Yes, I read the young adult edition of this. But this shouldn't reflect my level of reading. At first I picked up the adult edition, but while I could read it Michael Pollan used words that an average person probably could not understand. While I thought the content of this book was important. Throwing away all notions that young adult books are inferior and dived into this. I'm glad I did. If the goal of the adult edition was to get his ideas acrossed as clearly as possible I would have continued to read it. Pollan was preaching from the mountian top. It was sort of like reading a shakespear play; you know what the words mean but in that order it makes no sense.
With readablity of the adult book aside, I believed that the young adult struck the right tone with me. It was easy to understand and the illisatations and side blurbs made it fun to read and understand fully what Pollan is trying to say. The book shows you four seperate food chains; industrial, industrial organic, local sutainable, and the do-it-yourself meal. While all four food systems where entertaining to read about, I found that the local sutainable and the do-it-youself systems were very informing. People know little about these two systems so it was nice to have them detailed. The systems that we hear most about at the industrial and industrial organtic.
I'm fortunate enough to be able to utilize all four of these systems, but it might be a shock to the average reader in the city and hard to wrap the idea of eating mushrooms from a forest around their mind.
I mostly enjoyed reading about Joel Salatin and Polyface farm. It shows that animals don't need to be handled like a piece of meat just because they are going to become meat and that all of the animals died a honorable death.
Overall, I believe Omnivore's Dilemma was a very informative and entertaining read and I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to learn more about food systems and how what you buy is like a vote.
A little side note: Customers do have a say in what products a company produces. If a company sees a decline in sales because customers do not want high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in their foods, companies will cater to their needs. For example, a few companies, such as Hunt, are going to switch to sugar from HFCS. So cast your vote at the check out.
