Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/omnivores_dilemma_author_michael_polla

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“Omnivore’s Dilemma” Author Michael Pollan’s New Advice on Buying
Food: “Don’t Buy Any Food You’ve Ever Seen Advertised”
Defense-food-web2

Michael Pollan is one of the nation’s leading writers and thinkers in
this country on the issue of food. He is author of several books about
food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his
latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. In light of what he
calls the processed food industry’s co-option of “sustainability” and
its vast spending on marketing, Pollan advises to be wary of any food
that’s advertised. [includes rush transcript]
Guest:

Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. He is a
contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and is a Knight
Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

AMY GOODMAN: Energy, healthcare, agriculture, climate change, global
outbreaks like swine flu—what do all these topics have in common? Food.
That’s right, none of these issues can really be tackled without
addressing some of the fundamental problems of the food system and the
American diet.

Well, my next guest is one of the leading writers and thinkers in this
country on food. Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental
journalism at University of California, Berkeley, author of several books
about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and
his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which just came out
in paperback. Michael Pollan joins me now in our firehouse studio for the
rest of the hour.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

MICHAEL POLLAN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s good to have you with us. Let’s start with,
well, the latest news over the last month, swine flu. How is that connected
to industrialized agriculture?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, we don’t know for sure yet. We’re still kind of
investigating. But the best knowledge we have is that this outbreak came
from a very large industrial pork operation, pork confinement operation,
where, you know, tens of thousands of pigs live in filth and close contact.
And this was in Mexico.

And, you know, it’s very interesting. Last year, eighteen months ago, the
Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to
the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in
this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the
way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment
for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get
that mutation, which sooner or later is about to happen, it very
quickly—you have so many different—so much genetic material coming
together, so concentrated, and then so many pigs can catch it, and that
this is a—you know, we’ve created these Petri dishes for new diseases.
And here we go.

AMY GOODMAN: And what has been the industry response?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Oh, the industry response and the media response, by and
large, is not to pay attention to that part of the story. We haven’t
gotten a lot of investigation of, well, exactly how do these things evolve
and how did these conditions contribute to it.

The other angle, too, is that, you know, as we bring any pressure to bear
on American animal agriculture, the tendency is going to be for it to move
to Mexico. And indeed, that appears to be the case here, that these are
American corporations who have to escape any kind of environmental
regulation, have moved their confinement, animal operations, south of the
border.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how these animal operations work.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, a pig confinement operation is a pretty hellish
place. They are, you know, tens of thousands of animals, kept jammed
together. The animals are so close together that they have to snip their
tails off, because the animals are so neurotic—I mean, pigs are very
intelligent; they’re smarter than dogs—that they will nip at each
other’s tails. They’ve been weaned so early that they have this sucking
desire, and so they take it out on the tails of the animal right in front
of them. So they snip the tails off, not to stop the procedure, but to make
it so painful that animals will avoid having their tails bitten, just to
make them raw and painful.

They administer antibiotics to these animals on a regular basis, because
they could not survive without them. And the waste goes down directly below
the animals into this giant cesspool that’s flushed, two or three times a
day, out. I mean, they’re just—you know, they’re incubators for
disease.

The sows remain in crates their whole lives, so they can be conveniently
inseminated, and they have their babies right there in their crates. You
know, to go to one of these places is to stop eating industrial pork,
basically. I mean, if we could see into this industrial meat production, it
would change the way most of us eat.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s amazing, because the whole coverage, it seems, of swine
flu is to be afraid of human beings coming over the border, that they are
the main problem.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, that they’re carrying it, yeah, yeah. No, it’s
not—we don’t—it is not contracted by eating the pork. That doesn’t,
you know, seem to be a problem. And some countries have taken that tact,
used this to keep out American pork. But that link hasn’t been made.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about corporations in other ways, like Monsanto,
talking about the sustainability of genetically modified foods?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, Monsanto is very much on the attack right now,
pushing its products, particularly in Africa, and making the case that the
most sustainable agriculture will be intensive production on the land base
we have. The argument is that there’s only so much arable land in the
world, we have ten billion people on the way, and that the only way to feed
them is to get more productivity over the land we have, to further
intensify agriculture, using their genetically modified seeds.

