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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Michael Pollan: We Are Headed Toward a Breakdown in Our Food System
  • Date: Sun, 05 Jul 2009 09:27:59 -0600


"Actually I met Agriculture Secretary Vilsack and at some point, apropos
of nothing, he went into this incredibly eloquent riff about farmers'
markets. He just loves farmers' markets. He said, 'You know, this isn't
about food, this is about community. People are starved for community.' And
he's absolutely right. And I'm amazed that the U.S. Secretary of
Agriculture has that insight. ... At my farmer's market, people go whether
they are going to be cooking or not. They go to hang out. They go because
they're going to see their friends. They go because there's politicking and
music and massages and all these other things happening. And it's just as
important."


Michael Pollan: We Are Headed Toward a Breakdown in Our Food System
By David Beers, The Tyee July 4, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141072/

Michael Pollan's famous motto for a smart, healthy diet is "Eat food.
Not too much. Mostly plants." Add to that: "And when you happen to be
on your publisher's expense account, splurge." The night we met up to
chat at a place of his choosing, he tucked into a roasted slab of
B.C. wild Chinook salmon, a tangle of salad greens and several
glasses of good Okanagan Pinot Gris in the swank environs of the Blue
Water Café in Vancouver's Yaletown neighbourhood.

Pollan, who lives in Berkeley, California, has championed the cause
of stronger local food networks with his bestsellers The Omnivore's
Dilemma and In Defense of Food. He was in town to sign books and
headline a sold-out picnic fundraiser to preserve the University of
British Columbia's urban farm as a working laboratory for sustainable
agriculture. His rousing talk drew a standing ovation, and even a few
tears.

As a dinner companion, Pollan is loose, friendly, and, as you might
expect, intellectually omnivorous, peppering his interviewer with
more questions than he was asked.

Along the way, he sketched the current state of food politics inside
the White House and within his own home. He was surprised to learn
the 100-Mile Diet was launched in British Columbia (on The Tyee) and
said meeting 100-Mile Diet creators Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon
is on his list of things to do (message delivered, Alisa and James).
He compared today's food movement to Martin Luther's reform of the
Church and he predicted certain breakdown for a North American food
system far too dependent on cheap energy and big corporations.
Between bites, here's what else Pollan shared …

On raising an ultra-picky eater:

Michael Pollan: My 16-year-old son Isaac has been a very complex,
tortuous food story. He was a terrible eater. One of the reasons I
got interested in writing about food is he didn't eat anything. I
love food, my wife loves food, and he just was tortured about food.
He was one of these kids -- and there are many of them -- who only
ate white food. He ate bread, pasta, rice, potatoes. There are a lot
more of these kids than there used to be. I'm not exactly sure why.

But he basically found food scary and overwhelming. And so he
controlled that by eating food that was as bland as possible. He was
the same way about clothes. He didn't like any variety in clothing.
So he wore black clothes for about eight years of his childhood. Ate
white, dressed black. In both cases, in retrospect, he was trying to
reduce sensory input. It was overwhelming. Smell was overwhelming,
taste was overwhelming, colour was overwhelming. And he just had
trouble processing.

A very interesting turnaround happened about two years ago. He
discovered food. He became very serious about it, partly through
cooking. And now he loves food. But he doesn't eat everything. No
seafood, for example. But he'll eat any kind of meat, many kinds of
vegetables. Last summer he worked a summer job in a kitchen. He
worked as a chef. So he's gone through this really interesting
transformation.

But I've since heard that many chefs have gone through this as
children. That they couldn't eat because their sensory apparatuses
were overly receptive. And I heard this story from [famous Chez
Panisse owner and chef] Alice Waters, who herself was a very, very
picky eater as a child. She predicted Isaac would flip around. She
met him when he was young and actually tried to cook for him when he
was eleven. Such a waste of her talent! (laughs).

