By Michael Pollan
Pollan's bestseller, trimmed down for a twelve-year-old: he traces four different meals back to the ground they came out of, and what he finds behind the industrial one isn't pretty.
Pollan asks a plain question, where did this dinner come from, and then actually goes and finds out, four times over. The first meal is fast food, and the trail runs back to a sea of corn in Iowa and then to a feedlot in Kansas, where he buys a steer, number 534, and watches what happens to him. The second is dinner from the organic supermarket, where the word 'organic' turns out to mean less than the packaging promises. The third comes from a small farm in Virginia, where the animals get moved around the field in a deliberate order, and where Pollan helps kill and pluck the chickens himself. The fourth he hunts, gathers, and cooks from scratch, down to shooting a wild pig. Then he hands the question to your child: knowing all that, what should you eat?
What sets this apart is that it treats your child as someone who can follow an argument and disagree with it. It isn't interested in handing your child a conclusion about food. It hands over a method instead, go look at where your dinner came from, and then walks that method four separate times, including down two roads Pollan himself doesn't much like. For a ten-to-fourteen-year-old who's outgrown being told that trees are good and litter is bad, that's a real step up in what a book expects of them. It also ties the whole subject to eating, which is something a child does three times a day.