Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Have any issues with this? I have.

Michael Pollan Fixes Dinner
America's favorite food intellectual talks about ethanol, the carrot lobby, 
and secularizing food.
http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/03/michael-pollan-fixes-dinner-extended-interview

Mother Jones: I'm here talking with Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of 
Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and, most recently, a letter to the incoming 
president, about getting us off of a diet of fossil fuel and back on a diet 
of sunshine.

Most of our readers are aware of the basic health and environmental problems 
of our industrial food system. But I wonder if you could tell me if anything 
surprised you as you were researching this book?

Michael Pollan: A couple things. One is how deeply the food system is 
implicated in climate change. I don't think that has really been on people's 
radar until very recently. Al Gore didn't talk about it at all. Climate 
change was about how we heat our houses and drive our cars and power the 
grid. But it wasn't a matter of how we eat. And it is; to the tune of 25 to 
33 percent of climate change gases can be traced to the food system. Another 
surprise it that, yeah, we know that diet-related chronic disease is a big 
deal, but I was surprised, looking at the history of nutrition, that those 
diseases that we take for granted as what will kill us—heart disease, cancer, 
other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes—were virtually unknown 150 years ago, 
before we began eating this way.

MJ: A lot of the blame for the climate issues and the diet issues can be laid 
at the feet of corn. And I wonder what it is about corn, chemically, that 
makes it such a problem both for our health and, in terms of ethanol, for the 
planet.

MP: Well I've often thought, If it weren't corn, would it be something else? 
Probably I'd be complaining about soybeans if corn weren't there to do it. 
The fact is there is going to be one plant that can produce more pure energy 
off of an acre of soil. It happens to be an incredibly productive plant. It 
also happens to be a plant that just meshes beautifully with industrial 
capitalism. You can control the intellectual property. It loves machinery. It 
can be harvested and planted by machines. It is fungible, it can be stored, 
and it's a source of money. It can be a source of food. So it's the ideal 
capitalist plant. But there might be another if there weren't corn. But corn 
has been implicated in a lot of these problems, certainly the diet. We make 
sweeteners from corn, and this has definitely played a role in type 2 
diabetes. I think we're finding that refined sugars like high fructose corn 
syrup are implicated in things like heart disease as well. We used to think 
it was just all about saturated fat.

But the soybean does deserve some of the blame for these problems, too. 
Together they feed all that feedlot meat, and that feedlot meat is a 
tremendous part of the climate change problem. That's where a lot of those 
greenhouse gases are coming from—basically feedlots.

MJ: The excrement that the animals produce?

MP: It's that, but it's also the energy that goes into producing the feed. 
The corn, by and large, that takes so much fossil fuel. At every step of the 
way there's a lot of greenhouse gas that's produced.

The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil. This 
is the main oil. This is the fast-food oil. Which we've recently learned is 
full of trans fats. Corn has to share the blame a little bit with the soybean.

MJ: When you first wrote the mantra "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," 
did you have any idea what kind of reaction you'd get to that?

MP: Well, I studied my poetry in school and I knew there was something about 
the way it sounded that made it easy to remember. I did urge my publisher to 
put it on the cover of the book. I wanted to write a book that had some very 
easy-to-remember ideas in it. After writing The Omnivore's Dilemma—"Aren't 
you preaching to the choir?"—I wanted to write a book that got past the 
choir, that got to people who didn't care about sustainable food or how their 
food was grown, but who did care about their health. I wanted to make it 
almost billboard simple. And that phrase certainly helped me do it. It 
started out as just "Eat food." But then I realized, Eh, not quite good 
enough. You've got to deal with the quantity issue; a lot of this has to do 
with how much we're eating, not just what we're eating. And then plants; the 
more you looked at this the more you realized that the shortage of plants in 
our diet could explain a lot. Not that I'm against meat eating. But I think 
we're eating too much. That's why I said "mostly plants."

MJ: Did you hear from the beef lobby?

MP: No, but there's another group, the Weston A. Price Foundation, who are 
fierce in their love of animal fat. And with pastured animal fat, healthy 
animal fat, a lot of what they say is right. But they really don't like 
plants. People feel like they have to take sides on this plant/animal divide, 
and I don't think we do.

MJ: There's no dilemma?

