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Food for thought.

Article Excerpt
THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA: A Natural History of Four Meals

By Michael Pollan

464 pages; Penguin Books, 2007

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There are 38 ingredients in a Chicken McNugget. Thirteen are derived in some part from the ubiquitous tropical grass zea mays, better known as corn. In fact, from the nuggets' modified cornstarch and partially hydrogenated corn oil to the high fructose corn syrup in the ketchup and soda, an afternoon at your local fast food joint can be seen as one giant buffet of corn and its derivative sugars. It's enough to make you wonder why corn is king in America.

Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma tries to answer that question and others about your food, including perhaps the most basic of all: What should we have for dinner? The answer, Pollan contends, hinges on our understanding of where the food we eat comes from be it the American industrial food chain, a small, independent organic farm, or something we've hunted and gathered ourselves and what sacrifices were made to Get it to our tables.

If we are, as Pollan argues, "not only what we eat, but how we eat," then our complex processed foods must be examined with an eye toward how they have taken up residence at the center of our tables. Any such inquiry, he contends, must begin by tracing the history of corn, which is present in over half of the 45,000 items in your typical supermarket.

KING CORN The ties between corn and America date back to the Americans Indians who first introduced European settlers to their maize plant. The Europeans quickly found it ideally adapted to the North American climate and, thanks to its heartiness, versatility, and yield, their early acceptance...

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