Book reviews

I'll be putting in book reviews on this page.  My next book review, coming eventually, will be on Nutrition For Dummies!

Review 1: The Omnivore's Dilemma (Young Reader's Edition)

First, I should try to say something about this book.  It's not so much about nutrition as the story behind your food.  Now, to the book review.

This book is divided into 4 parts: The Industrial Meal (what you can buy at the supermarket), The Industrial Organic Meal (the foods at the supermarket that say organic), The Local Sustainable Meal (what you can buy at the farmer's market), and The Do-It-Yourself Meal (what you can forage, shoot, and grow yourself).

Part I: The Industrial Meal

This section is on how the supermarket meals get made.  The biggest point that the author tries to get through is that corn is in just about EVERYTHING.  There are a bunch of ingredients that are made from corn (corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate, ascorbic acid, lecithin, monoglyceides, diglycerides, triglycerides, and some other hard-to-pronounce ingredients).  Corn feeds the beef, chicken, salmon, catfish...  It's even in your corn!!!

Part II: The Industrial Organic Meal

This section is basically comparing organic to non-organic.

Part III: The Local Sustainable Meal

In this section, the author goes through how food from the farmer's market gets made.  It concerns how farmers try to make sure the ecosystem is working properly, feed the cows grass, let the chickens eat the grubs from the cow manure (YUCK!!!!!)...

Pare IV: The Do-It-Yourself Meal

In this section, the author goes through a hunter-gatherer meal.  It goes through mushroom hunting (hard), pig hunting (less hard), and cherry-from-your-neighbor's-tree-hanging-in-your-yard hunting (not very hard).

Positive words describing book: interesting, informative

Negative word describing book: gross
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Review 2:  Food Rules by Michael Pollan

In this book, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma tries to help people with their eating by listing 64 rules.  While some of them are a little too extreme (for example, don't buy anything where "sugar" appears in the first 3 ingredients), they are actually pretty good rules to follow.  There's also an introduction.  There's not much more to know, except rule #64: "Break the rules once in a while."