MP: [Laughs.] No dilemma. Well, not between those two things. And of course a 
lot of vegetarians were annoyed that I wasn't saying "all plants." You can't 
win. A simple word like "mostly"…It's a thicket. People have strong, 
quasi-religious views on these things. Secularizing the issue is challenging.

MJ: Your books have gone from very interior, literally, to large. The 
audience expands and expands. Has the transition to being the public face of 
food activism been difficult?

MP: Very unexpected. My work has gotten more political over time, but once 
you start exploring food you find you're up against economics and politics 
and psychology and anthropology, all of these different things you have to 
deal with. I think as a career matter—you know, I used to be a magazine 
editor, and that's where I did my politics, that's where I thought 
politically. And my writing was something over here. That was separate and 
could be a lot more personal and intimate. It wasn't as public, even though 
you're publishing books. As I gave up editing and became a full-time writer 
there had to be an outlet for my political side. That's part of what has 
driven that progression, though I could easily see writing a much more 
personal book. I'm not going to be writing a whole lot of manifestos; that 
was pretty unusual. But that comes from sensing a political moment. If you 
read Omnivore's Dilemma it's not a political book, you see. It tells the 
story of these food chains and it follows them. There aren't any 
proscriptions. The last chapter didn't tell anyone to do anything. I just 
went hunting and made a really amazing meal. And "That's not practical; what 
do we do with that?" It's really in the next book that I try to draw some 
political lessons. For me as a journalist I felt a little uncomfortable being 
prescriptive. I didn't think that was the proper role of a journalist. I 
guess I've gotten over that.

MJ: Is it hard? You most be called on to be the spokesman on these issues all 
the time.

MP: Very hard. You still have to draw lines between being a journalist and an 
activist. There's no question. I can be an activist in my writing and I can 
be an activist as a citizen but there's a place where it gets mushy. When 
Obama announced his pick for agriculture secretary I was disappointed; I 
didn't think that this was the person who was going to lead the charge for 
reform. He had a lousy record in a lot of ways as governor on ag issues, and 
I said so in some interviews. I got some calls and emails from very prominent 
activists saying, "You should really keep your powder dry because we want to 
have access to this guy; we don't want to be at war with this guy." Who is 
this "we?" I felt like Tonto. And I realized there was a tactical way to 
respond and a writerly way to respond. And I understand that if you are an 
activist you do respond tactically. You have other considerations. You want 
to say the thing that will drive everybody in the direction you want to go. 
But as a writer you have a pact with your readers that you'll be really 
straight with them at all times.

This was true after the last farm bill was signed. Really lousy bill, had a 
lot of goodies in it for everyone. It was really a crappy bill. And I saw all 
these activists that I was in a sense working with writing these letters on 
their websites saying "look at the wonderful things we've gotten in this 
bill; we've got to get behind it." And I asked what was going on and finally 
someone explained to me that they all have these funders who've put up a lot 
of money for this campaign and they have to show their funders they got 
something. That was a tactical, not an honest, response. In the end I'm still 
a writer. I'm still a journalist, and my first responsibility is to my 
readers. That's where I have to draw the line.

MJ: So what do you think of the appointment of Tom Vilsack, the governor of 
Iowa, an agribusiness state known for its love of corn and all things ethanol?

MP: Well, you know, if you look at it historically, there's reason to be very 
concerned. He oversaw a tremendous expansion of feedlot agriculture, ruining 
the Iowa countryside, ruining the lives of many farmers. This move toward a 
confinement hog production. He helped to get local control over the zoning 
decisions. He also has been very friendly toward Monsanto and genetically 
modified products and was named governor of the year by BIO, the big biotech 
trade organization. There's not a lot there to get hopeful about.

But people who I respect say that he is someone who will listen. He is 
someone who has an open door to organic activists and local food activists. 
He was interested, in Iowa, in developing local food systems, helping Iowa to 
feed itself to a greater extent than it does. It feeds the world but it 
doesn't feed itself. It's a food desert, weirdly enough. All the raw material 
leaves the state and comes back in processed form, even though you can grow 
anything you want there. It's some of the best soil in the world, and it's 
just a shame that people aren't eating from that. I also think, and this is 
putting the most positive spin I can on it, that as governor of Iowa there 
are some positions that you simply must have. One is support for corn-based 
ethanol. Another is a tacit support for feedlot agriculture and biotech. But 
he's no longer governor of Iowa and he is a politician; his positions are 
circumstantial, as will be President Obama's. And I'm hoping that as a 
politician, when he senses where the wind is moving, he will move with it. It 
could have been a whole lot worse; there were people on the short list who 
were truly alarming in their commitment to the most retrograde and 
unsustainable forms of agriculture. I think he's a blank slate on a lot of 
issues, like commodity subsidies and stuff like that. We don't know who will 
be designing the agenda; it may not be him. It may be people in the White 
House.

