Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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http://www.alternet.org/story/76987/
Michael Pollan: Don't Eat Anything That Doesn't Rot
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on March 8, 2008, Printed on March 8, 2008

Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan argues that what most  
Americans are consuming today is not food but "edible foodlike  
substances." His previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural  
History of Four Meals, was named one of 2006's ten best books by the  
New York Times and the Washington Post. His latest book is called In  
Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.

Amy Goodman:"You are what to eat." Or so the saying goes. In American  
culture, healthy food is a national preoccupation. But then, why are  
Americans becoming less healthy and more overweight?

Michael Pollan joined me for a wide-ranging conversation about  
nutrition, food science and the current American diet. I began by  
asking him why he feels he has to defend food.

Michael Pollan: Food's under attack from two quarters. It's under  
attack from the food industry, which is taking, you know, perfectly  
good whole foods and tricking them up into highly processed edible  
foodlike substances, and from nutritional science, which has over the  
years convinced us that we shouldn't be paying attention to food,  
it's really the nutrients that matter. And they're trying to replace  
foods with antioxidants, you know, cholesterol, saturated fat,  
omega-3s, and that whole way of looking at food as a collection of  
nutrients, I think, is very destructive.

Goodman: Shouldn't people be concerned, for example, about cholesterol?

Pollan: No. Cholesterol in the diet is actually only very mildly  
related to cholesterol in the blood. It was a -- that was a  
scientific error, basically. We were sold a bill of goods that we  
should really worry about the cholesterol in our food, basically  
because cholesterol is one of the few things we could measure that  
was linked to heart disease, so there was this kind of obsessive  
focus on cholesterol. But, you know, the egg has been rehabilitated.  
You know, the egg is very high in cholesterol, and now we're told  
it's actually a perfectly good, healthy food. So there's only a very  
tangential relationship between the cholesterol you eat and the  
cholesterol levels in your blood.

Goodman: How is it that the food we eat now, it takes time to read  
the ingredients?

Pollan: Yeah.

Goodman: You actually have to stop and spend time and perhaps put on  
glasses or figure out how to pronounce words you have never heard of.

Pollan: Yeah, it's a literary scientific experience now going  
shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten  
more complex. It's -- for the food industry -- see, to understand the  
economics of the food industry, you can't really make money selling  
things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go  
to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for 79  
cents. There's no money in that, because it doesn't have any brand  
identification. It's a commodity, and the prices of commodity are  
constantly falling over time.

So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you take  
those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can charge  
four bucks for that 79 cents -- and actually even less than that, a  
few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios become a  
commodity. You know, everyone's ripping off your little circles. And  
so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like cereal bars.  
And now there's cereal straws, you know, that your kids are supposed  
to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. It's made out of  
the cereal material. It's extruded.

So, you see, every level of further complication gives you some  
intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to  
charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as  
you make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to  
make it last, to make it taste good, to make -- and because, you  
know, food really isn't designed to last a year on the shelf in a  
supermarket. And so, it takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen.

Goodman: I was a whole grain baker in Maine, and I would consider the  
coup to be to get our whole grain organic breads in the schools of  
Maine for the kids, but we just couldn't compete with Wonder Bread  
which could stay on the shelf -- I don't know if it was a year.

Pollan: That's amazing.

Goodman: Ours, after a few days, of course, would get moldy, because  
it was alive.

Pollan: Right. And, in fact, one of my tips is, don't eat any food  
that's incapable of rotting. If the food can't rot eventually,  
there's something wrong.

Goodman: What is nutritionism?

Pollan: Nutritionism is the prevailing ideology in the whole world of  
food. And it's not a science. It is an ideology. And like most  
ideologies, it is a set of assumptions about how the world works that  
we're totally unaware of. And nutritionism, there's a few fundamental  
tenets to it. One is that food is a collection of nutrients, that  
basically the sum of -- you know, food is the sum of the nutrients it  
contains. The other is that since the nutrient is the key unit and,  
as ordinary people, we can't see or taste or feel nutrients, we need  
experts to help us design our foods and tell us how to eat.

Another assumption of nutritionism is that you can measure these  
nutrients and you know what they're doing, that we know what  
cholesterol is and what it does in our body or what an antioxidant  
is. And that's a dubious proposition.