And the word “sustainable” is never far from their lips. And they have
this amazing ad campaign. Two things are notable about it. One is that the
language of sustainability and the critique of industrial food is being
picked up by some of the major players within industrial food, either as an
effort to co-opt the rhetoric or simply confuse the consumer and the
citizen.

The other thing is that it’s very interesting that Monsanto should be
arguing that it has the key to improving productivity. If indeed what we
need to do is improve productivity, don’t look at genetically modified
crops. They have never succeeded in raising productivity. That’s not what
they do. If you look at the—the Union of Concerned Scientists just issued
a report looking at the twenty-year history of these crops, and what they
have found is that basically the real gains in yield for American crops,
for world crops, has been through conventional breeding. Genetic
modification has—with one tiny exception, Bt corn used in years of very
high infestation of European corn borers—has not increased productivity
at all. That’s not what they’re good at. What they’re good at is
creating products that allow farmers to expand their monocultures, because
it takes less management. So, if indeed we need to go where Monsanto says,
there are better technologies than theirs.

AMY GOODMAN: What about companies boasting that they use real sugar, like
that’s a health claim.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, you know, it’s very interesting. Since this book
came out, where I argue don’t buy high-fructose corn syrup and don’t
buy products with more than five ingredients, suddenly the industry
is—you know, they’re so clever. I just—I have to hand it to them. But
now they’re arguing that their products are simpler, and there’s new
Haagen-Dazs 5, which is a five-ingredient Haagen-Dazs product. You know,
it’s still ice cream. Ice cream is wonderful, but we shouldn’t treat it
as health food because it now has only five ingredients. Frito-Lay is—

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve had a big effect.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, but I don’t know if it’s for the better. I mean,
I think—

AMY GOODMAN: Frito-Lay?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Frito-Lay potato chips now is arguing that they’re local.
Now, you have to remember, any product is local somewhere. Right? This food
doesn’t come from Mars. But to think that Frito-Lay as a local potato
chip is really a stretch.

So—and on the high-fructose corn syrup thing, now that you’ve got
Snapple and soon-to-be Coca-Cola making a virtue of the fact that they
contain real sugar, no high-fructose corn syrup, what that is is an
implicit health claim for sugar. And that is an incredible achievement on
the part of industry, to convince us that getting off of high-fructose corn
syrup has made their products healthier. It has done no such thing.
Biologically, there’s no difference between high-fructose corn syrup and
sugar.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain why you were going after high-fructose corn
syrup.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, my argument about high-fructose corn syrup and why
you should avoid it is it is a marker of a highly processed food. I’m
just trying to help people, when they’re going through the
supermarket—the main thing you want to avoid is processing, you know,
extreme processing. And high-fructose corn syrup—I mean, think about it.
Do you know anyone who cooks with high-fructose corn syrup? It’s not a
home—it’s not an ingredient you’ll find in a home pantry. It’s a
tool of food science.

My problem with it is its ubiquity through the food system. You have
high-fructose corn syrup showing up where sugar has never been—in bread,
in pickles, in mayonnaise, in relish, in all these products—that they
basically have found that if you sweeten anything, we will buy more of it.
High-fructose corn syrup is a very convenient, cheap ingredient, because we
subsidize the corn from which it’s made.

But to boast about your product not having high-fructose corn syrup as
being some kind of virtue is really stretching it. And I think what we see
here is another example of the food industry’s ingenuity in taking any
critique of industrial food and turning it into the next marketing
strategy. It’s a lot like the low-fat campaign, you know, which began as
a government critique of food, you know, beginning with George McGovern in
the ’70s saying we should eat less red meat because of heart disease.
Whatever you think of the science of that, which turns out not to have been
that good, it was a well-meaning campaign to improve the American diet.
Industry came back and re-engineered the whole food system to have less fat
in it and no fat in it. And that campaign sold a lot more food. And, in
fact, since that campaign, we’ve been eating about 300 more calories a
day, and we’re a lot fatter. So, you can’t—you just can’t
underestimate their ability turn any critique into a way to sell food.

So, I’ve had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on
these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply
don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of
ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers
don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being
advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan, the Food and Drug Administration is slapping
General Mills with a warning over its claim that Cheerios—

MICHAEL POLLAN: Lowers cholesterol.

