Be sure to read the Atlantic's review. In part:

"One debates the other side in a rational manner until pushed into a corner. Then one simply drops the argument and slips away, pretending that one has not fallen short of reason but instead transcended it. The irreconcilability of one's belief with reason is then held up as a great mystery, the humble readiness to live with which puts one above lesser minds and their cheap certainties. As Pollan writes:

"'I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.'"

"How arrogant, in other words, how pitifully close to mental illness, to want to be a better person!"

Also, this is the farm (Pollyface) Pollan endorses:

Rabbits on the farm are kept in small suspended-wire cages. Chickens are crowded into mobile wire cages, confined without the ability to nest or the space to establish a pecking order. Pigs and cattle are shipped year-round in open trucks to conventional slaughterhouses. Seventy-two hours before their slaughter, birds are crated with seven other birds. After three days without food, they are grabbed by the feet, up-ended in metal cones, and, without any stunning, have their throats slit.

The stuff on ethics at the end of the book is sophomoric crap, and most of it is quite simplistic. But it is useful to get the extent of the hegemony of BigCorn out there.

Interesting and provocative book. Lots of great info, even if you don't agree with his conclusions. As noted above, the influence of Big Corn is eye-opening, and the McDonald's meal is simply creepy.

If you haven't read William Langewiesche's The Outlaw Sea, don't hesitate any further. Fascinating series of essays about the sheer anarchy that prevails in the maritime industry. Jonathan Raban reviews it here for the NYRB. It's long since in paperback, and if I remember right, it clocks in at less than 300 pages (thereby fulfilling my own summer reading criteria).

A bit off topic, but I like to listen to things while reading blogs. I thought some might enjoy this one: Confessions of a Subprime Lender:
An Insider's Tale of Greed,
Fraud and Ignorance

As for books I havent read any lately.
*sniff, tear, sniff*

Good choice, very readable, a great example of how to write, but not a great example of research in the library.

I'd also highly recommend Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food."

You might not learn anything new in the book, but Pollan does put it all into the big picture and frightens/depresses the sh*t out of you.

John McCain: More of the Same, is being outright dishonest in his take of the book. While the Chickens are kept in a small mobile house, they are let out to roam the pasture every day. And slitting the throat of an animal is the quickest and painless way to death.

Pollan takes animals and eating into a Darwinian/Selfish Gene Morality. Animals are to be eaten by other animals, and we should let them live as close as possible to their nature (with that said, the house cat is in Darwinian terms, the most immoral animal out there.

I've seen the book at Jamba Juice. It's on my list of books to read. It's particularly relevant since California Prop 2 is about treatment of farm animals. I don't remember the details of the proposition; I signed the petition mainly to mollify an attractive friend who was gathering signatures.

I'll second the shout out for "The Outlaw Sea". It is a great look at shipping in an age of globalization. A second shout out goes to "Hooked" (sorry, the book is hidden in a pile, so I can't give you the author) which is a great look at the modern fishing industry; it explains why you keep seeing new types of fish in the market. Short answer: the fish they used to catch have been driven to commercial extinction.

I can also give a big shout out to "With The Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge. It is a wonderfully literate look a WWII in the Pacific from a Marine Infantryman's POV.

Here are some others I've found interesting over the last few months:

The Shock Doctrine -- Naomi Klein
Bad Samaritans -- Han-Joon Chang
The Great Derangement -- Matt Taibbi
The Road -- Cormac McCarthy

I would normally recommend anything by Ian Kershaw, who is a great historian of the Nazi period in Europe ("Making Friends With Hitler" was a great examination of pre-war British thought on the rise of Hitler), but his latest is just a collection of essays which are loosely connected and do not flow well together, making the same point endlessly. His two volume bio of Hitler is masterful, however. Probably not great summer reading though.

You'll enjoy it, Kevin. Pollan's The Botany of Desire is equally worthy.

I'm trying to read The Shock Doctrine. The introduction so unnerved me I had to put it down for a while.

What's The Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank is a great read. It seems sort of obvious from the title but in fact it is a very well researched, well thought out book. One of his conclusions is that the Democrats conceded much ground to the Republicans when they walked away from blue collar economic issues and hoped to get big corporation money. Without standing with people helping to keep their jobs and wages and benefits they let the Republicans drive their anger and frustration with emotional issues.

One I forgot to mention earlier goes beyond "The Outlaw Sea" focus to look directly at piracy, especially the piracy of Very Large Crude Carriers, the superdupertankers. Oil companies never report these things to their insurers; if they did, today, especially with the piracy in the treacherous Straits of Malacca, you could add another $10/bbl to oil's "instability premium."