And the last premise of nutritionism is that the whole point of  
eating is to advance your physical health and that that's what we go  
to the store for, that's what we're buying. And that's also a very  
dubious idea. If you go around the world, people eat for a great many  
reasons besides, you know, the medicinal reason. I mean, they eat for  
pleasure, they eat for community and family and identity and all  
these things. But we've put that aside with this obsession with  
nutrition.

And I basically think it's a pernicious ideology. I mean, I don't  
think it's really helping us. If there was a trade-off, if looking at  
food this way made us so much healthier, great. But in fact, since  
we've been looking at food this way, our health has gotten worse and  
worse.

Goodman: Let's talk about the diseases of Western civilization.

Pollan: The Western diseases, which -- they were named that about a  
hundred years ago by a medical doctor named Denis Burkitt, an  
Englishman, who noted that there -- after the Western diet comes to  
these countries where he had spent a lot of time in Africa and Asia,  
a series of Western diseases followed, very predictably: obesity,  
diabetes, heart disease and a specific set of cancers. And he said,  
well, they must have this common origin, because we keep seeing this  
pattern.

And we've known this for a hundred years, that if you eat this  
Western diet, which is defined basically as -- I mean, we all know  
what the Western diet is, but to reiterate it, it's lots of processed  
food, lots of refined grain and pure sugar, lots of red meat and  
processed meats, very little whole grains, very little fresh fruits  
and vegetables. That's the Western diet -- it's the fast-food diet --  
that we know it leads to those diseases. About 80 percent of heart  
disease, at least as much Type II diabetes, 33 to 40 percent cancers  
all come out of eating that way, and we know this. And the odd thing  
is that it doesn't seem to discomfort us that much.

Goodman: Talk about coming from another culture and coming here. When  
you specifically talk about sugar, refined wheat, what actually  
happens in the body?

Pollan: Well, that's where you see it most directly. When populations  
that have not been exposed to this kind of food for a long time --  
we've seen it with Pacific Islanders, if you go to Hawaii, we've seen  
it with Mexican immigrants coming to America -- these are the people  
who have the most trouble with this diet, and they get fat very  
quickly and get diabetes very quickly. You know, we hear about this  
epidemic of diabetes, but it's very much of a class and ethnically  
based phenomenon, and Hispanics have much more trouble with it. And  
the reason or the hypothesis is that, culturally and physically, they  
haven't been dealing with a lot of refined grain, whereas in Europe,  
we've been dealing with refined grain for a couple hundred years.

Goodman: And what does refined wheat do?

Pollan: Well, what happens is, when you -- there was a key invention  
around the 1860s, which is we developed these steel rollers and  
porcelain rollers that could grind wheat and corn and other grains  
really fine and eliminate the germ and the bran. And the reason we  
wanted to do that was we loved it as white as possible. It would last  
longer. The rats had less interest in it, because it had less  
nutrients in it. And also you get a kind of a real strong hit of  
glucose. I mean, basically it digests much quicker, as soon as it  
hits the tongue. I mean, everyone has -- you know, if you've ever  
tasted Wonder Bread, you know how sweet it is. The reason it's sweet  
is it's so highly refined that as soon as your saliva hits it, it  
turns to sugar.

Whole grains have a whole lot of other nutrients. You know, it once  
was possible to live by bread alone, because a whole grain loaf of  
bread has all sorts of other nutrients. It has omega-3s, it has, you  
know, lots of B vitamins. And we remove those when we refine grain.  
And it's kind of odd and maladaptive that refined grain should be so  
prestigious since it's so unhealthy. But we've always liked it, and  
one of the reasons is it stores longer.

Goodman: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Talk about the  
funding of nutrition science.

Pollan: Well, nutrition science is very compromised by industry.  
Organizations like the American Dietetic Association take sponsorship  
from companies who are eager to find -- you know, be able to make  
health claims. Not all nutrition science. And there are very large,  
important studies that are, you know, published -- that are supported  
by the government and are as good as any other medical studies in  
terms of their cleanness. But there is a lot of corporate nutrition  
science that's done for the express purpose of developing health  
claims. This science reliably finds health benefits for whatever is  
being studied. You take a pomegranate to one of these scientists, and  
they will tell you that it will cure cancer and erectile dysfunction.  
You take, you know, any kind of food that you want. And now, it's not  
surprising, because food is good for you, and that all plants have  
antioxidants.

Goodman: Explain what an antioxidant is.

