The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals Michael Pollan How much do you value your life? The lives of your kids? Your loved ones? Then stop everything and focus on what I'm about to tell you --- for this is the most important book I've read in a long, long time, and unlike other books which may or may not “change your life,” this is a book that may save your life. Oh, not right away. The kind of poison that most of us call food takes years to hurt you. And maybe, just maybe, you and yours will thrive on “industrial food” that comes to you via a production chain so ugly you'd throw up if you saw any part of it. Then again, if “you are what you eat,” “The Omnivore's Dilemma” may inspire you to turn away from the all-American diet that is built around corn, that makes you fat, that gives you diabetes and heart disease --- but you get the idea... “The Omnivore's Dilemma” divides meals into three food chains: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. Of these, we need only concern ourselves with the first two --- that's the first 185 of the book's 412 pages. The final chapters are interesting, but not crucial. It's those first 185 pages that you must, must, must read and that I want to discuss here. They're actually pretty simple. If you buy processed food in a supermarket, it is very likely that you are eating corn --- that's what feeds cows that become your beef, chicken, turkey, lamb and fish. Corn becomes eggs. Corn is the diet for milk cows. And then it gets turned into sugar, in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Drink a Coke or beer, eat a Chicken Nugget, consume almost any frozen food, hot dog, cake, mayonnaise, margarine, salad dressing --- even vitamins. Of the 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, more than 25% contain corn. (And that goes for non-food items too.) So if you are what you eat, greetings --- you are corn. Oops. Processed corn. You're a “corn chip with legs.” Which is very bad for you. Very bad for farmers. But very good for huge corporations like Cargill and ADM. And --- how crazy is this? --- very good for the military-industrial complex and the oil business. Because we consume, each of us, about a ton of corn a year. In terms of HFCS alone, that's 66 pounds a person. Your total consumption of corn? 158 pounds. Michael Pollan tells the amazing story of how this came to be. And what this does to the animals raised on giant industrial farms (almost all of them are sick --- “most of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed”). And what that does to the planet (“One fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food”). And what it does to you (it turns you into a new kind of creature: an “industrial eater”). So...the answer is organic food? Not so fast. Tomorrow --- yes, this is HeadButler.com's first-ever two-part review--- I'll take on what we think of as “organic” foods. And then you're really going to put on your thinking cap before you go shopping for food again. --- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com To buy “The Omnivore's Dilemma” from Amazon.com, click here. Copyright 2007 by Head Butler Inc.