Frances McDormand to Make 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' Movie

Photo credit: Camilla Morandi/Corbis

In a profile of Frances McDormand, The New York Times writer Frank Bruni revealed Wednesday that the Oscar-winning actress has acquired the rights to Michael Pollan’s best-selling The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Pollan is, as The New York Times dubbed him in 2006, a “liberal foodie intellectual” whose work is largely concerned with what he believes to be a detrimental tension between nature and industry. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, for which Pollan won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2007, he drove home this idea with a critique of modern agribusiness.

Important stuff, but not very glamorous. McDormand has never been one for glamour, though, choosing roles such as a pregnant Minnesota police chief in Fargo and a dowdy math teacher in the upcoming HBO series Olive Kitteridge. In this new project, she hopes “to weave strands” of Pollan’s most popular work of nonfiction “into a fictional narrative about the distance that people travel, in their diets and souls, from the earth,” wrote Bruni. “She’d have a supporting role, as the protagonist’s mother, with terminal cancer.”

There’s no telling when the film might make its debut, but we’ll be watching.

Did you read The Omnivore’s Dilemma? What did you think?