Think globally, eat locally.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - Book review

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

The Penguin Press. 450 pages. $26.95.

Most of us are ignorant of what we eat. Though we may count calories or carbs, we don't really know where our food comes from. But when people die because of spinach--spinach!--ignorance can suddenly, horribly, turn deadly. How, exactly, do three counties in California cause grocery stores across the country to take spinach off the shelf?.

It's hard to imagine that just a few generations ago, most of our food was local. Food now travels, on average, 1,500 miles to reach our plates. Once upon a time, our food came from the ground. Now a lot of it comes from the lab. We buy tomatoes spliced with fish genes, eat corn that is genetically modified, and cut into steaks carved from cows, natural herbivores, that have been fed processed bovine parts. How did we become so split off from food?

Michael Pollan answers this question in his latest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Humans eat most anything, and therein lies our dilemma. Sometimes what we eat can kill us. Eat the wrong mushroom and we're goners.

The industrial food industry takes advantage of this quandary. "It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products," writes Pollan. "Our bewilderment in the supermarket is no accident."

I considered myself a somewhat savvy shopper until I read this book. I buy food at a local co-op, not at Wal-Mart, though it, too, now stocks organic products. But even in the coop I can't avoid the problems of our industrial food system. The same companies that produce organic foods also sell cigarettes.

The best way to examine our national dysfunctional relationship to food, Pollan decides, is to trace the origins of meals derived from different food systems--industrial, organic, and food foraged from the wild. A journalist by trade, Pollan is an ideal person for this task. His previous book, The Botany of Desire, scrutinized the symbiotic connections between plants and people. An elegant writer, he explains both complicated chemical processes and the finer points of animal liberation philosophy with ease. And he loves food.

He starts his search in the cornfields of Iowa, and there we find clues to our current predicament. Most of the food grown in Iowa isn't for us; it's for cattle. (The United States actually imports food for human consumption while we dump...