AMY GOODMAN: —is clinically proven to help lower cholesterol. They say it
makes it a drug under federal law.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. Well, good for them. I mean, you know, the FDA has
been so lax, and the reason you see this proliferation of bogus health
claims all through the supermarket has basically been the FDA has been
hands-off for a decade. And to see them tighten a little bit and make these
companies prove these health claims—

You know, another piece of advice from In Defense of Food is, don’t eat
any food that comes with a health claim. It sounds counterintuitive, but if
you’re worried about your health, that is not the healthy food. The
healthy food is in the produce section. It’s sitting there very quietly,
without budgets to do this research, without budgets for marketing, without
packages to print health claims on. So just kind of tune that out.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of the new Agricultural Secretary, Tom
Vilsack?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, it’s interesting. When Vilsack was appointed, I was
disappointed initially. And I said something like, this was agribusiness as
usual. He has surprised me in various ways, and I have some reason,
cautious, for hope. I think he has a mandate from President Obama to begin
reforming things.

He has appointed as his number two—the woman running the Department of
Agriculture, Kathleen Merrigan, is a proven reformer. She developed the
organic program in the department and as a staffer to Senator Leahy back in
the ’90s. And she is really committed to sustainable agriculture. This
woman will be running the Department of Agriculture. I think that’s
wonderful. We’ll see what she can do. She’s up against an incredible
amount of opposition.

He made an initial move to go after subsidies that was not very well
handled and was rebuffed very easily by the agriculture committees in the
House and Senate. He, I think, will do a lot to support local agriculture.
He’s very committed to farmers’ markets and developing these local food
chains, and I think that’s very encouraging.

But he has a mission to make “nutrition” the watchword of the nutrition
programs in the Department of Agriculture: School Lunch, Food Stamps, WIC.
Now, that sounds kind of “duh,” but, in fact, those programs have
nothing to do with nutrition right now. They’re essentially ways to
dispose of agricultural surpluses. So if they actually raise the nutrition
standards and make that the focus—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, they’re the way to—

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the reason we have a School Lunch Program, you know,
it began as an effort really to get rid of this incredible overproduction
of American agriculture. I mean, we’re using our children as a disposal
for excess, you know, cheap ground beef and cheese and all these corn
products, and that the—you know, under the School Lunch Program, we feed
our kids chicken nuggets and tater tots in school. We’re using the School
Lunch Program to teach them how to become fast-food consumers. So, it’s
not about health, and it needs to be about health. So, if he can move that
program in that direction, I think that will be wonderful.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Obama’s organic garden, that the pesticide industry
had in a memo that they shuddered when they heard her use the word?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yes. You know, I think her garden is actually a significant
development. I mean, you can dismiss it as symbolic politics, but in fact
symbols are important. And the word “organic” are fighting words in
this—is a fighting word in this world. And she did not have to say it was
an organic garden; she could have simply said it’s a garden. And that she
did was noticed.

And the Crop Life Association, the trade group of the pesticide makers,
wrote her a letter, being as cordial as you must be to a First Lady,
saying, you know, “You’re really casting aspersions on industrial
agriculture, and we really hope you will use our crop protection
products.” In other words, “Buy our poisons, whether you need them or
not.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Michael Pollan. His latest book, now out in
paperback, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Your words of
wisdom? Your food for thought? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it’s very simple. It really is. I mean, you know,
as a journalist, you know this, that usually when you drill down into a
subject, you find things are more complicated than you thought, and the
blacks and whites don’t quite work anymore. When it came to nutrition
science, the deeper I went, the simpler it got. And by the time I had spent
two years studying what we know about nutrition and health, I realized
that, you know, all the—that you could dismiss so much of this sketchy
science, and as long as you ate real food, and not too much of it, and
emphasized plants more than meat in your diet, you would be fine, and that
the over-complication of food by industry, by government, is something
really to be avoided.

