Consider the Chicken McNugget. What's in it exactly? There's some chicken, of course. Salt, no doubt. And then there's all that mysterious stuff identified in the ingredients brochure. Sodium aluminum phosphate--what is that, and where does it come from? For that matter, where does the chicken come from?
Right there, Michael Pollan tells us, is the problem with the way we eat now. We're clueless. In The Omnivore's Dilemma (Penguin Press; 450 pages), he tries to cut through this fog of unknowing. The title refers to the predicament of animals, including rats and humans, that can eat just about anything, whether...