With that all said, here's the book:

Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas, by John S. Burnett.

Also:

Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance, by Kenneth Kamler.

As for reading, I read two new nonfiction books a week, Kevin, so I can give you a whole list of recommendations.

I listened to Omnivore's Dilemma - my first ever audiobook. :)

I couldn't wait to get in the car for my daily commute just so I could hear more about Joel Salatin's farm. Fascinating. I really want to visit that farm some day.

If you want to read a funny, non-fiction book about food, you should get Julian Barnes's The Pedant in the Kitchen. It's very short (only an afternoon's reading), but just wonderful.

I second "Botany of Desire".

Two other food books: that complement The Omnivore's Dilemma: The End of Food, by Paul Roberts and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral by Barbara Kingsolver. Paul Roberts' book would be the better choice in terms of policy discussions.

Great read - Pollan's work on "edible food-like substances". Who can argue with the statement:

"If your grandmother would not recognize it, don't eat it!"

Corporate, processed foods is all about using processing and chemicals to creat "brands" that can be produced at lowest cost - if an "edible food-like substance" is addictive, so much the better.

And if it is unhealthy? They don't care, the FDA can be bought off.

Just like the sham political candidates today, they represent the corpocracy with packaging that is designed to appeal to the masses.

obama is just another lying liar that will:

*continuing Iraq war

*maintaining the fake "war on terror" (yes, 9/11 was an inside job)

*using scare tactics to undermine constitution

*enable the continued looting of the federal treasury by the military-industrial complex

*restart the Social Security bamboozle - it will be a DEMOCRAT that destoys it (just like it took a democrat to undermine welfare).

He answers to the same master as the smirking chimp.

This is a fairly good book, but I would suggest his more recent book, In Defense of Food, as being better and more interesting all around.

Either way, tell us all what you think.

"Anonymous," I'll agree with everything except the conspiracy theory on 9/11. Conspiracy theories in general, to me, reflect a variety of problems, some of which are held by too many Americans in general:
1. A desire for easy, quick, solutions;
2. A desire for a small personal cut on a collective Warholian 15 minutes of fame;
3. An anti-expert bias in things such as science and engineering;
4. A believe that certain tragedies couldn't be as "existentialist" as they actually are.

Finally, specific to 9/11, I say the same thing as I did in one-starring a 9/11 conspiracy book on Amazon without even bothering to read it:
This Administration is too inept to have pulled off 9/11 as a conspiracy.

"If your grandmother would not recognize it, don't eat it!"

Good advice. Heck, if it's a drug that wasn't around in 1950 don't use it. If it's a surgical procedure that didn't exist in 1820, ignore it. Forget this new-fangled crap about anesthetics and "sterilization".

As I said, Pollan's book is vastly over-rated, and is successful because there's a huge anti-rationalism contingent in America (the same nuts being celebrated in _The Greening of America_. The good stuff in Pollan (about the agro-industrial complex) is drowned in far too much moralizing about the world and its actors.

Travels with Herodotus - Ryszard Kapuscinski
What is the What - Dave Eggers
City of Quartz - Mike Davis
For Bread Alone - Mohamad Choukri
Drinking the Sea in Gaza - Amira Hass
Obedience to Authority - Stanley Milgram
The Road to Mecca - Mohamad Asad
All the Shah's Men - Stephen Kinzer
Black Like Me - John Howard Griffen
The Strange Career of Jim Crow - C. Vann Woodward
The Mountain People - Colin Turnbull
The Metaphysical Club - Louis Menand
The Monument - Kanaan Makiya

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes

Very well written, and good background for understanding the issues of nuclear weapon proliferation.

missed the last thread ... may I suggest "When Genius Failed," by Roger Lowenstein about Long-Term Capital, in many ways the first big computer-model-trading driven hedge fund, and its collapse in the wake of the Russian ruble devaluation. Interesting read and of itself, and an easy introduction to our current credit crisis because it's the discrete story of a particular group of people who deluded themselves into thinking their financial modeling was bullet-proof.

Favorite book of the year is the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, just released this week in paperbook. (I've listened to it a couple of times now on audiook/iPhone and I love the narrator's voice :) Sometimes the reader's voice is a distraction for an audiobook but I find this one perfectly matched.)

I purchased a couple of paperbacks and mailed them to my congress critters, since after watching these latest hearings I felt like I knew more than those asking questions at the hearings of Blackwater and the oil CEOs.