MJ: Although it seems that, as a former governor, he has a vested interest in 
insuring that we always have an Iowa caucus. How much of our current 
agricultural policy can we lay at the feet of the Iowa caucus?

MP: Look, you get rid of the Iowa caucus and you could have a much more 
realistic debate about food and agricultural policy. You can't be elected 
president of this country without passing though Iowa and bowing down before 
corn-based ethanol, before agricultural subsidies. You can't get out alive. 
And that's too bad. I mean, even McCain was a critic of ethanol, but when he 
got to Iowa he was singing a different tune. On the other hand, this time 
around the candidates talked to other people and they learned there is a 
progressive farm lobby. Iowa came close to electing as agriculture secretary 
of the state a woman organic farmer. Almost won until the farm bureau 
realized what a threat she was and came after her.

And I think Obama saw, in fact he said he saw, the importance of local 
control. He said a lot of progressive things in Iowa, too. That idea that 
there is a monolithic farm bloc—I wouldn't say it's starting to crumble—but 
there are interesting cracks. The challenge for the food reform movement is 
to make those cracks bigger.

MJ: What do we know of Obama's history? Obviously he's from Illinois and he 
must have had to curry favor with his own farm lobby. He's spoken well of 
corn-based ethanol.

MP: He has. I think we'll see him back off of that pretty soon because he's 
no longer a senator from Illinois, and he has to look at not only the 
national but the global implications of this folly.

MJ: You were saying over lunch that you actually have a lot of hope that this 
corn-based ethanol will be phased out pretty quickly in the US.

MP: I don't think we're going to be talking about it that much longer. It's 
an experiment that's been tried and it's been disastrous, specifically what 
it did to food prices both here and around the world. It’s estimated that 
about 30 percent of the increase in grain prices could be attributed to the 
decision to embrace biofuels, particularly corn-based ethanol. It has done 
nothing for climate change and the business is in real trouble now with the 
collapse of oil prices. It's completely dependent on a dollar subsidy and 
tariff from the government. I don't think it's proven itself of any value 
except, you know, to ADM and the people who built these refineries. And 
there's the fact that Obama appointed Steven Chu as secretary of energy, a 
fierce critic of corn-based ethanol, a physicist and a Nobel Prize winner. I 
think it will be his job to argue the president and Vilsack out of corn-based 
ethanol. What better way to change your position on that than to have a Nobel 
Prize laureate explain to you exactly why it's a bad idea.

MJ: Are there any biofuels that are still showing promise, or are they all 
slowly revealing themselves to be problematic?

MP: Well, we don't yet know about cellulosic ethanol, basically taking 
cellulose—wood, other plant wastes, parts of plants you can't eat—and using 
them to produce ethanol. You can't yet do it economically because the 
cellulose is very hard to break down and it takes a lot of energy to break it 
down. But there's a lot of work; this is supposedly the next generation. 
There are people who will tell you, No, that's impossible too. It's 
impossible to get a significant amount of liquid fuel out of it. And that 
remains to be seen. And the fact is that the kind of refineries that we've 
been building for corn will not work for cellulose. This whole infrastructure 
we're building is going to have to be tossed out. I don't know enough about 
it to say that it's not going to work.

I think using waste oils as fuel makes sense. We do waste a huge amount of 
vegetable oil in this country and using that as a fuel source strikes me as 
fine. I don't know if it's significant, but there it is. I think one of the 
things we got in touch with was that using your farm for fuel, you're going 
to have to replace that acre of farmland. So people deforest Indonesia, 
Brazil. It's very shortsighted. It's all based on the fact that we have this 
infrastructure and these oil companies and they need a replacement liquid. 
And that's why we do so much work on it; we've got to find the next liquid.

MJ: Explain that. Oil companies need a liquid because they're interested in 
refining, burning a liquid?

