Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

 Michael Pollan- the AcresUSA Interview!
   

(From the December 2007 Issue of ACRES USA: The Voice of 
Eco-Agriculture (subscription information follows this interview) If 
you'd like a pdf version of this interview, which will include a 
photo of Mr Pollan and stylized text and layout, you can download one 
at www.acresusa.com. If you are interested in the topics Michael 
Pollan has written on, you will enjoy the 2007 ACRES USA Conference 
which will occur in Louisville, KY December 5-9. Detail at 
www.acresusa.com.)

Rethinking Health
Author Michael Pollan on Food, Health & the Problems of Industrial
Agriculture

INTRODUCTION
Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, published last year, is as 
close to an instant classic on the subject of farming and food as 
we're likely to see in this decade. The structure is ingenious: 
Pollan follows a series of food chains from a group of plants 
photosynthesizing calories, through a series of intermediate stages, 
and ultimately to a meal. Along the way, he describes with wit and 
clarity the fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the 
logic of human industry. The way we eat, he argues, represents our 
most profound engagement with the natural world, and industrial 
eating obscures crucially important ecological relationships and 
connections. To prove it, he spent a week working on Joel Salatin's 
farm, visited many other farms, did a lot of eating and a lot of 
thinking about what he ate.
One of the book's funniest sections dealt with Whole Foods, where 
Pollan marveled at the lyrical descriptions on product labels and 
delivered a few hard, justified knocks at the company for doing much 
to push the organic food industry toward organic-in-name-only factory 
farms, mock holistic processed food and the like. At first, Whole 
Foods reacted like any offended corporation, issuing a release 
saying, in effect, that Michael Pollan was full of it. Then the story 
took a surprising turn, leading to an online dialogue between Pollan 
and Whole Foods founder John Mackey, who turned on a dime at dizzying 
speed and said the chain would henceforth make a point of buying from 
local farmers whenever possible.
Although Pollan first hit the radar of many readers with his 2001 
book The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World and a New 
York Times Magazine cover story about a steer he bought and tracked 
to the door of the slaughterhouse, he's been a working writer since 
getting his master's degree at Columbia University in 1981. He wrote 
two books before Botany and won several journalism prizes. He now 
lives in Berkeley and teaches at the University of California.

An Interview with Michael Pollan (from the 12/07 ACRES USA magazine)

ACRES U.S.A. Were you surprised by Whole Foods' reaction to the 
criticisms in your book The Omnivore's Dilemma and the dialogue with 
John Mackey that followed?

POLLAN. I was as surprised as anyone that John Mackey was willing to 
engage at that level. Our exchange of letters was preceded by a 
meeting that happened in Austin when I was on book tour. I got word 
from someone in his office that he would like to meet me when I was 
in town, and I thought, "Well, this could be interesting!" I didn't 
expect it to be a love-fest because I had reason to believe they'd be 
upset by what I said in the book. We must have spent more than an 
hour together talking in his office, and it was partly him expressing 
his displeasure, but there were a lot of things we agreed on, too, 
and I think we were both surprised by that. He agreed, for example, 
that there were developments going on in the organic marketplace that 
were alarming - signs of  organic losing its way and concerns about 
food imports from certain places. The direction of big organic was a 
concern that we shared, and that the standards for animal welfare 
simply weren't what they should be. So there was some common ground 
as well as some disagreement. At the meeting he handed me a 
five-page, single-spaced letter, the first letter in the exchange. He 
asked me if I had any objection to his putting it on his website, and 
I said no, but I would hope that he'd put my response to it on his 
website as well. He said fine. That began the exchange. Instead of 
just trying to pick his letter apart point by point, I chose to take 
a tack of emphasizing the potential Whole Foods has to move the whole 
discussion and industry in the right direction. I said they were in a 
position to support pastured livestock in particular - that they 
could give an enormous boost to that business and also push organics 
in the right direction and do something more for local food. I 
figured,  why not prod rather than blow off? And he responded in a 
similar way. It was very unusual because most corporations, if they 
were going to respond to criticism, they wouldn't admit that was what 
they were doing. They would not have tied their new initiatives to 
the critic, and Mackey indeed announced several of these initiatives 
in his letter to me. I thought that was very refreshing and 
completely surprising - but also very clever because it sends a 
message that Whole Foods is different from your typical Fortune 500 
corporation, that they do engage with critics, that they try by doing 
so to be on the forefront of what is happening. So in a way I thought 
it was really smart on his part. It probably won more attention for 
those initiatives, and certainly got me to temper my criticisms while 
I wait to see how this works out.

