¶ … Omnivore's Dilemma In 2006, author and activist Michael Pollan published his classic treatise on America's agricultural abandonment, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural history of Four Meals, which critiques the growing disconnect between the food we consume and the processes used to bring it to our plates in evocative and eloquent terms. By posing the seemingly simple question of what mankind should eat, Pollan disassembles the modern meal in methodical fashion, guiding the reader through the convoluted industry of industrialized agriculture, from the massive corn farming conglomerates that have largely replaced traditional family farms to the processing plants used to modify and preserve food products through artificial means. Much of Pollan's career has been dedicated to exposing what he has termed "the perverse economics of agriculture, which would seem to defy the classical laws of supply and demand" (2006),...

From the factory farm to the industrial feedlot, the processing plant and the supermarket, Pollan explores the confounding combination of apathy and ignorance displayed by the average American while shopping for groceries and eating meals, sprinkling his thorough reporting with rhetorical daggers reminding the reader that "you won't find a fruit with anywhere near the amount of fructose in a soda, or a piece of animal flesh with quite as much fat as a chicken nugget" (2006).
During any comprehensive textual analysis of a work of nonfiction like The Omnivore's Dilemma, it is important for an informed reader to develop a contextual understanding of the author's perspective and platform. The presence of preconceived biases or ulterior motives within a text is more…