So anyway, my son's whole journey around food has been interesting
for me to watch. And now he likes to cook and we cook together and
he's a good cook. But now, of course, he's a horrible food snob.
It'll be like, he's doing homework so I'm doing the cooking, and
he'll say, 'What are we having?' And I'll say, 'Well, I've got this
nice grass-fed steak I'm going to make'. And he'll say, 'Can you make
a reduction to go with that? Maybe a Port reduction would be good'.
And I'll say, 'Fuck you! If you want to do a Port reduction, you do
it'! (laughs) And depending on how much homework he has, he will do
it. He'll make this delicious Port reduction for his steak. He's a
complicated character.

On the personal politics of pint-sized picky eaters:

MP: Kids' relations to food are complex. This generation will have
its own neuroses, that's for sure. But it's very concerning that
there are such high levels of allergies among kids nowadays. The
reasons are as yet unexplained. But I've heard that it has
complicated kids' relationships with food because so many have
allergies, or think they do.

I've discovered cooking and gardening are great ways to get kids to
reorient their relationships to food in a positive way. Kids will eat
things that they'll pick in the garden that they'll never eat off the
plate. Or they'll eat things that they've cooked themselves. Because
I think a big issue for them is control. Food is really, I think, a
primary political phenomenon. It is the first time you can control
what you take into your body, and the first time you can say no to
your parents and assert your identity. So I think food and politics
are very intertwined.

On whether Barack Obama is going to be good for food:

MP: We don't know yet. I think Obama gets the issues. He's a great
dot connector. He connects the dots between the way we grow food and
the health care crisis and the climate change crisis and the energy
crisis. He understands that and he's spoken about that eloquently.
The question is how much political capital he is going to put into
changing the system.

So far the most significant thing is what his wife has done, the way
Michelle Obama has been talking about food, especially the importance
of giving your children real food. When she planted a vegetable
garden at the White House, she was very careful to let the world know
that it was an organic garden. And that's a big deal, because
organics are fighting words in this battle and in fact the industry
came back at her.

A group with the wonderful name of the Crop Life Association, which
is the lobbying group for the pesticide manufacturers, was very upset
that she was casting aspersions on conventional agriculture. The Crop
Life Association really should go by the opposite name, the Bug Death
Association. (laughs) They understood Michelle Obama's garden to be a
critique of non-organic agriculture. And it was a critique. But their
backlash hasn't deterred her. She is going to make food one of her
issues.

I was a bit surprised. I thought she was going to be leading with,
like, war widows, families of soldiers, which she said was going to
be her issue. But this came out first. And she's got great feedback
on it and is going to do more, from what I've heard.

On Obama's side, you've got Tom Vilsack who is the Secretary of
Agriculture. As the former governor of Iowa, he seemed like a real
conventional choice. But in fact he's been quite surprising, too.
He's also planted a garden at the Department of Agriculture, which
you could dismiss as symbolism, but he's talking a lot about local
food and urban agriculture. Most significantly, he appointed as his
number two a woman name Kathleen Merrigan, who is a genuine reformer.
She founded the organic program at USDA, she wrote the original
organic law for Senator Patrick Leahy and she's a real staunch
supporter of sustainable agriculture and she's running the Department
of Agriculture! That's pretty mind blowing. We'll see. She's up
against incredible forces of inertia.

On the health dollar costs of America's 'diet catastrophe':

MP: At some abstract level Obama sees that he's not going to get his
health care costs under control unless we change the way Americans
eat. Because the crisis of rising costs in the American health care
system can be translated very simply as the catastrophe of the
American diet, which represents probably half of what we spend on
health care in America. We spend about $2 trillion a year. The
Centers for Disease Control says that 1.5 trillion goes to treat
chronic disease. Now you've got smoking in there, alcoholism, but
other than that, chronic disease is mostly food related. So you
really can't get control of that system unless you are preventing
some of those chronic diseases. And the way you do that, really, is
to change the food system. But, you know, it's very, very hard to do.