ACRES U.S.A. That was a year ago. Do you know how Whole Foods policy 
changes are coming along?

POLLAN. I can't draw a single conclusion yet. I have heard very good 
things from a lot of local produce farmers in many parts of the 
country who feel that they are more welcome at Whole Foods than they 
were before. In the meat area I think that there has been a whole lot 
of confusion, and people have gotten very mixed signals from Whole 
Foods - some real reaching out by parts of the company telling 
people, "We really want to sell your grass-finished livestock," but 
then finding that it is incredibly hard to do business with them, 
that there are many impediments. As one person described it, there's 
been a Chinese fire-drill quality to dealing with them on meat. I 
think they are making the effort. From what I can see it's not a 
situation where John Mackey can snap his fingers and make everything 
happen overnight. It's a big, highly decentralized company, and some 
areas are making a stronger push than others to be serious about 
local. I was in their New York City stores this summer where I 
thought the amount of local product was pretty paltry given what is 
going on in the food scene there and what is available. So far it's a 
mixed bag, but I think this is a sincere effort to move in the right 
direction, and I need to look more systematically at what is 
happening. How has Whole Foods done on these  promises a year later? 
What is happening with the $10 million credit fund for local farmers? 
Where are we on grass-fed beef? That article is for somebody else to 
do, and I hope it happens. By the way, I've also talked to many of 
their employees who feel that they have gotten a signal to change, 
and they feel very emboldened by this. But I should say my 
information is not national, and it's not up to date. Wherever I go, 
whatever market I'm in, I make a point to stop there and talk to the 
produce manager and the guy behind the meat counter.

ACRES U.S.A. It's only anecdotal information, but it is positive?

POLLAN. It is encouraging. We're not there yet, and the meat issue is 
a little hard to read. More transparency on the meat would be really 
good. The other thing that happened is that Mackey came to Berkeley 
to engage in an onstage conversation with me.

ACRES U.S.A. How did that go?
POLLAN. It was really interesting, actually. There was a lot of 
apprehension on his part about coming to Berkeley, which is really a 
den of lions if you're the president of Whole Foods.

ACRES U.S.A. He has had labor troubles there, organized protests, 
because he doesn't want employees' unions in his stores?

POLLAN. He has - and in other places, too. I think he was 
apprehensive about the whole thing, but in fact it went very well. It 
was very civil. I think some people expected an angrier exchange, and 
I'm not an angry person. That's not how I deal with these things. So 
I know there were some people who thought it was too friendly an 
exchange, but I actually thought it was very productive. I think he 
surprised people, too. He showed a PowerPoint, which was his 
condition for appearing there, that he get a half hour to show a 
PowerPoint. "This is going to be terrible," I thought, but it was so 
non-corporate. It included a great five minutes of brutal PETA 
videotape of slaughterhouses and made clear that his commitment on 
the animal welfare front was very strong. He was willing to show this 
tape even though they haven't cleaned up their act to the extent that 
they need to if they want to stand on the ground of "we only serve 
humane food." But he clearly is trying to push the company in that 
direction.

ACRES U.S.A. Does their acquisition of Wild Oats give them 
significant new power? Wild Oats didn't seem to be that dynamic a 
company.

POLLAN. No, I don't think that they were a strong competitor by any 
means. I'm not a business writer, so I can't speak with any authority 
about the implications of that move. A lot depends on whether you 
perceive Whole Foods as being in the alternative food store world, in 
which case they are becoming a monopoly, or if you see them as being 
in the supermarket world, in which case they are still a pretty small 
player compared to some of the others.

ACRES U.S.A. The problem a lot of people have with Whole Foods and 
with the evolution of organic food is the kind of esthetic they are 
creating with the megastores, where you walk in and it feels like a 
theme park and you need a GPS device to find your way around. There's 
a question that runs all through your book about food culture in this 
country and how the poor eat badly and get sick while the rich eat 
well and the middle are in between, and it's not a brand new problem. 
Yet nobody in organic retailing ever faces it head-on and opens 
retail stores in underserved neighborhoods - poor neighborhoods. The 
real estate costs are not high in  these places, and how do they know 
low-income people wouldn't eat better food if they could find it 
nearby?

