The Omnivore's Dilemma
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40 free The Omnivore's Dilemma trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma starts with a question that sounds simple: what should we have for dinner? To answer it he follows four meals back to where they began, from a cornfield and a feedlot to a grocery aisle, a grass farm and the woods. The result changed how a lot of readers shop, cook and think about what is on the plate. This quiz covers the full journey: the industrial food chain built on a single crop, the promises and compromises of big organic, a stint of farm work with Joel Salatin, and the hunted and gathered dinner that closes the book. Expect questions on the people Pollan meets, the animals and plants he tracks, the terms he coins and the arguments he makes about cheap food, farm policy and the ethics of meat. It works as a final quiz for a class that has finished the book, a check on a single section, or a refresher before a discussion. The opening questions are the gentlest, later ones reward close readers, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01Which fast-food chain supplies the industrial lunch that Michael Pollan and his family eat in their car?
McDonald's
McDonald's served a lunch that Pollan traces back to a single crop. That crop fed the cattle, became the oil for the fries and sweetened both the shakes and the sodas.
Q 02Which animal does Michael Pollan hold up as the specialist eater that never has to wonder what is for dinner?
Koala
Koala diets come hardwired: if it looks and smells like a eucalyptus leaf, it is a meal. Omnivores get no such instructions, which is the dilemma of the book's title.
Q 03Which animal does Michael Pollan shoot in northern California as the main course of his hunter-gatherer meal?
Wild boar
Wild boar was the centrepiece, though Pollan had never hunted before. The animal he shot was a large grayish sow, and he was honest about how mixed his feelings were afterwards.
Q 04What is the name of Joel Salatin's farm, which Michael Pollan presents as a model of sustainable agriculture?
Polyface
Polyface, when Pollan visited, sold only to customers, restaurants and shops within about half a day's drive. Its animals share the same pastures, each species helping the next.
Q 05In which state's Shenandoah Valley does Joel Salatin raise the grass-fed animals that Michael Pollan helps tend?
Virginia
Virginia is where the Salatin family bought worn-out land in 1961 and set about restoring it. It had been a run-down dairy operation scarred by erosion gullies.
Q 06Which illness entered the food supply, Michael Pollan recounts, after feedlot cattle ate the remains of other cattle?
Mad cow disease
Mad cow disease spread because the offal of slaughtered cattle was once mixed into feed for animals built to eat grass. Pollan sets it beside the indigestion that a grain diet causes them.
Q 07Which upmarket grocery chain sells Michael Pollan every ingredient of his 'Big Organic' dinner?
Whole Foods
Whole Foods stood in for the whole industry of large-scale organic farming. Pollan found its labels promised open pastures that the big suppliers behind them rarely delivered.
Q 08In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan argues that America, lacking a steady food culture, has a national what?
Eating disorder
Eating disorder is Pollan's diagnosis for a country that lurches from one diet fad to the next. He blames the lack of food traditions that carry the wisdom of earlier generations.
Q 09Which animal, known only by the number 534, does Michael Pollan buy and follow from a ranch to a feedlot?
A steer
A steer numbered 534 was Pollan's stake in the beef business, born on the Blair Ranch in South Dakota. He suspected its branding there would count as the good old days once it reached the feedlot.
Q 10Which kind of bread does Michael Pollan bake for the foraged meal that ends The Omnivore's Dilemma?
Sourdough
Sourdough rises on wild yeast, which Pollan gathered rather than bought. The meal was meant to use only what he had hunted, gathered or grown himself, down to the salad from his garden.
Q 11Which prized mushrooms share the plate with the meat at the hunter-gatherer feast that ends The Omnivore's Dilemma?
Morels
Morels are safe only once cooked, the kind of food lore Pollan says omnivores depend on. He had grown up with a dread of poisonous toadstools, passed on by his mother.
Q 12Which shellfish does Michael Pollan dive for while foraging for the final meal of The Omnivore's Dilemma?
Abalone
Abalone are sea snails, not clams, and looking for them was one of the foraging skills that local food lovers taught Pollan. They also showed him how to hunt and where to find mushrooms.
Q 13Which fruit, picked from trees in his own neighborhood, goes into the dessert of Michael Pollan's foraged meal?
Cherries
Q 21Which drugs do feedlot cattle receive pre-emptively, Michael Pollan reports, to offset an unnatural diet of grain?
Antibiotics
Antibiotics are routine because grain sickens animals built for grass, bringing on indigestion that needs repeated courses of the drugs. The trade buys speed: grain fattens cattle faster than pasture.