And so, the challenge is, though, how do you identify food? Because now the
market is full of these edible food-like substances, the ones that carry
the health claims, the—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “edible food-like substances”?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, these are products of food science. These are the
stuff in the middle of the supermarket, the stuff that doesn’t go bad for
a year, deathless food, immortal food. You have to think, well, what does
it mean to say a food has got a shelf life of six months or a year? It
means it has been engineered to resist bacteria, pests of all kinds, fungi,
mold. And what does that mean? Well, it has no nutritional value for those
things. The insects, the bacteria, they’re not interested in the Twinkie,
because there’s nothing of nutritional value in it.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how the food system affects healthcare and
the whole issue of healthcare reform?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, I think that we are soon to recognize that we are not
going to be able to reform healthcare, which depends on getting the cost of
healthcare down, without addressing the American diet, the catastrophe of
the American diet.

The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, estimates that of the $2 trillion
we’re spending on healthcare in this country, $1.5 trillion is for the
treatment of preventable chronic disease. Now, that’s not all food,
because you have smoking in there, too, and alcoholism. But the bulk of it
is food. Food is implicated in heart disease, which we spend, you know,
billions and billions on. It’s implicated in type 2 diabetes. It’s
implicated in about 40 percent of cancers. It’s implicated in stroke, all
sorts of cardiovascular problems.

And, you know, in a sense, the healthcare crisis is a euphemism for the
food crisis, I mean, that they are identical. And I do think that President
Obama recognizes this. And I think that you will see programs to address
this, because that is how you could—you know, a better School Lunch
Program would be a down payment on the healthcare reform, because you would
reduce long-term the costs of the system. Treating a case of type 2
diabetes costs the City of New York, every new case, $500,000. It is
bankrupting the system. And it’s preventable.

AMY GOODMAN: How is it treated?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, type 2 diabetes is, once you contract it, it’s
$13,000 a year in additional medical costs. It takes something like ten
years off of your life span. It means an 80 percent chance of heart disease
in your life, a possibility of amputation and blindness, you know, being
tethered to machines and drugs your whole life. It’s a very serious
sentence, and it’s entirely preventable with a change in lifestyle.

The interesting thing is, why don’t we have really powerful public
interest ad campaigns to inform people about this? I mean, the way the
government could save the most money the most easily would be having a
public advertising campaign about the dangers of soda. There are a great
many children that, simply by getting off soda, avert this whole course.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of taxing soft drinks, that they’re
talking about now?

MICHAEL POLLAN: You know, I’m not sure, frankly. I haven’t really
thought that through. It’s probably not a bad idea. I think that the
cheapness of high-fructose corn syrup and sugars in our economy is part of
the problem and that when we started subsidizing—I guess I would attack
it on the other side. We should not be making these corn-based products so
cheap with our tax dollars. I think we have to change the subsidies. The
reason that soda is so cheap is that we subsidize corn in huge amounts, and
I think we have to change the incentives down on the farm. I think that’s
really where I would put my emphasis.

AMY GOODMAN: What about large corporations buying up the farmland of poorer
countries?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, this is going on. There is a growing recognition that
the great unrenewable resource is arable soil in this world and that
countries like China realize that they will not be able to feed their
population on their soil base, because of their numbers, but also because
they poison so much of their soil. Their soil is polluted, and they have a
serious problem with that. So they are buying up huge swaths of land in
Africa.

This is a political disaster, you know, waiting to happen. I mean,
Africans, you know, are going to stand by while their best farmland is
being used to feed Chinese? I mean, I don’t see this as a sustainable
solution for anybody. But this is what’s happening.

And we should take note and realize that our farmland is so precious, and
we should be very careful about developing it, and we should certainly be
careful about letting it run off into the Mississippi River because we’re
failing to put in cover crops and things like that.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have twenty seconds left, but you wrote a long letter
to President Obama, to the “Farmer-in-Chief,” as you put it. What’s
the most salient point in it?

MICHAEL POLLAN: The most salient point is simply, you are not going to be
able to tackle either the healthcare crisis or climate change unless you
look at our food system. In the case of climate change, food is responsible
for about a third of greenhouse gases, the way we’re growing food, the
way we’re processing it and the way we’re eating. And the healthcare
crisis, as I’ve talked about. So we need to address it. It’s really the
shadow issue over these other two issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan, I want to thank you for being with us. His
latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, it’s just come
out in paperback. Also his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of
Desire.