POLLAN. I think there are a lot of reasons to think that they would. 
I see people here taking the bus from West Oakland to get to the 
supermarkets over the line in Emeryville and having to schlep bags 
and bags of groceries home on the bus. I think it's an underserved 
market, and I think there is probably money to be made in that 
marketplace. Whole Foods will tell you that the demographics of their 
clientele are not what you would expect in many places. They have 
higher numbers of Hispanic shoppers, higher numbers of African 
American shoppers than you might think, and they are not all wealthy 
people shopping in these stores. They often like to locate stores on 
the edge of these neighborhoods, as they have done in Washington, 
D.C., for example. They're opening a big one in downtown Oakland. 
They actually feel that they can get that market, which is special 
occasion shopping. People in these neighborhoods are not buying there 
everyday as, say, you may find in Manhattan, where some people are 
doing all their shopping at Whole Foods, crazy as it sounds. So they 
do feel that there is a market. It's not like they're doing this out 
of a sense that they're going to go into the ghetto and make a lot of 
money, but they like being on the edge of lower-income neighborhoods, 
and they feel that they can draw from both upscale and more downscale 
marketplaces. There are policy reasons that supermarkets are not in 
the inner cities, and it is also due to the way chains typically 
decide these things based on some very simplistic formula. Lots of 
big chains of all different kinds wouldn't go into Manhattan for a 
long time. They just don't like cities. They have a very anti-urban 
attitude, and it took a while for any kind of retail chain to really 
decide, "Oh, Manhattan - a lot of people live there, a lot of money." 
Now you go to SoHo and it looks like a mall - but that's only in the 
last 20 years. What came into the inner city instead were franchises, 
and indeed there were policies to help franchises get in. The Small 
Business Administration, for example, wanted to start businesses in 
the inner city, and they would loan you money if you were a local 
entrepreneur and you wanted to open a  Taco Bell. They made it very 
easy for the franchises to get in, but there was nothing similar for 
supermarkets, which of course are a bigger investment. Also, the 
story you hear traditionally was that supermarket chains were 
concerned about what they call shrinkage, which is to say theft. I 
don't know whether that was a racist excuse or if there was any basis 
to it, but what you heard is that you can't make money there because 
security would be such a problem.

ACRES U.S.A. "Significant shrinkage." Speaking of shrinking and 
swelling, you wrote that the price of food hasn't been a political 
issue in this country at least since the Earl Butz era. Now that 
retail food prices are rising, do you think it is about to become a 
political issue?

POLLAN. Yeah. I think ethanol has the potential to make the price of 
food a political issue again. When everybody got on this bandwagon, 
the Bush administration in particular, they really didn't look down 
the road to see that if you create this strong incentive for ethanol, 
you are going to raise food prices. It is starting to happen, and 
you're hearing from people in the meat business, dairy, eggs, they 
are crying foul because their grain prices have doubled. Soy has gone 
up, too, because all that soy acreage is now in corn, so it affects 
all the grains. I'm not a futurist, but a couple of things could 
happen. One could be that this is a temporary blip, and that as so 
often happens in American agriculture everyone is getting in on the 
good thing - which is currently corn for ethanol - and the market 
will be flooded and collapse. We have seen this happen over and over 
again - whether it will take one year or two years or three years, I 
don't know. That is one possibility. The other is that it will be a 
very positive thing for people trying to do pastured food. If corn 
prices are high, then let your chickens outside and start pasturing 
your dairy cows again. That is one way to deal with that. What has 
allowed the whole industrialization of our livestock has been cheap 
corn and cheap soy. That is the real subsidy there for all those 
guys, because a feedlot operator can feed cattle more cheaply than a 
farmer can when he can buy the corn at less than the cost of 
producing it. But if that equation changes, then farmers who are 
either growing their own feed or putting their animals on grass will 
be in a much better competitive situation, and that could be very 
positive for the growth of an alternative food system. Feedlots 
depend on artificially cheap grain, and that ain't around anymore.

ACRES U.S.A. Does your mind reel when you try to imagine the United 
States without piles and piles of cheap corn? What would a post-corn 
republic look like?

POLLAN. There would be a lot more pasture and a lot less corn fields. 
The height of the grass in the Midwest would go down dramatically! I 
think that would be wonderful by many measures. In terms of the 
health of the land, the health of the animals, the health of the 
eaters, all would benefit from taking some of that land out of corn 
and putting it back in grass. Whether it will happen, I don't know. 
We are planting more corn this year than we have in ages. At least in 
the short term, perhaps all that corn we're feeding to our cars now 
means some of our animals will get off of it.