Pollan: Well, an antioxidant is a chemical compound that plants  
produce, really to protect themselves from free radicals of oxygen  
that are generated during photosynthesis. They absorb these kind of  
mischievous oxygen radicals, molecules, atoms, and disarm them. And  
as we age, we produce a lot of these oxygen radicals, and they're  
implicated in aging and cancer. So antioxidants are a way to kind of  
quiet that response, and they have health benefits. They also help  
you detoxify your body.

So -- but my point is kind of, you don't need to know what an  
antioxidant is to have the benefit of an antioxidant. You know, we've  
been benefiting from them for thousands of years without really  
having to worry what they are. They're in whole foods, and it's one  
of the reasons whole foods are good for you. And there are not that  
much in processed foods.

Goodman: Isn't it odd that the more you put into foods -- so that's  
processing fruits -- the less expensive is? The simpler you keep it,  
getting whole foods in this day and age in this country, it's  
extremely expensive.

Pollan: Yeah. Well, there are reasons of policy that that is the  
case. You're absolutely right. Most processed foods are made from  
these very cheap raw ingredients. I mean, they're basically corn, soy  
and wheat. And if you look at all those very-hard-to-pronounce  
ingredients on the back of that processed food, those are fractions  
of corn, and some petroleum, but a lot of corn, soy and wheat. And  
the industry's preferred mode of doing business is to take the  
cheapest raw materials and create complicated foodstuffs from them.

The reason those raw ingredients are so cheap, though, is because  
these are precisely the ones that the government chooses to support,  
the subsidies -- you know, the big $26 billion for corn and soy and  
wheat and rice. So it's no accident that these should be the ones,  
you know, grown abundantly and cheap, and that's one of the reasons  
the industry moved down this path. There was such a surfeit of cheap  
corn and soy that the food scientists got to work turning it into --

Goodman: In fact, getting away totally from sugar to corn syrup.

Pollan: Yeah, that's right. And we don't -- yeah, there's very little  
sugar in our processed food. It's all high-fructose corn syrup,  
which, in effect, the government is subsidizing.

Goodman: Cottonseed oil, is it regulated by the FDA? Is it considered  
a food, even though it's in so many of the processed foods we eat? I  
was wondering, because -- to do with the pesticide that is in it that  
if it's considered -- if it's done for cotton, it doesn't matter how  
much pesticide there is. But if it's for food, it does matter. And  
it's in so much to keep it right, stable for so long on the shelf.

Pollan: That's right. And it's a food I would avoid. I mean, you  
know, humans have not been eating cotton for most of their history.  
They've been wearing it. And now we're eating it. And you're right,  
it receives an enormous amount of pesticide as a crop. How many  
residues are in the oil? I don't really know the answer, but it has  
been approved by the FDA as a foodstuff. And -- but it's one of these  
novel oils that I'm inclined to stay away with. I mean, my basic  
philosophy of eating is, you know, if your great-grandmother wasn't  
familiar with it, you probably want to stay away from it.

Goodman: Talk about -- well, you started with a New York Times piece  
called "Unhappy Meals," and in it -- and you expand on this in In  
Defense of Food -- you talk about the McGovern report, 1977, what, 20  
years ago.

Pollan: Well, that's really, I think, one of the red letter days in  
the rise of nutritionism as a way of thinking about food. It was a  
very interesting moment. McGovern convened this set of hearings to  
look at the American diet, and there was a great deal of concern  
about heart disease at the time. We had -- we were having -- you  
know, after a falloff during the war in heart disease, there was a  
big spike in the '50s and '60s, and scientists were busy trying to  
figure out what was going on and very worried about it. McGovern  
convened these hearings, took a lot of testimony, and then came out  
with a set of guidelines. And he said -- he implicated red meat,  
basically, in this problem. And he said we're getting -- we're eating  
too much red meat, and the advice of the government became -- the  
official advice -- eat less red meat. And he said as much. Now, that  
was a very controversial message. The meat industry, in fact the  
whole food industry, went crazy, and they came down on him like a ton  
of bricks. You can't tell people to eat less of anything.

Goodman: As Oprah learned when she said she won't eat hamburgers.

