Pivotal to the book is Pollan’s claim that

our omnivorousness has done much to shape our nature, both body (we possess the omnicompetent teeth and jaws of the omnivore, equally well suited to tearing meat and grinding seeds) and soul.

One might as well describe man the way the anthropologist Ernest Becker did, as a digestive tract with teeth at one end and an anus at the other, and claim that the soul is shaped out of that. In which case, I don’t want one. But most of us use soul to mean the part of humanness that is not shaped out of that. In contrast to the fearless Becker, Pollan thinks that taking a hard look at human nature is more a matter of leaning over the museum rail at the caveman exhibit. Seeing only the painted mammoth on the horizon, so to speak, he derives the rightness of meat eating from the fact that humans are physically suited to it, they enjoy it, and they have engaged in it until modern times without feeling much “ethical heartburn.” (Only a food writer would use such an appalling phrase.) According to Pollan, this “reality” demands our respect. The same reasoning could be used to defend our mistreatment of children: In body and instinct, we are marvelously well-equipped for making their lives hell. If many cultures now object to abusing them, it is thanks to new values, to people who refused to respect the time-honored “reality.”

But by reducing man’s moral nature to an extension of our instincts, Pollan is free to present his appetite as a sort of moral-o-meter, the final authority for judging the rightness of all things culinary. He shoots a wild pig, for example, hugely enjoying the experience. We even get a spiel about how hunting makes people face the inevitability of their own death. (Psychologists have long asserted the opposite: As Otto Rank put it, and in words relevant to meat eating in general, “the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other.”) Ah, but then Pollan sees a photo of himself leering over the corpse and feels bad. So is killing pigs right or wrong? Or as he puts it, “What if it turned out I couldn’t eat this meat?”

Spoiler alert: He could. He even congratulates himself on “doing well by the animal” by cooking and chewing it with the proper reverence. As reluctant as he is to attribute fear and pain to a live animal— one mustn’t anthropomorphize!—he sees nothing strange in attributing a concern for decorum to a dead one. He apparently believes that we cannot fully relate to animals until they become food. In the introduction, we are told that eating something—“transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds”—constitutes the deepest possible “relationship” with it, “the most profound engagement” of all. (German police had to listen to similar reasoning in 2002 after arresting one Armin Meiwes, who had just put his omnicompetent jaws to work on a Siemens engineer.) Now, Epicurus, who strikes me as a vegetarian Pollan might listen to, made the rather obvious point that no living thing experiences death. As soon as life ceases, the body ceases to deserve the attribute human or animal, as the root of the latter word makes especially clear. The pig thus takes its farewell from Pollan almost as soon as he pulls his trigger in greeting. The mere flesh left behind tastes remarkably like that of us “long pigs—to use the notorious cannibal term—and the digestive tract cannot tell them apart at all. There is less “transformation” going on here than Pollan would like to think.