As I said, Pollan's book is vastly over-rated, and is successful because there's a huge anti-rationalism contingent in America (the same nuts being celebrated in _The Greening of America_. The good stuff in Pollan (about the agro-industrial complex) is drowned in far too much moralizing about the world and its actors.

Hmmm. So it's anti-rational to want to eat foods that are more healthful? Such as pasture raised meats with less fat and more omega-3 acids? It's anti-rational to recognize that eating foods grown close to home cuts down on waste of fossil fuels in transport? I think most of what you said, with the exception of the good background information on big agri, is a load of crap. Maybe it's not "rational" to refuse to eat an animal that's been forced into becoming an eating machine on a feedlot, though such a lack of "rationality" could help a person avoid e coli and mad cow disease. As for me, I don't feel bad about eating animals as long as they are allowed to be animals before I eat them. When they aren't, it not only sucks for the animals, it quite often causes problems for the people who eat them, too. Or how about this bit of "anti-rationalism": I decided that high fructose corn syrup might not be the best thing to eat, so I found every item in my pantry and fridge that contained it and found substitutes for all of those items. And lost six pounds in 2 weeks while continuing to eat my bowl of ice cream each evening (HFCS-free, of course - with homemade chocolate syrup). I suppose the more "rational" course of action would be to continue eating the shit that's pushed as "food" and just keep getting fatter.

I thought The Omnivore's Dilemma was fine but a bit tedious. Honestly I felt I learned most of what he had to say in the New York Times magazine article(s?) he wrote a couple months before the book came out.

Anyway if you read it, I hope you're interested in corn. 'Coz you're gonna read a lot about it.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

For today's lesson, Maynard Handley gives us an excellent example of a false analogy.

Pollan's not anti-rational. His criticism is that industrial food production often is not rational enough, or rather that it exhibits the wrong kind of rationality. Its logic is the logic of the corporate supply chain, which fails to capture the complexity of ecosystems and the richness of cultural heritage. Pollan is saying that we ignore those things to our own detriment.

The modern developments in medicine that you allude to, on the other hand, have been driven by discovery of the causes of disease, not by corporate economics. There's not a new fad theory every couple of years about whether doctors should wash their hands, but there is a new fad theory every couple of years about what we all should eat. To compare the two is just, well, anti-rational.

I'm in the demographic that should love Pollan -- and I have a first edition of the Botany of Desire. BUT, I think he's jumped the shark with these last two. "If your grandmother would not recognize it, don't eat it!" sounds Ok until you think about what my grandmother would have recognized as "food" -- lard, fish from polluted waters, and all those early convienence foods.
Yes, we should all think more about what we eat, but no, we can't all be Michael Pollan who has time and resources for food choice in amounts available to only a tiny percentage of the planet.

boy, you fellas sure can take a little book discussion to ruin in a hurry. When Pollan came to Louisville to do a reading and book signing people lined up around the block to get in on it. His talk at the big Arts Center sold out in a matter of hours.
So, regardless of flippant bloggers and rightwing trolls, the guy has hit a nerve in our culture.

Don't know about anybody else's grandma, but mine killed her own backyard chickens, and we fished catfish and bass out her clean pond. She milked her own cows and grew practically all her food. I spent the summers with her and learned plenty about preparing meat. Meals from a box or bag would have seemed alien to her. the only thing i can remember that she wouldn't recognize as food, but we ate anyway, was the annual red velvet cake at thanksgiving and a random moon pie or two.

I can her the whimper of the vegans, so save your moralizing. To this day I prefer to eat only what I kill and we always thank and bless the animals we eat. My family raise a small garden but we are also members of a CSA that I can walk to on share day. (I think there are 10-12 farmers markets in metroLouisville, maybe more. there are even some in the urban areas.)

the global warming fears outshadow the larger problem of monoculture in our so-called industrialized agriculture- (i guess greenhouse gas is more sexy?). Eating locally grown seasonal foods is healthier for you and the environment. diversity is what nature is tuned to and forcing one piece of land to only grow one crop, over and over, year after year is bad. You don't need a tomato on new years day. (you could be using tomato juice you canned last fall and make bloody mary's though) DIVERSITY...
Please don't whine about your urban lifestyle, if you are hungry enough you can get creative and grow plenty of food in window boxes. I lived for many years in Chicago and we had farmers markets tuesdays and thursdays. hell, you can even buy locally brewed beer in most places. woo-hoo!

I would suggest to read Eliot Coleman books and learn to farm on a small scale. Farming(the real kind) is not easy. But try it, you might like it.