Michael Pollan hasn’t been the only writer to bring attention to the follies of industrial agriculture, an oxymoron if there ever were one, but he is arguably the most influential, much as Rachel Carson exemplified the ethos of the environmental movement when she wrote Silent Spring. Cooked, Pollan’s latest exploration of the intersection between food, science and culture, shows him at his most engaging but also exhibits a tone-deafness that comes when the preacher is proselytizing those who are already converted. The premise of Cooked is that there have been dire consequences from the post-war advent of so-called convenience foods. With an abundance of scientific …