Another partial book review. This is on Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. I put the book down on page 116.
I loved Pollan’s first book The Botany of Desire and found his second book Second Nature to be boring. So, as you’ll see with this review, Pollan is on a straight downhill trajectory. I won’t read any more of his books.
In Omnivore’s first section Pollan tries to do for corn what he did for apples and marijuana in his first book: to show us how these plants have guided us into helping the plant take over the world.
Hybrid corn has definitely taken over the world. Corn, and its ally soy bean, have created such great surpluses that the price of corn keeps falling every year; related food, such as chicken, beef and pork, are so abundant as a consequence that the retail price never stops falling. Now we are trying to use up the remaining surplus corn in our automobiles and trucks as
ethanol. Pollan does a good job of explaining why corn sugar has replaced all other commercial sugars in the U.S. since the mid-1970s. I wrote about the Coke battle on this issue earlier.
Pollan is a great writer and fun to read. The trouble is that he hates corporations so much that his whole schtick sounds like Michael Moore with brains. Reading Pollan is like talking to an interesting old man who farts, belches and smells like a homeless bum. Pollan is so politically offensive and inane that his book becomes an unreadable stinker. Too much food production, by Pollan's account, is a capitalist created disaster.
(Yes, the photo at the left is skiing on corn.)