MP: It's what they're good at. And they have gas stations. There's this whole 
huge structure that is about finding a new liquid for the tank. And the idea 
that maybe there shouldn't be a liquid, that maybe the best is an electrical 
grid, a sustainably powered electrical grid that we all plug into, that 
doesn't sit well with oil companies; they don't have a seat at the table if 
we have that discussion. So they're invested in going down a certain road. 
That's why BP has given half a billion dollars to this campus [Berkeley] to 
help develop it. I think that Obama will put a lot of money into cellulosic 
ethanol to help develop it. I just hope it's not wasted.

MJ: I understand that some European countries, before they give out any kind 
of subsidy for biofuels, they're saying you have to prove that there's a net 
climate benefit, and, if not, kiss your subsidy goodbye. Is there a chance 
that something like that could happen in this country?

MP: Well, Obama just announced that he's going to have this performance 
manager who's going to evaluate the performance of all of these investments. 
I think that's a terrific idea. It's the same way foundations, before they 
give out money, ask you to have some benchmarks for success and that your 
future funding depends on you hitting these benchmarks. If indeed the reason 
we're getting into ethanol is to mitigate climate change, show us it works. I 
think it makes great sense.

MJ: And, in fact, ethanol producers are asking that some kind of the economic 
stimulus, green jobs, trillion dollars go to them.

MP: Can you believe it? We're already being asked to bail them out. They're 
only like two years old and they were started with subsidies and would not 
exist except for the fact that in 2006 President Bush began these mandates. 
They now, on top of that, need a bailout. That may be just the fastest arc. 
It took the auto companies almost a century to get there, but ethanol 
companies are there in just two years.

MJ: If you had a magic wand, would you get rid of subsidizes or would you 
reform them?

MP: I think what I would do would be to give farmers the exact same amount of 
money we're giving them now but give them the money to do something else with 
it. It's a political dead end to try and eliminate subsidies because then you 
get all of America's farmers, who have political power out of all proportion 
of their number, and that has a lot to do with the way they get two senators 
for all of these virtually empty states. So I think that's a political loser. 
You unify the farmers against change. You don't want to do that; you want to 
divide the farmers. The way you do that is to offer, for a certain amount of 
time, to keep their income steady but change the set of incentives. Right now 
the incentives are to get them to produce as much as possible, whatever the 
cost in terms of the environment, water quality, the erosion of the soil, and 
our health.

But you can imagine another set of assumptions, another set of incentives so 
that they're getting incentives to sequester carbon, say. So that they're 
getting incentives to clean the water that leaves their farm, so that they're 
getting incentives for the quality, not the quantity, of the food they're 
growing. And then suddenly they're making a contribution to what we're trying 
to do with regard to the environment, public health, climate change. That's 
where I would go. I don't know how to devise that system, but it can be 
devised. The Europeans are working on that, and in the past we have had other 
incentives. It was not as hell-bent on maximizing production. That's where 
you get into trouble.

MJ: Why is having a secretary of agriculture from an urban community, where 
the majority of eaters live, not a possibility?

MP: Good question. Historically it's always been someone from a farm state 
because the Ag Department has been viewed as a bureaucracy whose goal is to 
advance the interest of the American farmers, not eaters. For many, many 
years though, advancing the interests of farmers and eaters was the same 
thing. When the great public heath problem in America was not enough calories 
for everybody, having a set of policies that encouraged farmers to produce as 
much as possible made sense; the quantity of calories mattered more than the 
quality. Look at the school lunch program or the food stamp program. The 
interests of agribusiness and the interest of the recipients of these 
programs were once identical just because it was about getting enough food on 
the table or in the cafeteria. Now our problem is different; it is the poor 
who suffer disproportionately from diet-related illnesses and chronic 
diseases. So merely giving them enough calories is not the answer.

One of the more encouraging things that Vilsack said in his press conference 
when he was nominated was that he was going to put nutrition at the center of 
his nutrition program in the Department of Agriculture, which must have 
struck a lot of listeners as, "Well, duh," but in fact nutrition has not been 
at the center of these programs; disposing of agricultural surplus has been 
at the center of these programs. So if that really comes to pass I think that 
would be wonderful. One of the things you might want to consider is getting 
these programs out of the Department of Agriculture. The interests of eaters 
need to be represented in a way that they have not been. One of the things 
that was discouraging was that neither Obama nor Vilsack used the word "food" 
or "eating." It was very much cast in terms of interest groups, but eaters 
are the biggest interest group of all, and their interests are not being 
taking into account at all.