My bet is that what we'll see from the Obama administration is a lot
of support for alternative groups such as local and organic. Money
for farmers to transition, money to rebuild local food economies.
Whether we'll actually see an attack on conventional agriculture is
less likely, given the politics of it. The reason is you can't do
anything with the current agriculture committees we've got in
Congress. You can't drive any reform through. It's going to take a
few years to change the populations of those committees.

On whether he's trying to rally a movement in time to avert disaster,
or just prepare us for the inevitable mess caused by scarcer oil,
degrading ecologies, and global warming:

MP: It's more the latter. We need to have these alternatives around
and available when the shit hits the fan, basically.

One of the reasons we need to nurture several different ways of
feeding ourselves -- local, organic, pasture-based meats, and so on –
is that we don't know what we're going to need and we don't know what
is going to work. To the extent that we diversify the food economy,
we will be that much more resilient. Because there will be shocks. We
know that. We saw that last summer with the shock of high oil prices.
There will be other shocks. We may have the shock of the collapsing
honey bee population. We may have the shock of epidemic diseases
coming off of feed lots. We're going to need alternatives around.

When we say the food system is unsustainable we mean that there is
something about it, an internal contradiction, that means it can't go
on the way it is without it breaking up. And I firmly believe there
will be a breakdown.

On whether he's a fan of the 100-Mile Diet:

MP: I think the 100-Mile Diet, as a pedantic exercise, is really
important. People really learn a lot. They learn what's available.
They learn how much they appreciate things that come from far away.
It was one of the great teaching exercises. And we need those. People
don't know where their food comes from and they have no idea what
they are eating.

But you know, when I was working on The Omnivore's Dilemma I talked
to Joel Salatin, a farmer who is kind of a hero of alternative
agriculture. He is radical. Beyond organic. Really uncompromising. In
fact he hates organic, thinks it's already sold out. So I asked him:
'Are you going to blow up this food system?' He said, 'No, this isn't
a revolution, this is a reformation.' And that's a good metaphor.

It's like once upon a time there was one way to feed yourself
spiritually as a Christian. It was the Catholic Church. And you had
to go through those doors to have any relationship with God. And then
Luther came along and suddenly you have many denominations. And
that's where we are now. Luther is like the organic pioneers, maybe
Wendell Berry, I don't know. And these alternatives are thriving, and
everyone is very excited about the possibilities. But the Catholic
Church didn't go away. It just got smaller, you know? And I think
realistically that's what’s going to happen. There still will be
supermarket food. There still will be food that travels around the
world. I just hope there is less of it and more good alternatives.

On the communal pleasures and benefits of 'locavore' eating:

MP: It's a part of the food movement that people don't pay enough
attention to. Actually I met Agriculture Secretary Vilsack and at
some point, apropos of nothing, he went into this incredibly eloquent
riff about farmers' markets. He just loves farmers' markets. He said,
'You know, this isn't about food, this is about community. People are
starved for community.' And he's absolutely right. And I'm amazed
that the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has that insight.

At my farmer's market, people go whether they are going to be cooking
or not. They go to hang out. They go because they're going to see
their friends. They go because there's politicking and music and
massages and all these other things happening. And it's just as
important.

On how food insecurity can unravel an empire:

MP: That's what brought down Soviet communism, you know. By the end
of the Soviet Union, 50 per cent of the food was being grown outside
the official system. And people just realized, okay, supermarkets
aren't working, we're going to set up this other economy. We're going
to grow it ourselves, we're going to tend small allotment farms. And
I think it was the crisis of legitimacy of the whole system. Again,
it was another reformation. The collective farms were still there,
still producing large amounts of bread or whatever. But you had this
alternative that just rose up.





  • [Livingontheland] Michael Pollan: We Are Headed Toward a Breakdown in Our Food System, Tradingpost, 07/05/2009

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