ACRES U.S.A. Unfortunately, that brings up the mind-warping topic of . . .

POLLAN. Not the Farm Bill!

ACRES U.S.A. . . . the Farm Bill. Earlier this year you wrote an 
essay for the Times that was rife with heresy, describing the Farm 
Bill as an egregious piece of corporate welfare reinforcing a status 
quo that is bad for American health, bad for the land, and bad for 
average farmers. You proposed renaming it the Food Bill and giving it 
a total overhaul. It was shocking to read these things in the leading 
national newspaper, and it triggered talk that this year might see a 
break in the orthodoxy. Of course, hell did not freeze over, and a 
status quo bill oozes through Congress as we speak. What did the 
fallout from that essay tell you?

POLLAN. There is a new politics around agricultural policy in this 
country, and there is more interest on the part of people who live on 
the coasts and in the cities in the Farm Bill - to the extent that 
the people in Congress who have had this cozy committee situation to 
themselves are kind of annoyed. Collin Peterson, the Minnesota 
Democrat who is a senior member of the Farm Bill Conference 
Committee, gave a testy quote to the San Francisco Chronicle that 
these people in the city don't know what they're talking about when 
they talk about the bill. More people are showing up at their 
hearings and their markup sessions than ever before. That said, 
legislators are responding by digging in their heels and passing even 
more reactionary farm bills than we have had in a while. It is the 
same old Farm Bill, more or less. There are some good things hidden 
in the House bill, I hear, some initiatives that in certain worlds 
are very important. For example, if you are buying food for a school 
district you can give preference to local suppliers, even if they are 
not the low-cost supplier, without violating USDA rules. It doesn't 
sound like a big deal, but there are a lot of local school districts 
that would like to start buying locally, and this will make it 
somewhat easier. It could turn into something. There is a lot of 
purchasing power there.

ACRES U.S.A. What would it take to crack the Farm Bill, considering 
all the money that's behind keeping it the way it is?

POLLAN. There is a tradition in Congress of leaving it to these 
Midwestern senators and congressmen, and yet there is no one on these 
committees who represents consumers, who represents the environment, 
who represents the public health community. I think it would really 
take recasting these committees to some extent, and dropping this old 
tradition that you fill these committees up with Midwesterners. 
California is the biggest agricultural state in the country, but what 
is its representation on the committees? It's slight to nonexistent. 
The committees are full of Midwesterners, so therefore it is all 
about commodity farming, which is only part of what we do in 
California. There is a lot more money made in agriculture here. So we 
talk about these people, and the next thing you know, Collin Peterson 
is bitching to the Chronicle about how people in California shouldn't 
be messing with it, but the fact is they've got a lot at stake - 
they're growing lots  of food without a lot of government help, and 
by the way, they're growing the kind of food we need to be eating 
more of.

ACRES U.S.A. When you see that little green-and-white organic label 
on a food product, do you ever wonder how many people realize the 
office behind that seal gets less than one percent of the USDA budget 
and is staffed by nine people?

POLLAN. There is very, very little support for it, which makes it all 
the more remarkable that this market has grown as it has. It shows 
that policy is important, but the consumer is really important, too, 
and the food industry can be changed by people voting with their 
forks, and that's not a trivial thing. It created the organic 
movement. It's creating the grass-fed movement, and the potential has 
just been scratched. There are so many more people whose eyes are 
being opened to the importance of their food choices as a matter of 
health, both personally and environmentally. Then there's all the 
stuff we're not even counting. Like, how many dollars are being spent 
at farmers markets? A lot of it is not being reported, so who knows? 
But it is growing in leaps and bounds.

ACRES U.S.A. Do you think more people are voting with their forks for 
food as medicine, or are we seeing some kind of a return to food as a 
source of pleasure that is also good for your health? Most people 
still choose industrial food, which is like using food as a 
recreational drug, isn't it? Use it long enough and you need other 
drugs to treat you before the inevitable happens.

POLLAN. That is the way it goes with drugs, isn't it? If you look at 
the farmers market movement, that is not just buying a different kind 
of food, because that food also needs to be cooked, for example. 
Going to the farmers market means that you are cooking, and as soon 
as you're cooking, you are having meals, and as soon as you're having 
meals, you are sitting down with other people. A whole lot of other 
changes that are cultural as well as economic or biological are 
happening when you start growing that market. People cannot get fast 
food at the farmers market.

