40 Fun Facts About The Omnivore's Dilemma

Which fast-food chain supplies the industrial lunch that Michael Pollan and his family eat in their car?

McDonald's served a lunch that Pollan traces back to a single crop. That crop fed the cattle, became the oil for the fries and sweetened both the shakes and the sodas.

Which animal does Michael Pollan hold up as the specialist eater that never has to wonder what is for dinner?

Koala diets come hardwired: if it looks and smells like a eucalyptus leaf, it is a meal. Omnivores get no such instructions, which is the dilemma of the book's title.

Which animal does Michael Pollan shoot in northern California as the main course of his hunter-gatherer meal?

Wild boar was the centrepiece, though Pollan had never hunted before. The animal he shot was a large grayish sow, and he was honest about how mixed his feelings were afterwards.

What is the name of Joel Salatin's farm, which Michael Pollan presents as a model of sustainable agriculture?

Polyface, when Pollan visited, sold only to customers, restaurants and shops within about half a day's drive. Its animals share the same pastures, each species helping the next.

In which state's Shenandoah Valley does Joel Salatin raise the grass-fed animals that Michael Pollan helps tend?

Virginia is where the Salatin family bought worn-out land in 1961 and set about restoring it. It had been a run-down dairy operation scarred by erosion gullies.

Which illness entered the food supply, Michael Pollan recounts, after feedlot cattle ate the remains of other cattle?

Mad cow disease spread because the offal of slaughtered cattle was once mixed into feed for animals built to eat grass. Pollan sets it beside the indigestion that a grain diet causes them.

Which upmarket grocery chain sells Michael Pollan every ingredient of his 'Big Organic' dinner?

Whole Foods stood in for the whole industry of large-scale organic farming. Pollan found its labels promised open pastures that the big suppliers behind them rarely delivered.

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan argues that America, lacking a steady food culture, has a national what?

Eating disorder is Pollan's diagnosis for a country that lurches from one diet fad to the next. He blames the lack of food traditions that carry the wisdom of earlier generations.

Which animal, known only by the number 534, does Michael Pollan buy and follow from a ranch to a feedlot?

A steer numbered 534 was Pollan's stake in the beef business, born on the Blair Ranch in South Dakota. He suspected its branding there would count as the good old days once it reached the feedlot.

Which kind of bread does Michael Pollan bake for the foraged meal that ends The Omnivore's Dilemma?

Sourdough rises on wild yeast, which Pollan gathered rather than bought. The meal was meant to use only what he had hunted, gathered or grown himself, down to the salad from his garden.

Which prized mushrooms share the plate with the meat at the hunter-gatherer feast that ends The Omnivore's Dilemma?

Morels are safe only once cooked, the kind of food lore Pollan says omnivores depend on. He had grown up with a dread of poisonous toadstools, passed on by his mother.

Which shellfish does Michael Pollan dive for while foraging for the final meal of The Omnivore's Dilemma?

Abalone are sea snails, not clams, and looking for them was one of the foraging skills that local food lovers taught Pollan. They also showed him how to hunt and where to find mushrooms.

Which fruit, picked from trees in his own neighborhood, goes into the dessert of Michael Pollan's foraged meal?

Cherries from a tree near his home went into a galette, the one sweet course. Pollan judged the feast as unsustainable as fast food, a ritual rather than a way to live.

Which philosopher's book Animal Liberation challenges Michael Pollan to give up meat for a while?

Peter Singer argued so forcefully that Pollan abstained from meat for a period to test his conscience. He came back to it as a selective eater of free-range and local animals.

Which animals does Michael Pollan help slaughter on Joel Salatin's farm, an experience that tests his animal ethics?

Chickens were the test, and Pollan took his turn at the killing. What troubled him most was how quickly the work stopped troubling him.

What do Joel Salatin's laying hens pick out of the cow pats when their mobile coop follows the cattle?

Fly larvae are rich in protein, and the hens arrive just as the flies are developing in the manure. The birds scatter the dung, cut the fly numbers and leave nitrogen of their own behind.

Which label does Joel Salatin, the self-described lunatic farmer of The Omnivore's Dilemma, give the meat he raises?

Beyond organic is his phrase for meat raised on grass and sold only to neighbours. He told Pollan that sending meat across the country by courier could not be called sustainable.

In which state is the feedlot where the animal Michael Pollan bought in South Dakota is fattened on grain?

Kansas is where the animal swaps the grass it evolved to eat for a grain diet that Pollan says damages its liver. The industry treats sick animals as a cost of doing business.

In which Corn Belt state does Michael Pollan visit George Naylor, a farmer going slowly broke growing grain?

Iowa grew its grain at a loss: a bushel cost about $2.50 to raise and fetched $1.45 when Pollan visited. Federal payments made up nearly half of an average grower's income.

Which sweetener does Michael Pollan single out as a driver of America's obesity epidemic?

High-fructose corn syrup sweetened not just the soda in Pollan's fast-food lunch but the ketchup and the burger bun too. Some 530 million bushels of grain a year go into making it.

