Omnivore's Dilemma Summary

Most people think that Cheerios are a healthy breakfast cereal, but did you know that there are eleven different varieties of Cheerios and only one is low in sugar? Michael Pollan, the author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma, argues that modern omnivores are confused about what to eat because they have too many food choices, their taste buds have not evolved for modern times, and they do not have a food culture to guide them in the United States. To begin with, there are thousands of food choices at the grocery store and the modern omnivore doesn’t know where their food comes from. At one point in history, omnivores hunted and gathered their own food. Today omnivores purchase most of their food at the grocery store, and they do not know what they are eating because many of the ingredients on food labels are unrecognizable. Pollan blames the industrial food chain, “The industrial food chain has brought the world to our supermarkets. Today we can buy just about any sort of food from anywhere in the globe, in any season . . . Add that to the thousands of new processed foods-about seventeen thousand each year-and we have an incredible amount of food choices . . . ” (102). The invention of processed foods has led to too many food choices, making it

Unlike France with hundreds of years of the same food culture and traditions, the United States is a large country of immigrants with many different food traditions. As Michael Pollan asserts, “We have never had a national food culture in the United States . . . We have few rules about what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat. We don’t have any strong food traditions to guide us, so we seek food advice from ‘experts’” (109). Modern omnivores want help making good food choices, but with no food culture or traditions to follow, they listen to almost anyone who has an opinion. The result is a lot of conflicting and sometimes misleading