ACRES U.S.A. Have you thought much about the way a lot of people 
think of food as a medicine, but they also enjoy it some of the time? 
It's a very strange thing.

POLLAN. Actually, that is the subject of my next book. It is coming 
out in January, and its working title is In Defense of Food: An 
Eater's Manifesto. What I'm trying to do in this book is look at the 
whole "food as health" phenomenon and trying to redefine the health 
side of it. The point I try to make is that your bodily health is 
very much connected to the health of the ecosystem and the food chain 
that you are eating from, and that you cannot separate the two. 
Whether you eat meat or don't eat meat might not matter as much as 
what kind of meat you eat and how the animals you eat were fed. The 
idea that you can think about food in a vacuum and that if you eat 
the right kinds you're going to be fine is simply not true. You have 
to enlarge your sense of what it means to be healthy. Health is what 
motivates people and their food choices, and I don't think that's a 
bad thing. I just think they have to understand that to get really 
healthy food you have to get it from healthy soil, with a healthy 
food chain all along the way without pharmaceuticals, without too 
much corn, without too much processing. All these things are 
connected, and health is the door through which people - most of them 
- first choose to buy organic. It is a very strong motivator, but we 
are looking at health in a very narrow, reductionist way when we 
shop, and that is why we are fooled by frozen entrees that make 
health claims. In other words, healthy eating has nothing to do with 
health claims on packages. In fact, I argue in this book that when 
you see a health claim on a package, run the other way.

ACRES U.S.A. It's one of those ironclad laws like "never eat anything 
advertised on television?"

POLLAN. Or never eat anything that can't rot. In fact, a third of the 
book is devoted to helpful rules for people to navigate the food 
landscape. But food with health claims has to have a package for the 
claims to be printed on, and that is a problem. In general the 
companies that have the money to do the research to get the health 
claim by the FDA are food processors, they're not selling whole 
foods. You do have some crops such as the pomegranate or the almond 
that have industries that can pay for health claims, but in general 
it's the quiet food in the produce section that you want to eat, food 
that is not making health claims.

ACRES U.S.A. The Omnivore's Dilemma  included a detailed description 
of the processes behind high-fructose corn syrup, which no outsiders 
are allowed to see being made. How did you get that?

POLLAN. Since I couldn't get in to see the corn refining process, I 
was able to see the university version of it at the place where they 
teach people how to do it. I went to Iowa State, where they have a 
kind of mini-corn refining operation and soy refining operation, so I 
was able to see how they do it there on a small scale and have it 
explained to me by people who are food scientists. I didn't get to 
see the giant vats and the 12-foot diameter pipes through which the 
corn gets pumped, but I saw a mini-version of it.

ACRES U.S.A. Do the corn refiners worry that the giant vats look 
diabolical, like Frankenstein's lab? Why do they refuse to let anyone 
have a look at the process?

POLLAN. It simply may be that the companies that do it are not 
consumer-product companies, and they just don't care what any of us 
think. Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill really don't care what 
journalists think. In general they have had really bad experiences 
with journalists - I wonder why! I think it's more about the universe 
in which they operate. They only get grief from the New York Times or 
writers like me, so why bother? There's no penalty in saying no.

ACRES U.S.A. Do you think your book has contributed to a sort of 
folk-wisdom grapevine process among people who do not read this kind 
of thing? Word is getting around that you should maybe avoid this 
corn syrup stuff.
POLLAN. That's one message that has really gotten around. I have 
somewhat mixed feelings about it because corn
syrup is not poison. The confusion is that fructose as a sugar 
appears to be a more serious issue vis-a-vis diabetes and fat because 
fructose basically goes directly to the liver, and unless there is a 
demand for more sugar in the body, more glucose in the body, the 
liver turns it right into triglycerides and it gets stored as fat. 
But what people fail to understand is that high-fructose corn syrup 
is not all fructose. It's about 50-50 fructose and glucose. If you 
took all the high-fructose corn syrup in the world and replaced it 
with table sugar - beet sugar or cane sugar, I don't know if that 
would help very much. The issue really is that high-fructose corn 
syrup is so cheap or has been so cheap and ubiquitous that it even 
ends up in products that have never had sugar before. The reason for 
that is it has these other qualities - it gives baked goods a nice 
golden coloring, it prevents freezer burn, it is a mild food 
preservative - so food scientists are throwing it into everything.