Pollan: Exactly. This is just a taboo topic in America. So McGovern  
had to beat this hasty retreat, and he rewrote the guidelines to say,  
choose meats that will lessen your saturated fat intake, something  
nobody understood at all and was much to the -- and that was  
acceptable. But you see the transition. It's very interesting. We've  
been talking about whole food -- eat less red meat, which probably  
was good advice -- to this very complicated construct -- eat meats  
that have less of this nutrient. It's still an affirmative message --  
eat more, which is fine with industry, just eat a little differently.  
And suddenly, the focus was on saturated fat, as if we knew that that  
was the nutrient in the red meat that was the problem. And in fact,  
it may not be. I mean, there are other things going on in red meat,  
we're learning, that may be the problem.

Goodman: Like?

Pollan: Well, some people think it's the protein in red meat. Some  
people think it's the nitrosamines, these various compounds that are  
produced when you cook red meat. We see a correlation between high  
red meat consumption and higher rates of cancer and heart disease.  
But, again, we don't know exactly what the cause is, but it may not  
be saturated fat.

Goodman: And then the political economy of, for example, eating meat?

Pollan: Well, that -- because of that -- I mean, that's why McGovern  
lost in 1980. I mean, the beef lobby went after him, and they tossed  
him out. And so -- but from then on, anyone who would pronounce on  
the American diet understood you had to speak in this very obscure  
language of nutrients. You could talk about saturated fat, you could  
talk about antioxidants, but you cannot talk about whole foods. So  
that is the kind of official language in which we discuss nutrition.

Conveniently, it's very confusing to the average consumer.  
Conveniently to the industry, they love talk about nutrients, because  
they can always -- with processed foods, unlike whole foods, you can  
redesign it. You can just reduce the saturated fat, you know, up the  
antioxidants. You can jigger it in a way you can't change broccoli.  
You know, broccoli is going to be broccoli. But a processed food can  
always have more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. So the  
industry loves nutritionism for that reason.

Goodman: So, for people who don't have much money, how do they eat? I  
mean, when you're talking about whole foods, they have to be  
prepared, and if you don't have much time, as well, processed foods  
are cheaper and they're faster.

Pollan: Well, processed foods -- you know, fast food seems cheap. I  
mean, if you have the time and the inclination to cook, you can eat  
more cheaply. But you do -- as you say, you do need the time, and you  
do need the skills to cook. There is no way around the fact that  
given the way our food policies are set up, such that whole foods are  
expensive and getting more expensive and processed foods tend to be  
cheaper -- I mean, if you go into the supermarket, the cheapest  
calories are added fat and added sugar from processed food, and the  
more expensive calories are over in the produce section. And we have  
to change policy in order to adjust that.

Goodman: How do you do that?

Pollan: You need a farm bill that basically evens the playing field  
and is not driving down the price of high-fructose corn syrup, so  
that, you know, real fruit juice can compete with it. You need a farm  
bill that makes carrots competitive with Wonder Bread. And we don't  
have that, and we didn't get it this time around.

Goodman: Do you feel like any candidates are addressing this issue?

Pollan: No, because they all pass through Iowa, and they all bow down  
before conventional agricultural policy. In office, I think that, you  
know, there have been -- Hillary Clinton has had some very positive  
food policies, basically because she has this big farm constituency  
upstate, and she's very interested in school lunch and farm-to-school  
programs and things like that. John Edwards has said some progressive  
things about feedlot agriculture and what's wrong with that, while he  
was in Iowa.

Goodman: Explain feedlots.

Pollan: Feedlots are where we grow our meat, in these huge factory  
farms that have become really the scourge of landscapes in places  
like Iowa and Missouri, I mean these giant pig confinement operations  
that basically collect manure in huge lagoons that leak when it rains  
and smell for miles around. I mean, they're just, you know, miserable  
places. And they're becoming a political issue in the Midwest. And I  
think they will become a political issue nationally, because people  
are very concerned about the status of the animals in these places.  
My worry is, though, that when we start regulating these feedlots,  
they'll move to Mexico.

Goodman: [What is the] "Omnivore's Dilemma?"

Pollan: "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is, if you're a creature like us  
that can eat almost anything -- I mean, unlike cows that only eat  
grass or koala bears that only eat eucalyptus leaves -- we can eat a  
great many different things, and meat and vegetables, but it's  
complicated. We don't have instincts to tell us exactly what to eat,  
so we have -- we need a lot of other cognitive equipment to navigate  
what is a very treacherous food landscape, because there -- as there  
was in the jungle and in nature, there are poisons out there that  
could kill us. So we had to learn what was safe and what wasn't, and  
we had this thing called culture that told us, like that mushroom  
there, somebody ate it last week and they died, so let's call it the  
"death cap," and that way we'll remember that that's one to stay away  
from. And, you know, so culture is how we navigate this.

