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What You Should Eat Will Stir Anxiety

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Life can be confusing while at the top of the food chain. For most animals, eating is simply habitual and is a subconscious choice. Monarch butterflies eat milkweed, koalas go for the eucalyptus leaves, and whales chow down on plankton. But we homo sapiens, hindered by a big brain and inventions such as agriculture and industry, face a bewildering array of choices, from scrambled eggs to Chicken McNuggets, from a bowl of fresh blueberries to the chemically complex yellow and white log of sweet, spongy food product known as the mystical Twinkie. "When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer," Michael Pollan writes in this thoughtful, engrossing new book, The Omnivore 's Dilemma, "deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety."
Nowhere is this anxiety more drastic, Pollan says, than in the United States. Wealth, abundance and the lack of a steadying, centuries-old food culture have conspired to make Americans dysfunctional eaters. We are obsessed with getting thin while becoming ever more fat, lurching from one bogus bit of dietary wisdom to another. Pollan diagnoses a "national eating disorder," and he aims to shed light on both its causes and some potential solutions. In order to achieve this, he embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which starts at the very beginning — in the soil from which the raw materials of his dinners will emerge — and ends with a cooked, finished meal.
These meals are, in order, a McDonald 's repast consumed by

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