ACRES U.S.A. One theory is that junk food is a delivery system for 
high-fructose corn syrup, but maybe it's the other way around: since 
HFCS makes things look fresh and golden brown and is ten times 
sweeter than sugar - it has a special sweetness to it, if you've been 
avoiding it for years you can taste it instantly  - maybe what 
high-fructose corn syrup does is make a lot of products palatable 
that would not be so edible without it?

POLLAN. That may be, because the fact is, if you sweeten anything 
people will eat more of it, because we're hard-wired to like 
sweetness. If you add it to ketchup, if you add it to pickles, if you 
add it to bread - you know, bread never used to have sugar in it - 
people will eat more of it. That is why it is a tool beloved by food 
scientists. It's cheap and it is magic. That is why we eat so much of 
it. But I do argue that people should avoid products with 
high-fructose corn syrup. The reason is not that it is worse for your 
health than eating a corresponding amount of cane sugar, but that it 
is a sure sign that a food is highly processed, and in my terms that 
means it isn't really food, because no one cooks with high-fructose 
corn syrup at home. Nobody has it on their shelf. Not so far. It is 
only in the kitchens of the
food scientists, and you really don't want to be eating out of those
kitchens.

ACRES U.S.A. Do you think the importance of soybeans as a processed 
food related to health and obesity is underrated because soy has all 
these positive associations with soy milk and tofu, those nice 
holistic foods? Do you believe the distinction between processed soy 
and old-fashioned, pre-industrial fermented soy is not commonly 
understood?

POLLAN. I think that's absolutely right. Soy has connotations of 
health food all over it, either because of how it has been eaten 
traditionally or because it has had a much more clever industry. The 
amazing thing about soy is that it's a very unpromising food for 
humans - it's full of anti-tryptophan factors and all these 
anti-nutrients essentially that prevent you from being able to break 
it down in your body. It has to be processed to make it digestible. 
There is a traditional way of doing it, and there is a newer way of 
doing it, and they're not the same thing. There is a reason why the 
FDA has not granted GRAS - generally regarded as safe - status to soy 
isoflavins for use as additives. I think that's curious. There was a 
petition to do so by ADM, but it was withdrawn. I think we eat way 
too much soy. Twenty percent of our daily calories are now soy oil. 
That soy oil is usually partially hydrogenated. It's full of omega-6 
fatty acids, which we're getting too much of. That's a pretty radical 
change to the diet, to get that many omega-6 fatty acids from one 
plant. Soy deserves the kind of hard look that its companion corn has 
been getting. But I think you're right, the reason it doesn't get it 
is because it has tofu out there in front. I've found that people 
have really strong feelings about soy. It's very hard to get 
objective information on it. Either people love it or they think it's 
a toxin. You go to the Weston A. Price Foundation and it sounds like 
soy will kill you. Then you go to most health food sites and soy will 
save you. You can get lost in it. All you really need to know is that 
the way it has traditionally been processed has kept huge populations 
healthy for thousands of years and that you don't want to get 20 
percent of your calories from one kind of seed oil. You really want 
diversity in your  diet. Too much soy, too much corn, too much of 
anything is not a good thing.

ACRES U.S.A. You mention the ancient Roman poet Virgil more than a 
few times in Omnivore's Dilemma. Why is he important?

POLLAN. The pastoral tradition is what I'm evoking there, both the 
real pastoral tradition and the literary tradition. Virgil really 
starts that tradition in Western literature of celebrating the middle 
landscape, this grassy, pastoral landscape with animals that 
represents a kind of reconciliation of people with nature. It's a 
very romantic idea, but when you go to Joel Salatin's farm, you see 
that it's a very realistic idea and a very beautiful idea, too. It's 
such a powerful idea, in fact, that we often try to fake it, and 
that's what I objected  to in so much of the food marketing for 
organics - trying to evoke that pastoral, Virgilian idea on a carton 
of organic milk when in fact it's coming out of a factory.

ACRES U.S.A. What is the key work of Virgil's that you would recommend?


