this the “French paradox,” but suggests that it probably makes more sense to “speak in terms of an American Paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.”

As omnivores, humans can eat any kind of food. Unlike koalas (for example), who are “hardwired” to only eat eucalyptus leaves, humans have the entire spectrum of food from which to choose. And although this kind of variety is something of a luxury, it also comes with its own complications. “When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer,” Pollan notes, “deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you.” This, he explains, is what’s known as the omnivore’s dilemma, an idea outlined by a psychologist named Paul Rozin. Juxtaposing the koala’s highly specific eating habits with omnivores like humans and rats, Rozin upheld that “a vast amount of brain space and time must be devoted to figuring out which of all the many potential dishes nature lays on are safe to eat.”  

Continuing his explanation of the omnivore’s dilemma, Pollan points out that humans have to depend upon their “prodigious powers of recognition and memory” in order to stay away from poisons. In addition to memory, taste buds contribute to a human’s ability to avoid sickening food, since human taste “predispose[s] us toward sweetness, which signals carbohydrate energy in nature, and away from bitterness, which is how many of the toxic alkaloids produced by plants taste.”

Thankfully, humans are better equipped to tackle the omnivore’s dilemma than other animals, like rats. Whereas rats are left to their own devices when it comes to figuring out whether or not something is safe to eat, humans can rely somewhat on each other, since the culture surrounding food is made up of a history of “human tasters,” forerunners who have warned the population away from certain foods. Pollan writes: “Our culture codifies the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, recipes, manners, and culinary traditions that keep us from having to reenact the omnivore’s dilemma at every meal.”

Unfortunately, what Pollan refers to as “the cornucopia of the American supermarket” has essentially reintroduced the average consumer to the omnivore’s dilemma. Faced with so many choices, shoppers must suddenly confront “the extraordinary abundance of food in America,” an endeavor that complicates the otherwise straightforward decision of what a person should eat for dinner. Worse, “many of the tools with which people historically managed the omnivore’s dilemma have lost their sharpness” in America, since this is a “relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations,” meaning that there are numerous cultures and traditions surrounding food in the country. In turn, it follows that “Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition” to use as a guide when it comes to the omnivore’s dilemma.

Pollan notes that, faced with this resurgence of the omnivore’s dilemma, he decided to “go back to the very beginning” of the various “food chains that sustain us, all the way from the earth to the plate.” He explains that humans are like any other creature in that they “take part in a food chain,” so that “we are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.” Unlike other creatures, though, we’ve found ways to actually change the various food chains in which we participate—indeed, even the process of cooking “opened up whole new vistas of edibility,” and agriculture has enabled the human race to cultivate especially “favored food species” that we depend upon. Plus, humans have found ways to “reinvent the […] food chain, from the synthetic fertility of the soil to the microwaveable can of soup designed to fit into a car’s cup holder.”

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan asserts, focuses on three food chains that sustain humans: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. Although each one is different, they all essentially connect humans—through what they eat—to “the fertility of the earth and the energy of the sun.” Of course, this is more obvious in certain food chains than in others, but Pollan assures readers that even a Twinkie is connected to the earth’s fertility.

Pollan states that “all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules.” A food chain, then, is a “system for passing those calories on to species that lack the plant’s unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight.” Interestingly enough, this concept has been significantly altered by the industrial revolution, since industrial agriculture has allowed farmers to grow crops that subsist on energy from fossil fuels instead of solely on energy produced by the sun. In turn, humans have been able to significantly increase the amount of food the earth can grow, which has enabled the human race to multiply in number while also further complicating the omnivore’s dilemma.

Pollan explains that each section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma follows “one of the principal human food chains from beginning to end: from a plant, or group of plants, photosynthesizing calories in the sun, all the way to a meal at the dinner end of that food chain.” The first section focuses on the industrial food chain, since this is the one from which humans primarily eat in contemporary times. In addition, the industrial food chain is the most complicated, despite the fact that it is largely dependent upon just one plant: Zea mays, “the giant tropical grass we call corn, which has become the keystone species of the industrial food chain, and so in turn of the modern diet.”

The second section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan writes, will track the pastoral food chain, which is made up of “some of the alternatives to industrial food and farming.” This includes the foods that are called “organic,” “local,” “biological,” and “beyond organic.” Because alternative agriculture is quite varied and multifaceted, Pollan admits that he had to alter his original plan to follow just one meal throughout the pastoral food chain. As such, he decided to also follow a meal along a food chain he likes to call the “industrial organic,” ultimately offering up an account of the variations within the greater pastoral—or organic—food chain.

The book’s final section, Pollan explains, “follows a kind of “neo-Paleolithic food chain,” one that he follows from “the forests of Northern California” to a dinner he made himself with ingredients he “hunted, gathered, and grew” himself. He admits that his interest in following this food chain was “less practical than philosophical,” as he wanted to gain insight into contemporary eating habits by harkening back to the ways hunter-gatherers used to eat. As a result, he was faced with several difficult questions regarding “the moral and psychological implications of killing, preparing, and eating a wild animal.” And although these questions were tricky to navigate, he upholds that the process of hunting and gathering his ingredients ultimately led to what he thinks of as the “Perfect Meal,” since it gave him the “opportunity […] to eat in full consciousness of everything involved in feeding [himself].”

Pollan believes there is a “fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry.” This means that, however advanced we’ve become at producing mass quantities of food, there’s no ignoring the fact that many of these practices are at odds with nature, which otherwise places limitations on the amount of food the earth can produce. Ultimately, this leads to “many of the health and environmental problems” running rampant today, since humans are essentially “oversimplify[ing] nature’s complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of [the] food chain.”

The way we eat, Pollan states, “represents our most profound engagement with the natural world.” It also represents the relationships we have with other species, whether those species are plants, animals, or fungi. We have coevolved with these species, but many of them have also evolved “expressly to gratify our desires,” since we’ve altered them to serve our needs. Unfortunately, industrial food chains have obfuscated the connections humans have with nature and other species. Pollan is confident that “if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.”