Which drugs do feedlot cattle receive pre-emptively, Michael Pollan reports, to offset an unnatural diet of grain?

Antibiotics are routine because grain sickens animals built for grass, bringing on indigestion that needs repeated courses of the drugs. The trade buys speed: grain fattens cattle faster than pasture.

Which president's agriculture secretary, Earl Butz, began the cheap-grain policy that The Omnivore's Dilemma criticises?

Richard Nixon faced soaring food prices, and Earl Butz answered by urging farmers to plant from fencerow to fencerow and to get big or get out. Pollan traces the glut of cheap grain to that change.

Which grain giant joined Archer Daniels Midland in refusing to let Michael Pollan inside its processing plants?

Cargill and its rival turn kernels into hundreds of food ingredients, yet neither would let Pollan inside. Their mills are where the chemistry behind so many grocery shelves happens.

Corn, the giant grass at the base of the industrial food chain in The Omnivore's Dilemma, has which scientific name?

Zea mays is a tall grass first domesticated in Mexico, and the world now harvests more of it than wheat or rice. Outside America the word corn can mean any local cereal.

Which German chemist found how to turn nitrogen in the air into ammonia, opening the age of synthetic fertilizer?

Fritz Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the process, later scaled up by Carl Bosch. It is credited with much of the fourfold rise in the world's food supply last century.

Cascadian Farm, founded by ex-hippie farmer Gene Kahn, was sold to which food giant, as Michael Pollan recounts?

General Mills bought the brand after Kahn decided a sale was the only way to keep his company going. Pollan notes that he drives a Lexus with a number plate reading ORGANIC.

Which salad grower, begun on a 2.5-acre plot, does Michael Pollan call industrial organic at its best?

Earthbound Farm became America's largest producer of organic salads and the first to sell prewashed, packaged greens on an industrial scale. Its founders started out in 1984 in the Carmel Valley.

Which psychologist coined the phrase 'omnivore's dilemma' some thirty years before Michael Pollan borrowed it?

Paul Rozin, of the University of Pennsylvania, is often described as the world's leading expert on disgust. His research asks why people, who can eat almost anything, choose what they do.

Which metropolis did Joel Salatin dismiss as pointless when Michael Pollan asked how it could be fed locally?

New York struck the farmer as a place the country could do without, a reply that showed Pollan how far apart their worlds were. He still thought caring about food could bridge the gap.

Which earlier Michael Pollan book looks at apples, tulips, cannabis and potatoes from the plants' point of view?

The Botany of Desire pairs each plant with a human craving: sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. It came out in 2001 and later became a two-hour PBS programme.

At which university was Michael Pollan a professor of journalism when The Omnivore's Dilemma came out?

UC Berkeley named him its Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism. In 2020 he also helped found a campus centre for the science of psychedelics.

Which Oscar-nominated 2008 documentary on industrial farming did Michael Pollan narrate with Eric Schlosser?

Food, Inc. also visits Joel Salatin's farm, bringing the hero of the grass chapters to cinema audiences. It lost the documentary Oscar to The Cove.

From which country had the organic asparagus that Michael Pollan questions been shipped to American shops in January?

Argentina supplied a spring vegetable in the dead of winter, thousands of miles from where it grew. Pollan asks whether food that travels so far still fits the organic ideal.

Which gut bacterium has grown more dangerous, Michael Pollan argues, thanks to the acidic stomachs of grain-fed cattle?

E. coli from a grass-fed gut usually dies in the acid of the human stomach. Pollan's case is that a grain diet sours the animal's gut and breeds strains able to survive it.

Michael Pollan calls his fast-food lunch a reverse version of which holiday, with the foraged feast as the real thing?

Thanksgiving is his word for the foraged dinner, a meal eaten in full knowledge of what it cost. What he prized most was knowing exactly where every part of it came from.

Which fast-food sales tactic does Michael Pollan present as the industry's way round the limits of the human appetite?

Supersizing sells more calories to people who are already full, which Pollan sees as the food industry treating appetite as one more bottleneck. Cheap grain made the bigger portions cost almost nothing.

Which Spanish philosopher's thoughts on hunting does Michael Pollan paraphrase after shooting his first animal?

Ortega y Gasset saw hunting as a last chance to step out of history and back into a state of nature, an idea Pollan borrows. He adds that the experience is messier than moralists allow.

What covers about 450 of the 550 acres on Joel Salatin's farm, sheltering the wildlife that helps the pastures?

Forest supplies the woodchips for the farm's compost and harbours the birds that help keep the worked land productive. Only about 100 acres are actually grazed.

Which chamber of a cow's stomach, built to ferment grass, turns acidic on the grain diet that Michael Pollan describes?

Rumen bacteria turn grass into protein and organic acids, a trick no human stomach can manage. Grain makes the chamber unnaturally acidic, which can sicken the animal and even kill it.

Which diet guru, nicknamed the Great Masticator, turns up in The Omnivore's Dilemma urging a hundred chews a mouthful?

Horace Fletcher won his following in the same years as the Battle Creek sanitarium, where patients endured all-grape diets. Pollan uses both as proof that America's food fads go back more than a century.