Fast Food Nation, Collapse and The Omnivore's Dilemma

It's a rare book that can make you feel, as the Biblical expression goes, like the scales have fallen from your eyes, and it's an even greater treat to discover three books that can so dramatically change your worldview.

Those three books - all with a different focus, but each revealing serious problems with the way we live today - are Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal," Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," and Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals."

Both Schlosser's and Pollan's books uncover the hidden workings of the modern food industry and, in both cases, it's often not a pretty sight. Much of what we eat, it turns out, has its origins in pollution-heavy, overcrowded cattle feedlots; gigantic, chemical-dependent fields of corn destined for heavy processing; slaughterhouses that are sometimes as deadly for the workers as they are for the millions of cows that pass through their doors each year; and a food system that benefits heavily subsidized corporate entities over small businesses and family farms.

Chances are, the more you learn from Schlosser's and Pollan's books, the less you'll want to support such practices by continuing to eat the way you do. You'll discover that every choice we make about what to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner is actually a political act, for better or for worse.

Diamond's book, on the other hand, provides broader insights into our modern lifestyles by examining in depth the failures and successes of past cultures. And in the many ways in which past societies have collapsed, we end up seeing reflections of our own society's shortcomings: our overwhelming dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels; our agricultural practices that destroy precious topsoil; our destruction of natural resources and biodiversity; our impact on the air, water and climate; and so on. Ultimately, Diamond applies the lessons learned from past cultures to our own and offers us ways in which we can avert the societal collapse that doomed so many past peoples.