The Omnivore's Dilemma Summary

Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is divided into three sections: corn, grass and forest. This review will cover part I of three, which are all within the corn section. Pollen starts with corn, just one kernel of it in a field in Iowa, and tries to track its journey to our dinner plates. It turns out an unexpected amount of corn appears in processed foods, non-food products and diets of animals who were never meant to eat it. This section will make you take a hard look at how prevalent corn is in our lives and why. In Part I, the Industrial Food-corn, takes the reader from the farm, to the feedlot, following the processing plant and finally to the consumer.
The Farm Corn can be grown year round on the same land with the use of fertilizer from cattle, and augmenting plant genetics to create hybrid strains of corn. This has resulted in corn becoming the most dominant force in industrialized
“17.5 billion pounds of high fructose corn syrup is being produced each year” (Pg.118). “There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn” (Pg. 19). “The power of food science lies in its ability to break foods down into their nutrient parts and then reassemble them in specific ways that, in effect, push our evolutionary buttons, fooling the omnivore’s inherited food selection system (Pg. 115). In addition to figuring out all the corn involved in a typical families fast food meal, Pollan hypothesizes that places like McDonald’s have become a sort of comfort food. “There are 38 ingredients in a Chicken McNugget, thirteen of which are derived from corn” (pg. 120). There is corn sweetener in burgers, as if all the corn used to fatten the cow wasn’t enough. “Forty-five of sixty items on a McDonald’s menu contains high fructose corn syrup” (pg. 122).