POLLAN. The Georgics is one, but the Eclogues is one of the first 
important pastoral poems. Virgil wrote about our symbiotic 
relationship with other species, and he wrote about the way humans 
can organize and manage the landscape and other species in it that is 
very positive. So the pastoral is kind of a halfway point between the 
wilderness, which Americans usually celebrate, and the city. It is 
something we don't spend enough time working on in this country 
because we are so all-or-nothing about nature. It is either leave it 
alone and throw away the key, or trash it.We don't have that middle 
ground. Grass is a big part of that middle ground. Virgil celebrates 
grass quite a bit. I think it is an important image and tradition for 
people doing alternative agriculture to seize and use as defense 
against people trying to fake it. The reason they're trying to fake 
it is because it is a very attractive idea to a lot of consumers.

ACRES U.S.A. It's embedded in us culturally?

POLLAN. I think so. I think it goes really deep. In fact, our love of 
grassy landscapes is probably hard-wired, as
E.O. Wilson has suggested, because that's what the savanna was. That 
is where you could find a lot of good food to eat and that is where 
you could be safe.

ACRES U.S.A. There is a question in your book about Joel Salatin's 
Polyface Farm that is left hanging. Slightly rephrased, you ask, does 
his Shenandoah Valley operation represent the past or foretell the 
future?

POLLAN. It's a really good question, and I think the answer is that 
it's both. I don't think it is a throwback. You would not find any 
farm like that if you turned back the clock. Only a very superficial 
look at Polyface Farm would say this is backward because the farm 
equipment is not fancy or up-to-date and the barn is kind of 
ramshackle. If you look closely, you are seeing a farm built on the 
most sophisticated understanding of the ecological relationships 
between different species and the land and the soil. That it is truly 
a knowledge-based business, and Joel is right when he talks that way 
about it. For my money it's the future, but it is built off of 
borrowing the best things from the past.

ACRES U.S.A. That brings up a thorny question. If a lot of people 
followed his example, would we have enough land to do it?

POLLAN. That's a real question. Can you scale it up? I think the 
bigger issue is not land, the bigger issue is farmers. We need a lot 
more farmers. The good news is that we are seeing the beginning of a 
new generation interested in getting into farming. In the last survey 
I read the USDA said the number of farmers has picked up for the 
first time in a hundred years.

ACRES U.S.A. Isn't some kind of consistent support needed to nurture 
this trend? It doesn't seem likely that giving new farmers $500 to 
help pay the certifier is going to cut it.

POLLAN. Exactly. We need more than that. They need support because 
the price of land is prohibitive, but there is a market for what 
they're doing. There are people who want to do it, and if they can be 
supported, I think we will get more farmers. We also have to work on 
our zoning rules to make it more possible for them either to do 
on-farm processing or to keep a certain amount of farmland free. When 
you're doing a development plan now you have to have open space in 
many areas. Why not require that there be a certain amount of 
farmland in a development so the development can feed itself? It's 
going to take a lot of creativity to do this. It is just not going to 
happen on its own.

ACRES U.S.A. Barbara Kingsolver wrote a book about how she and her 
family left Tucson and revived an old farm in the same part of the 
country as Joel Salatin. Along the way she muses that Tucson would 
shrivel up and die without trucks full of food coming in because you 
can't grow much out there.
POLLAN. And then you have the problem that where a lot of the good 
farmland is in this country, there aren't a lot of eaters left. You 
can develop your wonderful local food system in parts of Iowa, but 
who's going to buy the food? It's been so depopulated.

ACRES U.S.A. How do we prepare for the likelihood that someday the 
cost of shipping food 3,000 to 5,000 miles to market  will become 
prohibitive as the price of oil rises? How will the food industry 
cope?

POLLAN. The food industry has to change completely. It's one of the 
reasons that we need to develop these alternatives, because when that 
happens - and it will happen, there's no question - we will need 
other ways to feed ourselves. That is the national security reason 
why the federal government and local municipalities should be 
supporting local agriculture. If you're really concerned about 
homeland security, you want to have those food chains here and vital 
and working when the oil runs out.

ACRES U.S.A. Do you think water shortages will play a bigger part 
over time as well?

POLLAN. Somebody was telling me about a meeting of organic farmers in 
New England in the 1970s, and they were just getting killed by 
produce coming out of California.They were saying,"Just wait for the 
water to run out and we'll be fine." They're still waiting, but we 
don't know. The time horizon may surprise us.

Michael Pollan is the author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye 
View of the World; The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four 
Meals; and the forthcoming In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition 
and the Pleasures of Eating. For more information, visit www. 
michaelpollan.com.

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