"‘Ethical eating’ has taken the food world by storm, but the farms that produce most of our food have changed very little. Thank goodness,” wrote Blake Hurst, president of Missouri Farm Bureau, in his National Review article “Michael Pollan and His Faddish Foodie Followers, Ten Years After The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” As Penguin Books prepares to release a special tenth-anniversary edition of Pollan’s book, Hurst reflected on the author’s influence on the public conversation about food.

“As a farmer, I’ve participated in this discussion, in the same way a pig participates in a pig roast,” Hurst wrote. He goes on to clarify that the pig roast is a metaphor, because “no dedicated disciple of Pollan would ever attend such an event, unless the pig had a backstory complete with pastures, bucolic nature, local origins, and a life worthy of E.B. White’s Wilbur.” Further, thanks largely to Pollan, “the main course on the food movement’s menu has become the ‘industrial’ farmer, a farmer like me, who specializes in only a couple of crops or animals and uses the latest technology to grow his wares economically.”