“Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.”

Why do you eat what you do? How was it produced? If you can answer with more than the aisle of the supermarket you bought it from, well done. If you can’t, does that worry you? Is all food created equal and of equal health benefit? Is beef from a grass-lot the same as feed-lot, or vegetables grown industrially the same as organic? Do you know the answer to that? If not, does that worry you?

Michael Pollan argues it should worry us. Three principle chains of food sustain us, all of them linking one biological system, ourselves, with another, a patch of soil. Most of us, however, remain woefully ignorant of any sort of understanding of our food systems. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan explores each of the three methods of food creation, industrial, organic, and hunter/gatherer, and examines the costs and benefits of each.

There are a lot of shocking facts in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but to highlight one, I hadn’t realized that in industrial production of beef, cattle are dosed with antibiotics as a preventative measure, since they are so susceptible to disease from the poor conditions in which they live. Antibiotic resistance may be one of the most serious problems humanity as a whole faces in the coming years; to squander our antibiotics in a manner almost designed to create resistance is for me simply unacceptable. Shaving pennies off the price of beef just doesn’t seem worth the cost of our ability to fight disease. Health warning: readers of sensitive stomach may find they learn rather more about how broiler chickens are raised than they might have wanted.

There are of course two sides to every story, and Pollan is careful to examine the benefits from cheaper food in terms of health and living standards. He’s right, and the animal rights movement sometimes unfairly ignores these benefits. The reality though is that most of us aren’t in a position to decide either way; we remain willfully blind to the reality, ignorant of what we eat and where it comes from. Perhaps the tradeoff is worth it, but we should at least be aware of the processes our food goes through, whether that means glass walls on slaughterhouses or increased education about industrial production. In the end, what you eat is a personal choice, but it’s one that should be made out of information, not ignorance.

If you want to learn more about what you’re eating, you can get Pollan’s book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!