We are once again in a treacherous food landscape, when there are  
many things in the supermarket that are not good for you. How do we  
learn now to navigate that landscape? And that's what this book was  
an effort to do, was come up with some rules of thumb. And so, you  
know, I say eat food, which sounds really simple, but of course  
there's a lot of edible food-like substances in the supermarket that  
aren't really food. So how do you tell them apart?

Goodman: You talk about shopping the periphery of the supermarket?

Pollan: Yeah. Well, that was one rule that I found really helpful.  
And if you look at the layout of the average supermarket, the fresh  
whole foods are always on the edge. So you get produce and meat and  
fish and dairy products. And those are the foods that, you know, your  
grandmother would recognize as foods. They haven't changed that much.  
All the processed foods, the really bad stuff that is going to get  
you in trouble with all the refined grain and the additives and the  
high-fructose corn syrup, those are all in the middle. And so, if you  
stay out of the middle and get most of your food on the edges, you're  
going to do a lot better.

Goodman: What is the localvore movement?

Pollan: The localvore movement is a real new emphasis on eating  
locally, eating food from what's called your foodshed. It's a  
metaphor based on a watershed. You know, a certain -- draw a circle  
of a hundred miles around your community and try to eat everything  
from there. It's an interesting movement, and I'm very supportive of  
local food. I think that it's verging on the ridiculous right now --  
I mean, you know, because, frankly, there's no wheat produced in a  
hundred miles of New York. You know, do you want to give up bread?  
I'm not willing to give up bread. So people get a little extremist  
about it.

But the basic idea of when products are available locally, eating  
them and eating food in season, is a very powerful and important  
idea. It supports a great many values. The fact is that food that's  
produced locally is going to be fresher. It's going to be more  
nutritious because it's fresher. You're going to support the farmers  
in your community. You're going to check sprawl. I mean, you'll keep  
that farmland in business. You are going to keep basically, you know,  
some autonomy in our food system. I mean, make no mistake: The basic  
trend of food in this country is to globalize it, and there will come  
a day when America doesn't produce its own food. In California, the  
Central Valley is losing, you know, hundreds of acres of farmland  
every day, and the projections there are that we will no longer  
produce produce in California by the end of the century. I don't want  
to live in that world. I -- you know, we lost control over our energy  
destiny, and we don't want to lose control over our food destiny.

Goodman: What are the environmental effects of transporting food  
across the globe?

Pollan: Well, the biggest is energy. I mean, it's a -- people don't  
really think about food in terms of climate change, but in fact the  
food system contributes about a fifth of greenhouse gases. It is as  
important as the transportation sector, in terms of contributing to  
greenhouse gas. It's a very energy-intensive situation. What we did  
with the industrialization of food, essentially, is take food off of  
a solar system -- it was basically based on photosynthesis and the  
sun -- and put it on a fossil fuel system. We learned how to grow  
food with lots of synthetic fertilizers made from natural gas,  
pesticides made from petroleum, and then started moving it around the  
world. So now we take about ten calories of fossil fuel to produce  
one calorie of food energy. Very unsustainable system.

Goodman: And what about the argument of efficiency, and if you want  
to feed the planet? You have sugar growing in Cuba. You have grapes  
and meat in Argentina and Uruguay and Chile.

Pollan: Well, that's the argument. There are a lot of problems with  
it. First, it does depend on cheap fossil fuel, and we are not going  
to have cheap fossil fuel, so that if Uruguay loses its ability to  
produce anything else, they're going to be hungry. It's very  
important that you have local self-sufficiency in food -- some self- 
sufficiency, not complete -- before you start exporting. If you put  
all your eggs in the basket of, say, coffee, when the international  
market shifts, as it inevitably does, because it will always go to  
whatever country is willing to produce it a little more cheaply, you  
will decimate your industry.

Goodman: What if you only consume coffee and nothing else?

Pollan: Oh, you have all sorts of problems we don't even want to get  
into. You cannot live on coffee alone. It's not like bread.

