That is a head-spinning book.

Check out Pollan's lecture at TED.

It's a great book, and neatly delineates a lot of research into easy reading. Hard to imagine anyone could look at their food again after reading it. I was doing a lot of similar discovery related to growing stuff and raising my own cattle, pigs, etc., and Joel Salatin was a big inspiration. Then Pollan went and stayed with him and popularized a lot of what he was doing, which is a good thing. Salatin is an interesting character, a pretty staunch, semi-evangelical conservative, but a food liberal of the highest order. Check out "Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal" for a primer on how messed up the food trade in the US is.

Last week when the Common Reading situation at WSU looked pretty bleak, some of us at WSU created a facebook site: "WSU wants to have a serious discussion about food . . . . no, really":