Hacker News Books

I'm trying to expand my horizons a bit, so I'm reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma". Amazing!

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" is a quote from Micheal Pollan (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma). As far as I know, he isn't a dietitian. I believe he is a Journalism Professor at University of California.

Any time. Both In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma are great. My wife also swears by The Botany of Desire but I haven't read it yet.

Yes, it is, actually. It's amazing that you would cite McDonald's while arguing against a form of government subsidies. Seriously, go read the Omnivore's Dilemma.

I'm reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" - great book btw - but it mentions in passing that we still feed cow nervous tissue to pigs and chickens, which seems kind of scary in light of this article.

An interesting read on some of this would be The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I have yet to finish it, but I learned a tremendous amount about corn and petroleum just from the first seven chapters.

If you're interested in this topic, I recommend reading Michael Pollan's books - The Omnivore's Dilemma or (the shorter) In Defence of Food. He explains more why reductionism in nutrition makes absolutely no sense - both scientifically and from a health point of view.

It kind of depends on your priorities, whether taste, animal-welfare, cost, etc. I think grass-fed tastes better, but I do find it has less marbling. Check out The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omnivore's_Dilemma

Have a read of The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and you'll be wondering even more.

I'm not a vegetarian or vegan (meat is too tasty), but that book in many ways changed how I shop for food.

The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) goes into more detail on the history of the food boom in the 1970s and its link to obesity. Its a great read for anyone interested. Essentially we got hit with a one-two punch of food price paranoia and the high fructose corn syrup innovation.

He's got the right idea. As Michael Pollan( author of the Omnivore's Dilemma, which everyone should read) says: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants"

+1 for the recommendation of The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's one of the best books about food and nutrition that I've ever read.

- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master - Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

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

One of his other books, In Defense of Food, might almost be a better recommendation to read first. If they like that, go for the novel version - The Omnivore's Dilemma.

If you'd like to learn more about the issues in this essay, I recommend The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Pollan spends a good chunk of the book using Salatin's Polyface Farm as an example of sustainable agriculture.

Disclaimer: I've just joined the Arlington buyer's club for Polyface Farm and have been very happy with their meat and eggs.

I recently read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" which describes how the economics of subsidies available to farmers mean that corn and soybeans are crowding out every other crop. It was talking about Iowa mostly but I assume that the same economics apply to Nebraska.

You have to be kidding. Regarding food production, go read the Omnivore's Dilemma, go read up on issues with food patents, go read up on the costs of raising meat (which, in effect, only the wealthy can afford to eat). You are in a deep, delusional fantasy if you think the world's food industry is a paragon of efficiency, effectiveness, and long-term sustainability.

Pollan's latest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is worth reading. http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Meal...

The overall organization is little forced at times, but the research for each section is really interesting.

The book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" talks a lot about this. Basically, everything in American diets is corn based (corn fed beef, chicken, corn syrup, corn starch, etc.)

The Botany of Desire is based on a book by the same name. The author, Michael Pollan, has written quite a bit about food. Another book of his, The Omnivore's Dilemma, thoroughly examines the industrial food chain (in addition to others) from its origins to methods of production.

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

Flatland, by Edwin Abbott

Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

One of the few books that I think really everybody should read.

It's something out of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Joel Salatin pens his cows with a mobile electric fence that's basically a wire, a bunch of stakes, and a car battery. Michael Pollan notes that it took him and Salatin ten minutes to set it up or tear it down.

While we can't be sure to of the preferences of livestock, we can make pretty good guesses. If the responses of animals in a factory farm are more similar to the responses of an animal that is being injured than an animal that is not being interacted with, then the posterior probability of the factory farm situation being dis-preferred by the animal is reasonably high.

Factory farming or "wild" existence is a false dichotomy. There is the option of having pastured animals. And, critically, there is the option of not existing at all. Furthermore, I'd suggest that domesticated animals are different enough from their wild forebears that spending their existence being chased by predators isn't the default "non-factory farm" option.

