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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Michael Pollan- the AcresUSA Interview!
  • Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:09:27 -0700


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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  • [Livingontheland] Michael Pollan- the AcresUSA Interview!, TradingPostPaul, 12/12/2007

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