Key themes
- What we eat and what it costs — in every sense
- Industrial food and the disconnection it creates
- The ethics of eating other living things
About this book
Where our food really comes from, traced through four meals; the book that changed how many people eat.
Published in 2006, The Omnivore's Dilemma is widely considered the most important popular book about food and agriculture of recent decades. Pollan farmed, hunted and foraged for the book's research.
Discussion questions
- Pollan traces four meals — industrial, organic, local and foraged/hunted — to understand where food comes from. What does each origin reveal about the food systems we participate in?
- The industrial food chain is based on corn. What is Pollan saying through this focus on a single crop — about monoculture, about subsidy, about the gap between what we eat and what we think we eat?
- Pollan goes hunting and foraging to prepare a meal. What does the experience of killing your own food add to the argument — and what does it say about the moral implications of eating?
- The book argues that the American 'omnivore's dilemma' — our anxiety about what to eat — is a consequence of having lost traditional food cultures. How does he support this?
- The Omnivore's Dilemma has been credited with changing how many people think about food. What does it ask of readers — and what would it require to actually change your eating?
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