One of the gifts I received for my birthday was the River Cottage Meat Book. Looks amazing! Here's a review which uses the words "classic" and "astounding" in the first 'graph. The author, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (it's hard to imagine a more English name), sums up his approach better than I could on the River Cottage website: it's "about food, where it comes from, and why that matters." I've long believed that if you're gonna eat meat (and I am) then you have a responsibility to know that meat doesn't come from a styrofoam package in the grocery store. Fortunately I have the luxury of being able to buy meat from local and responsible sources. I do have concerns that, like so much in this country, we're currently at a place where if you're poor you're stuck eating factory-raised chicken, beef and pork pumped full of growth-hormones and whatnot. I'll be interested to see what the River Cottage book has to say about that. I haven't read Pollan's book but I've read some of his debates with Mr. Noodle and I've felt that he, like others in the slow food movement, tends to handwave around the problem of economic access. Of course, that's possibly an unfair characterization on my part.