So globalizing food has certain advantages of efficiency, but it also  
has very high risks. And, you know, efficiency is an important value,  
but resilience is even more important, and we know this from biology,  
that the resilience of natural systems and economic systems is  
something we have to focus more on. This globalized food system is  
very brittle. When you have a breakdown anywhere, when the prices of  
fuel escalates, people lose the ability to feed themselves.

What's happening with Mexico and NAFTA and corn, you know, they  
opened their borders to our corn, and it put one-and-a-half million  
farmers there out of business. They all came to the cities, where you  
would think, OK, now the price of tortillas should go down, but it  
didn't go down, even with the cheap corn, because there was an  
oligopoly controlling tortillas. Tortilla prices didn't go down. And  
so, a lot of these former Mexican farmers became serfs on California  
farms, and this was the effect of dumping lots of cheap corn.

Goodman: And now they're the target of main politicians all over the  
country to -- "We send our food down, and you send immigrants back  
who are coming here."

Pollan: Yeah, "And we don't want your immigrants." And, you know, we  
don't understand that these things are connected, that we make a  
decision in Washington and that this is what leads to an immigration  
problem. And -- but the dumping of our corn on Mexico is a big part  
of the immigration problem.

Goodman: Do you know anything about cloned livestock? The Wall Street  
Journal says cloned livestock are poised to receive FDA clearance.

Pollan: Yeah, well, the FDA has been looking at this. There are  
techniques now to clone livestock, usually for breeding purposes. If  
you have a really champion bull, the semen of that bull is very  
valuable. So, gee, if you could turn that bull into five bulls,  
wouldn't that be great? Actually, it won't be great. It's the  
rareness that makes the semen so valuable.

Goodman: What do you mean?

Pollan: Well, if you -- you know, if you multiply your champion bull,  
the supply will go up and the demand will go down. So -- but, anyway,  
so the FDA needs approval so that once they're done using these  
animals for breeding purposes, they can just drop them into the food  
system as hamburger. And there is some controversy over whether we  
should be eating cloned livestock. I'm not, you know, familiar with  
the risks. I'm a skeptic on genetically modifying food. But the  
specific risk of cloning livestock, I don't know. I don't want to be  
eating them.

Goodman: You have the French farmer, Jose Bove, who has just gone on  
a hunger strike to promote a ban on genetically modified crops in  
France.

Pollan: Yeah, I hadn't known that. The Europeans have reacted much  
more strongly to genetically modified crops than we have.

Goodman: Why do you think it's so different?

Pollan: A couple reasons. We have a misplaced faith in our FDA, that  
they've vetted everything and they've taken care of it and they know  
what's in the food and that they know the genetically modified crops  
have been fully tested, which, in fact, they have not, whereas the  
Europeans, after mad cow disease, are very skeptical of their  
regulators. And when their regulators tell them, "Oh, this stuff is  
fine," they're like, "Oh, wait. You said that about the beef." So  
they're much more skeptical. They also perceive it as an American  
imposition, as part of a cultural imperialism. Even though a lot of  
the GMO companies are European, the perception is it's Monsanto. And  
for some reason, the European countries have managed to get under the  
radar on this issue.

Goodman: Does it also have something to do with our media sponsored  
by food companies?

Pollan: Yeah, it does. And we -- and the fact that our -- we have not  
labeled it, so nobody knows whether you're eating it or not. I mean,  
that's been a huge fight. You know, Dennis Kucinich has tried to get  
labeling. Very simple. You know, he's not saying ban the stuff; he's  
saying just tell us if we're eating it, which seems like a very  
reasonable position.

Goodman: And Monsanto fought this.

Pollan: Viciously.

Goodman: They said that if you say it does not have GMO genetically  
modified organisms in it that that suggests there's something wrong  
with it, so when Ben & Jerry's tried to do that they weren't allowed.

Pollan: That's right. There's a lot of litigation over that still in  
Vermont and other states, in California, as well. Now, why is the  
industry so intent on not having this product regulated -- labeled?  
Well, they think, rightly, that people wouldn't buy it. And the  
reason they wouldn't buy it is it offers the consumer nothing, no  
benefit. Now, if you could -- Americans will eat all sorts of strange  
things, if there was a benefit. If you could say, well, this  
genetically modified soy oil will make you skinny, we would buy it,  
we would eat it. But so far, the traits that they've managed to get  
into these crops benefit farmers, arguably, and not consumers.

