The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Author Michael Pollan follows four meals back to their sources to show how Americans eat and what their food choices cost the environment and animals. For the industrial chain he traces corn, which he finds in many foods, from drinks to feedlot beef, and a calf raised on a South Dakota pasture and finished in a Kansas feedlot. Large-scale organic farming, with Whole Foods as its stand-in, gets a skeptical look at what labels like free-range mean. On Joel Salatin's family farm in Virginia, grass, cattle and chickens feed one another. Finally Pollan hunts, gathers and grows a meal himself, from feral pig to sourdough raised with wild yeast.

Readable founder Gabriel Coarna said its first third was what made him see how far the Earth's ecosystem has fallen out of balance.