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Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm the program's producer, Andy Bowers, and our subject today is the nonfiction book

The Omnivores Dilemma, A Natural History of Four Meals.

It's written by Michael Pollan.

Our critics have gathered at Slate's New York headquarters, and they're ready to discuss the book that seeks to diagnose what the author

calls America's National Eating Disorder. Here's your host, Megan O'Rourke. I'm Megan O'Rourke,

Slate's culture editor, and I want to welcome you to Slate's Audio Book Club. Joining me are Slate's critic at large, Stephen Metcalf, and Slate critic Katie Roifie, the author of the novel, and Still She Haunts Me, among other books. This month, we're reading a work of nonfiction, the omnivore's dilemma by Michael Pollan. The book is what Pollan calls a natural history of four meals, and it is at once

a work of culinary philosophy and a book of meticulous investigative recording.

I'm hoping we'll get into various plot points, but I, or, you know, well, plot points, but to

start out, I'll just say, you know, as pollen really tellingly points out, the pleasure of being an

omnivore is that as a race we can eat anything. The downside is that, of course, we can eat everything. And we need to figure out how and what to eat. So apparently he started this book shortly after the Atkins craze a few years back when he found himself struck by just how dysfunctional relationship to food America has. As a country, he says, we have what he calls a

national eating disorder. And we're a culture of people obsessed with eating well, yet we're getting

fatter and less healthy than ever. So the question pollen tries to answer by examining four meals

and tracing them all the way back to their origins is what went wrong? How did American nutrition get so screwed up?

And the answer in one word seems to be corn, although I'm hoping we'll talk more about that later.

So this is a complicated book, and it touches on many different things,

but let's start by just offering up our initial reactions and kind of getting into the details of the book.

Katie, Steve, what did you think of it?

I liked the book.

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