From what I know of factory farms, pastured animal husbandry, and the probable preference functions of animals, I would guess the preferences would be: pasturing > non-existence > factory farm

largely from The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

It's not a hypothetical at all. This is bound to happen sooner or later. You don't want it to happen even once. Food reserves only go so far - and if you use them for this very foreseeable problem (you just don't know when exactly) you leave yourself more open to the unforeseeable catastrophes.

And yes, there is a very good point talking about hypotheticals on such literally vitally important topics.

> People in the US die because they cannot afford medical costs, the US is perfectly happy with that.

Maybe the difference is that sick people don't riot? If I remember the already mentioned "The Omnivore's Dilemma" correctly the current agricultural policies among other factors mentioned there also were created because of civil unrest due to food shortages, to prevent it from happening again. I can find plenty of sources for food riots, I have not read about anything similar caused by medical costs.

Surprised there's been hardly any mention of Michael Pollan's new book. He's the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, and most recently How to Change Your Mind -- mostly about the recent advances in the study and therapeutic uses of psychedelics. There's also an accessible chapter or two on the latest neurophysiology findings on the psychedelic or mystical state of consciousness.

The book goes into some detail about a few FDA-approved clinical trials for MDMA and LSD-assisted psychotherapy underway, some approaching Stage 3 -- these are mainly the result of over 15 years of work by MAPS[1] -- if Stage 2 results are anywhere near as successful as the small Stage 1 trials, we're pretty likely to see legal and widespread adoption for the treatment of PTSD, end-of-life anxiety, and/or depression.

[1] http://www.maps.org/

I made a goal to read 100 books this year. I'm through 87 so far. Most of them have been non-fiction. Using this year to learn things outside of technology has been time very well spent for me. Here are some of my top books this year.

- Currency Wars, James Rickards

- The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

- What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly

- The Art Of Happiness, Dalai Lama

- Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen

- The Four Agreements, Miguel Ruiz

- Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl

- Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky

- The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

- Good To Great, Jim Collins

- Abundance, Peter Diamandis

- The Mystery Of Capital, Hernando De Soto

- Pathologies Of Power, Paul Farmer

- Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff

- Seeing Like A State, James Scott

- Ishmael, Daniel Quinn

- Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman

- Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier

- The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

- The Birth Of Plenty, William Bernstein

I think the danger in our agricultural policy is that large farms are favored (through subsidies, tax breaks, regulation, etc.) to an extent that small farms can't exist profitably, even charging higher prices at market. While there is a minimum viable farm size (given the need for modern machinery to automate the process), most likely, it probably isn't nearly as large as what our current set of incentives enforces. And, historically, there were farming coops that made it possible for communities of farmers to share expenses for those tools (and some states and communities still have legal infrastructure and such to enable those kinds of organizations), but federal policy and mega-store purchasing policy makes it a moot point.

There's a lot more to the story of what our agricultural system looks like, and this article only touches on it from one personal, anecdotal, perspective, but it's simplistic to dismiss this perspective and the concerns it raises about our food supply. Michael Pollan has been writing compellingly on the subject for many years, and I recommend you check out The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. They provide a well-research view of why things are so skewed in our food system, and why that is dangerous to our current and future health.

"If they're truly in demand, one would expect wages or profits to signal that."

On that point, we're agreed...there has to be a way to correct the incentives so that a competitive agriculture market can exist, given the fact that we all need to eat, and ethically speaking, it'd be good if the most affordable foods were among the most healthy and least damaging to the environment. That's not the way things are incentivized currently. As it stands, there's a strong cartel of very large farms and animal agriculture companies that stack the deck in their favor. It isn't merely a story of efficiency of scale, it also includes lobbying, anti-competitive practices, etc.

My sister has pet rats, and I had to babysit them for a while. They're actually really cool, smart and interesting. I recently finished the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" which draws a lot of parallels between rats and humans (basically we have a lot of the same adaptations around eating). I'd recommend the book and the pet.

To add context to this comment, it comes from Michael Pollan, who coined it in the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma".

http://michaelpollan.com/books/the-omnivores-dilemma/

There are a couple different things going on here.

