“I used to think when I was a teenager that the most important question was: Who was going to sleep with me? That came out of this Darwinian selfish gene thing. But now I understand – I’m a little older – the most important question, the one every 5-year-old asks, is: What’s to eat?”

Barry does have a way with words. The other Barry quote in the UT article bothered me a bit at the time. “We understand now that petroleum has embedded in it the lives of dead Iraqis and dead Nigerians.” On a certain level I don’t necessarily disagree - there is a moral dimension to our consumer purchases, whether we’re talking about petroleum or diamonds or cheap clothing from China. I just thought that bringing the Iraq war into this particular discussion clouded some of the issues specifically raised in the book. In particular, Pollen critique includes a lot of points that would appeal to even the most conservative Republican, but I imagine that as soon as rhetoric about Iraq comes into the conversation they turn off their hearing aids.

One of the things that I liked about the book is that Pollen isn’t anti-capitalist - much of his critique of our current food-production system would appeal to a strict free-market capitalist, and I wish we had discussed some of those issues in more detail. Not that I didn’t enjoy the discussion that did take place, it just seemed to focus on one element - individual dietary choices - and we never really got around to discussing some of the systematic issues that comprise so much of Pollen’s book. I did learn a few useful things about local and organic food resources, and we briefly touched on the farm bill, but Pollen’s book covers so much more.