Correction Appended: June 18, 2009
There's a corner of my bookshelf that I think of as the region of Reader Guilt crossed with Digestive Despair. Michael Pollan's 2006 best seller, The Omnivore's Dilemma, resides there, its elegant shoulder pressed up against that of greasier, grittier but also very fine Fast Food Nation (2001), another best seller, by Eric Schlosser.
While first enraptured by these books, I eagerly regurgitated their messages about what's wrong with the U.S. food system (essentially, everything) to everyone around me, throwing out data about the horrors of our centralized feedlots, where livestock is fattened on an...