December Non-Fiction Book: The Omnivore's Dilemma

Hi everyone!

As the holiday season approaches, it seems fitting we should read a book about food...

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes about how our food is grown -- what it is, in fact, that we are eating. The book has three sections, each one culminating in a meal:

- Industrial Farming (cheesburger and fries from McDonald's)

- Organic Food (chicken and vegetables from Whole Foods and a sustainable farm)

- Hunting & Gathering (mushrooms and pork, foraged from the wild)

"Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."Pollan's narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. " - Publisher's Weekly

For December, our book will be:

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan

The Omnivore's Dilema

We'll be meeting at the Lincoln-Belmont branch of the Chicago Public Library in West Lakeview. The library is down the street from the Paulina brown line stop and accessible from the Belmont, Ashland, and Lincoln buses. The library has a parking lot and street parking in the neighborhood is widely available.

* Note that the library is just down the street from the Caribou Cafe where we've had meetings in the past.

Chicago Public Library: Lincoln-Belmont Branch

Chicago Public Library: Lincoln-Belmont Branch (MAP)

Feel free to email me with any questions or concerns. Hope to see lots of you there!

-MikeE