The other reason, I understand, that they resist labeling is that if  
there were labels, there would be ways to trace outbreaks of allergy.  
Any kind of health problems associated with GMOs you could tie to a  
particular food. Right now, if there are any allergies that are tied  
to a GMO food, you can't prove it. And so, one of the reasons the  
industry has fought it is that they're vulnerable to that.

When the GMO industry was starting transgenic crops, they made a  
decision not to seek any limits on liability from the Congress, as  
the nuclear industry did, and they decided that would not look good  
to ask for that, so they just took a chance. And this is, in the view  
of many activists, their great vulnerability, is product liability.  
And so, labeling is a way to help prevent that eventuality. So they  
fought it, you know, ferociously and successfully.

Goodman: What were you most surprised by in writing this book, In  
Defense of Food?

Pollan: I was most surprised by two things. One was that the science  
on nutrition that we all traffic in every day -- we read these  
articles on the front page, we talk about antioxidants and  
cholesterol and all this kind of stuff -- it's really sketchy that  
nutritional science is still a very young science. And food is very  
complicated, as is the human digestive system. There's a great  
mystery on both ends of the food chain, and science has not yet  
sorted it out. Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650,  
you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to  
have them operate on you yet? I don't think so. I don't think we want  
to change our eating decisions based on nutritional science.

But what I also was surprised at is how many opportunities we now  
have. If we have -- if we're willing to put the money and the time  
into it to get off the Western diet and find another way of eating  
without actually having to leave civilization or, you know, grow all  
your own food or anything -- although I do think we should grow  
whatever food we can -- that it is such a hopeful time and that  
there's some very simple things we can all do to eat well without  
being cowed by the scientists.

Goodman: The healthiest cuisines, what do you feel they are?

Pollan: Well, the interesting thing is that most traditional cuisines  
are very healthy, that people -- that the human body has done very  
well on the Mediterranean diet, on the Japanese diet, on the peasant  
South American diet. It's really interesting how many different foods  
we can do well on. The one diet we seem poorly adapted to happens to  
be the one we're eating, the Western diet. So whatever traditional  
diet suits you -- you like eating that way -- you know, follow it.  
And that -- you know, that's a good rule of thumb.

There's an enormous amount of wisdom contained in a cuisine. And, you  
know, we privilege scientific information and authority in this  
country, but, of course, there's cultural authority and information,  
too. And whoever figured out that olive oil and tomatoes was a really  
great combination was actually, we're now learning, onto something  
scientifically. If you want to use that nutrient vocabulary, the  
lycopene in the tomato, which we think is the good thing, is  
basically made available to your body through the olive oil. So there  
was a wisdom in those combinations. And you see it throughout.

Goodman: The whole push for hydrogenated oils? I grew up on  
margarine. "You should never eat butter! Only margarine!"

Pollan: Yeah, I know. I did, too. And that was a huge mistake. That  
was a mistake.

Goodman: Can we go back in time?

Pollan: Yeah, we can. Yeah, the butter, fortunately, is still here.

Goodman: Where did it come from?

Pollan: Well, margarine was cheaper. Again, take a cheap raw  
material, which was to say they had developed these technologies for  
getting oil out of cottonseed and soy and all this kind of stuff, and  
there then was this health concern about saturated fat, the great  
evil. I mean, one of the -- another hallmark of nutritionism is that  
there's always the evil nutrient and the blessed nutrient, but it's  
always changing. So the evil nutrient for a long time has been  
saturated fat, and the good nutrient was polyunsaturated fat. So  
people thought, well, let's take the polyunsaturated fats, and we'll  
figure out a way to make them hard at room temperature, which  
involved the hydrogenation process. You basically fire hydrogen at  
it. And then you had something that looked like butter.

It was very controversial, though. People -- actually, in the late  
1900s, several states passed laws saying you had to dye your butter  
pink so people wouldn't be confused and would know that that's an  
imitation food. And then the Supreme Court -- the industry got the  
Supreme Court to throw this out. So butter was elevated as the more  
modern, more healthy food. And it turned out that we replaced this  
possibly mildly unhealthy fat called saturated fat with now a  
demonstrably lethal one called hydrogenated oil.

Goodman: How is it demonstrably lethal?

Pollan: Well, they have since proven to, you know, pretty high  
standard that trans fats are implicated both in heart disease and  
cancer.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news  
program Democracy Now!