Q 22Which president's agriculture secretary, Earl Butz, began the cheap-grain policy that The Omnivore's Dilemma criticises?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon faced soaring food prices, and Earl Butz answered by urging farmers to plant from fencerow to fencerow and to get big or get out. Pollan traces the glut of cheap grain to that change.
Q 23Which grain giant joined Archer Daniels Midland in refusing to let Michael Pollan inside its processing plants?
Cherries from a tree near his home went into a galette, the one sweet course. Pollan judged the feast as unsustainable as fast food, a ritual rather than a way to live.
Q 14Which philosopher's book Animal Liberation challenges Michael Pollan to give up meat for a while?
Peter Singer
Peter Singer argued so forcefully that Pollan abstained from meat for a period to test his conscience. He came back to it as a selective eater of free-range and local animals.
Q 15Which animals does Michael Pollan help slaughter on Joel Salatin's farm, an experience that tests his animal ethics?
Chickens
Chickens were the test, and Pollan took his turn at the killing. What troubled him most was how quickly the work stopped troubling him.
Q 16What do Joel Salatin's laying hens pick out of the cow pats when their mobile coop follows the cattle?
Fly larvae
Fly larvae are rich in protein, and the hens arrive just as the flies are developing in the manure. The birds scatter the dung, cut the fly numbers and leave nitrogen of their own behind.
Q 17Which label does Joel Salatin, the self-described lunatic farmer of The Omnivore's Dilemma, give the meat he raises?
Beyond organic
Beyond organic is his phrase for meat raised on grass and sold only to neighbours. He told Pollan that sending meat across the country by courier could not be called sustainable.
Q 18In which state is the feedlot where the animal Michael Pollan bought in South Dakota is fattened on grain?
Kansas
Kansas is where the animal swaps the grass it evolved to eat for a grain diet that Pollan says damages its liver. The industry treats sick animals as a cost of doing business.
Q 19In which Corn Belt state does Michael Pollan visit George Naylor, a farmer going slowly broke growing grain?
Iowa
Iowa grew its grain at a loss: a bushel cost about $2.50 to raise and fetched $1.45 when Pollan visited. Federal payments made up nearly half of an average grower's income.
Q 20Which sweetener does Michael Pollan single out as a driver of America's obesity epidemic?
High-fructose corn syrup
High-fructose corn syrup sweetened not just the soda in Pollan's fast-food lunch but the ketchup and the burger bun too. Some 530 million bushels of grain a year go into making it.
Cargill
Cargill and its rival turn kernels into hundreds of food ingredients, yet neither would let Pollan inside. Their mills are where the chemistry behind so many grocery shelves happens.
Q 24Corn, the giant grass at the base of the industrial food chain in The Omnivore's Dilemma, has which scientific name?
Zea mays
Zea mays is a tall grass first domesticated in Mexico, and the world now harvests more of it than wheat or rice. Outside America the word corn can mean any local cereal.
Q 25Which German chemist found how to turn nitrogen in the air into ammonia, opening the age of synthetic fertilizer?
Fritz Haber
Fritz Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the process, later scaled up by Carl Bosch. It is credited with much of the fourfold rise in the world's food supply last century.
Q 26Cascadian Farm, founded by ex-hippie farmer Gene Kahn, was sold to which food giant, as Michael Pollan recounts?
General Mills
General Mills bought the brand after Kahn decided a sale was the only way to keep his company going. Pollan notes that he drives a Lexus with a number plate reading ORGANIC.
Q 27Which salad grower, begun on a 2.5-acre plot, does Michael Pollan call industrial organic at its best?
Earthbound Farm
Earthbound Farm became America's largest producer of organic salads and the first to sell prewashed, packaged greens on an industrial scale. Its founders started out in 1984 in the Carmel Valley.
Q 28Which psychologist coined the phrase 'omnivore's dilemma' some thirty years before Michael Pollan borrowed it?
Paul Rozin
Paul Rozin, of the University of Pennsylvania, is often described as the world's leading expert on disgust. His research asks why people, who can eat almost anything, choose what they do.
Q 29Which metropolis did Joel Salatin dismiss as pointless when Michael Pollan asked how it could be fed locally?
New York
New York struck the farmer as a place the country could do without, a reply that showed Pollan how far apart their worlds were. He still thought caring about food could bridge the gap.
Q 30Which earlier Michael Pollan book looks at apples, tulips, cannabis and potatoes from the plants' point of view?
The Botany of Desire
The Botany of Desire pairs each plant with a human craving: sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. It came out in 2001 and later became a two-hour PBS programme.