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I am going to be honest. I would have perhaps been more affected or less indifferent to his claims if I had some personal stake or claim to the products he did his ‘expose’ on. I am not an American; I have never been to Whole Foods. Back home, we almost never use pre-processed or microwaveable dinners. We do eat out, including at McDonald’s. (That would be our corn source, along with perhaps the breakfast cereals I deign to eat). I am not a vegan, and the only brush I have had with organic foods was a conversation with a fair trade coffee grower back near my boarding school and a chapter in biology on applied plant and animal science that listed the differences between organic and chemical farming. However, I do applaud Pollan’s efforts in enlightening the average, confused, helpless consumer (or so he would like to think). Being a sceptic myself, I never completely bought into the idea of a complete return to pastoral beginnings in agriculture, simply because with the pace of life today, you would have to drug and hypnotise me to make me believe that a large scale producer of food puts in the amount of time, effort, patience and the risk of losing out that is the principle of organic food production. I was on the ‘other side’ to begin with. As a completely informative piece of writing then, I do believe that Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma lowers its credibility at times by over-emphasising points. There is something in his style of dramatising things that has put me off slightly. On the other hand, for me as an inquisitive reader, Pollan’s research brings out things I had not known before; and which, in that capacity, make it worthwhile for me to be reading his work. The detail he went into to describe the organic food industry is one of many among such things. Also, he points out many things in his course of writing that apart from being interesting, are striking in their content. The references to ‘the fetishism of science as the only credible tool with which to approach nature’, ‘organic farming increasingly coming to resemble the industrial system it originally set out to replace’, ‘the powers and limitations of reductionist science’ and ‘Supermarket Pastoral as a most seductive literary form, beguiling enough to survive in the face of a great many discomfiting facts’ being some of these. That, to be honest is the manner in which this chapter has affected me – philosophical judgment of these claims made by Pollan.