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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Michael Pollan: Don't Eat Anything That Doesn't Rot
  • Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:32:21 -0700


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!




  • [Livingontheland] Michael Pollan: Don't Eat Anything That Doesn't Rot, Tradingpost, 03/08/2008

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