When the body of a young woman is discovered deep beneath the icy waters of Lake Grant, a note left under a rock by the shore points to suicide. But within minutes, it becomes clear that this is no suicide. It's a brutal, cold-blooded murder. All too soon former Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton - home for Thanksgiving after a long absence - finds herself unwittingly drawn into the case.
A brutal Mafia slaying rocks the city of Philadelphia when the only living witness is revealed - a wealthy debutante involved with the targeted mobster. One of the suspects is a policeman, who unwittingly takes on the battle between organized crime, upper-class power, and his own police force.
What shall we have for dinner? To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma.
Pollan has divided the book into three parts, one for each of the food chains that sustain us: industrialized food, alternative or "organic" food, and food people obtain by dint of their own hunting, gathering, or gardening.
For each meal he traces the provenance of everything consumed, revealing the hidden components we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods reflects our environmental and biological inheritance.