First, the author makes some good points that without modern tools, some of the things we ask of modern farms would be impossible. There's a limit to the natural productivity of an acre of land.

Second, though, he doesn't address a) whether we're asking too much of one acre of land, or b) whether the things that farmers have to do in order to be productive enough to survive are things that are good to be doing to land, long-term.

The author is essentially saying, "If this is what you ask of me, don't complain about the things I have to do to deliver." And that's a fair point. But let's think more about what we should and shouldn't be asking of him and his land.

Additionally, the author makes a well-argued takedown of some of Michael Pollan's points from The Omnivore's Dilemma, but Joel Salatin — the man whose farming methods are the centerpiece of the book — is conspicuously absent from the critique. Salatin's farm is extremely productive, and sustainably so. That's accomplished by embracing technology (like electric fences that take ten minutes to set up), not by throwing it out and reverting to Depression-era methods.

Salatin's work is more hands-on than that of most farmers, and that's necessary for the type of farm he runs. But it's a model that we'd do well to see spread. (Again, though, it cannot spread widely without some significant changes in what farmers are and are not incentivized to do.)

For me two books have been a bit of a game changer, Salt Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss (See also the 'bliss point' [1]) and The omnivore's dilemma by Michael Pollan.

What pisses me off the most is the skill and vigilance you need nowadays to find out how healthy a product actually is.

At some point, I would to be able to trust that the farmer-clad package from my western supermarket is actually good for me.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

Most people stop reading something after the first few sentences. In that crucial 10 to 15 seconds, a book (or essay, or article, or blog post) has to make, and win, a subconscious appeal to your attention. Your reader's attention span is like a snotty doorman at a hot club. Your opening sentence needs to grab his interest and sneak the rest of the piece into the door.

Consider the following examples from fiction:

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." --George Orwell, 1984

"It was a pleasure to burn." --Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." --Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Or these examples from nonfiction:

"Air-conditioned, odorless, illuminated by buzzing flourescent tubes, the American market doesn't present itself as having very much to do with Nature." --Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

"I like to take my time when I pronounce someone dead." --Jane Churchon, "The Dead Book"

"Out of nowhere I developed this lump." --David Sedaris, "Old Faithful"

This is not to suggest that opening lines should be pure gimmickry, or that they should be conceived entirely apart from the rest of the piece itself. Provocation for provocation's sake is a game of diminishing returns. Rather, the opening line should immediately intrigue the reader by establishing a compelling tone -- one that the rest of the work will follow.

Compelling does not necessarily mean brief, though in modern practice, the two are frequently corelated. That being said, some of the best opening lines in literary history are long and winding. The key is setting up intrigue, however many words that may take.

A lengthy section of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (http://www.michaelpollan.com/omnivore.php) is devoted to Joel Salatin and his farm, as well.

The description in "The Omnivore's Dilemma" of egg yolks from idyllically pasture-raised chickens is forever stuck in my memory.

"Between stops, Art mentioned that Joel’s eggs usually gave him his foot in the door when trying to land a new account. We stopped in at one such prospect, a newly opened restaurant called the Filling Station. Art introduced himself and presented the chef with a brochure and a dozen eggs. The chef cracked one into a saucepan; instead of spreading out flabbily, the egg stood up nice and tall in the pan. Joel refers to this as “muscle tone.” When he first began selling eggs to chefs, he’d crack one right into the palm of his hand, and then flip the yolk back and forth from one hand to another to demonstrate its integrity. The Filling Station chef called his staff over to admire the vibrant orange color of the yolk. Art explained that it was the grass diet that gave the eggs their color, indicating lots of beta-carotene. I don’t think I’d ever seen an egg yolk rivet so many people for so long. Art beamed; he was in."

I've yet to find an egg like that, though I've heard you can get them if you raise backyard chickens.

I would recommend Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. He traces corn from the farm to its varied outputs.

Thanks for this. I have been trying to say this:

I now view this entire article as a rebellion of agribusiness to the fact that people are starting to become more interested in how their food gets to the table and don't like what they see.

in all my comments below, but I couldn't quite put it this eloquently.

I think you are exactly right; he is arguing that his way is best for his fields, his profit margin, and for getting low prices at the store. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" takes a more holistic approach and argues how this approach is worse for the planet as a whole (and how it's just plain wasteful). It's good to hear both sides of the story, but I can't help but feel that the "organic" way is closer to what's best for everyone.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is a must read. http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Meal...

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" is a great book about this.

One thing I learned there is that if you buy a strawberry flavored something that lists "natural flavorings" on it, that doesn't mean it has any strawberry in it. "Natural" just means the material originates in nature, not that the actual molecules are natural. Material from corn chemically processed into something that tastes (barely) remininscent of strawberry is a "natural flavor" according to the system.

The central problem with modern agriculture is hinted at by the Economist's reference to "food prices". The commoditisation of most food staples has meant that most people consider a banana to be a banana, a carrot to be a carrot, and so on, without any understanding of how the item was grown and treated, and as a result, what it actually contains. So one banana should cost the same as the rest of them, and there should be a central "banana price" which we can all fret over, and measures of "banana yield" as well. This is different to how we think of most products, including some foods (e.g. wine, and increasingly coffee and chocolate).

The fact is that the food we see is just a package for what we actually need (or desire) - tiny invisible nutrients, many of which we are yet to identify. One banana can be markedly different from another on many dimensions, but until recently we have only optimised for one dimension: price.

I highly recommend Michael Pollan's books, particularly the first third of The Omnivore's Dilemma, where he describes this process with respect to corn.

I don't think these books are in harmony with each other at all, what was your take on combining the knowledge?

The Omnivore's Dilemma, or at least the statements of its author, Michael Pollan to to eat low in the food chain are predicated on the idea that eating animal is bad for you, which thoroughly debunked (at least with respect to fat or saturated fat) by Taubes.

Taubes is also a fierce advocate that weight issues normally have little to do with willpower over overeating and everything to do with eating too many refined carbohydrates.

If you just make up numbers you can justify just about anything.

Let us add in some more external costs to these imaginary numbers. What does it cost to get the petroleum used to manufacture the pesticides, chemical fertilizer, etc. used in conventional farming (cough cough war in Iraq)? How much does it cost to transport food around the world instead of growing it locally? What are the costs to public health from superbugs bred in feedlots full of sick, bloated cows inundated with antibiotics?

I will now make up imaginary numbers for these costs large enough to trump your imaginary numbers.

P.S. If you want some real numbers and facts, you should check out Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma", especially the citations in the back of the book. It's also a damn good read.

> Meanwhile, many illiterate cultures appear to have healthy diets (implying thousands of years of trial and error, admittedly a form of science, works).

Hit the nail on the head. America is too young of a country and culture, we don't really have a national cuisine. Perhaps burgers and fries, but those are nothing more than the product of our early adoption of industrialized food production.

National cuisines from other cultures have sort of "symbiotic" properties which increase their nutritional properties. I'd have to re-read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma to find specific examples, but I remember things along the lines of soy sauce or rice vinegar enhancing the nutritional value of rice as an example.

This is one of the reasons America is plagued with fad-diets like Atkinsons, etc. that have no real proven benefits. American's grasp at straws asking "What am I supposed to eat?!" while other cultures don't have to wonder.

I have to second this recommendation. Everybody concerned about nutrition should read

* Good Calorie, Bad Calorie;

* The Omnivore's Dilemma

* The End of Overeating.

In order: the science of fat and weight, as best as can be explained today; what's in your food, and what you should be eating; and how companies influence your eating decisions and how to take control of them.

In particular, the last book summarizes research showing that, for certain people, there is a reward conditioning feedback mechanism in the brain triggered by the intake of fat, sugar, and salt. see http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/07/end-of-overeating-th.ht... for a longer review. In particular, if you have lots of willpower elsewhere in your life but struggle controlling your food intake, I can't recommend this book strongly enough.

In any case, I think everybody should read the above 3 books; you'll be a long way closer to being a well informed consumer of food and of it's effects on your body.