MJ: One of the criticisms of the food activism community is that, you know, 
it's easy enough for Clara Jeffery and Michael Pollan to talk about organic 
and locally grown food because we walk out the door and we trip over a 
farmers market and we can afford it. How do we democratize better quality 
food for people? If we want to get toward a more local and organic food 
system, can the poor afford it?

MP: It is the important question. Much more has to be done to democratize the 
food movement. One of the reasons that healthy food is more expensive than 
unhealthy food is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very 
little to support healthy food, whether you mean organic or grass-fed or 
whatever. The incentives we have make processed food or fast food or junk 
food very cheap. I mean we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize 
hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize these 
four crops—five altogether, but one is cotton—and these are the building 
blocks of fast food. One of the ways you democratize healthy food is you 
support healthy food.

I think you have to work on access. I think we have food deserts in our 
cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce 
is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people 
don't have grocery stores. They have to get on a bus and take a long ride to 
get to a source of fresh produce. So we have to figure out a way of getting 
supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.

MJ: Do you think it's a matter of drawing them in or somehow mandating that 
they come in?

MP: I don't know. I don't know how you do it. One way we've seen that works 
when we've experimented is that when we give people farmers market vouchers 
on the WIC [Women, Infants, and Children] program or food stamps, lo and 
behold, the farmers markets show up in those neighborhoods.

You talk to people here at Berkeley who run the ecology center and you say, 
"West Oakland, the first of the month there will be $15,000 worth of vouchers 
that can be spent in farmers markets": They'll be there. They'll set up the 
booths. The farmers will be there. It won't take long, either; it doesn't 
need a lot of infrastructure to build. That being said, one of the best 
things that Obama could do would be build 12-month farmers markets, 
especially in inner cities—that could be your legacy, those beautiful glass 
buildings you see in Barcelona or Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. 
This would be a wonderful way to make farmers markets a central part of these 
communities. It would drive economic development and local agriculture. And 
what happens around these neighborhoods is that you get all of these 
businesses sprouting up on the edges selling, you know, all kinds of 
groceries, or restaurants. Anywhere you go and you see a permanently located 
farmers market you will find economic redevelopment. You go all over Europe 
where they have these places—they're real economic engines.

The other way that you democratize the food movement is through the public 
school system. If you can pay enough for the school lunch system so that it 
can actually be cooked and not just microwaved, so that these schools can buy 
local food, fresh food, because right now it's all frozen and processed, you 
will improve the health of the students, you will improve the health of the 
local economy, and you will have better performing students. There are so 
many gains from that one step. Supposedly it would take about a dollar per 
student per day to really change the food system.

This is the part you don't hear about. I mean, everyone loves to put arugula 
on the cover of their newsweeklies and talk about organic and elitism, but a 
big part of this movement is community food security collation, and there are 
people working very hard on that idea of access. Alice Waters here in 
Berkeley with the public schools. Michelle Nichon, a chef who's working with 
these farmers market vouchers for food stamp recipients and WIC recipients 
and having incredible success with that.

The other more general thing I'd say, as an indictment of the movement, is 
that the movement is elitist in certain ways. And that's not surprising; a 
lot of social movements begin that way. I mean, you look at women's suffrage, 
you look at abolition, and you look at the environmental movement. Movements 
often begin with people who have the resources and the time to consider 
social change. The real test comes if it's still elitist in 20 or 30 years 
and it hasn't democratized itself. I think this movement will.

MJ: Could any of this have been put into the farm bill, or is it about 
government procurement to WIC and other individual procurement programs?

MP: Well some of it is in the farm bill. The farm bill is a many-headed 
beast. Commodity subsidies are a part of it. Food stamps are a part of it. 
The rules for food stamps are set in it. But also there is money for farmers 
markets. There is money for research on organics. You could argue that the 
seeds for change are being granted through little grants in the farm bill.

MJ: Does WIC still specify that you buy cheese and dairy?

MP: Yes. We had a huge fight to get a little more produce in the WIC basket. 
It's basically a basket of food the government will support, and it's heavy 
on the cheese and milk, not because there's a health benefit to cheese and 
milk, but because the dairy lobby is very powerful. So they fought and they 
fought and they fought, and they got a bunch of carrots in there. [Laughs.]

MJ: That's it? Specifically carrots? Who knew: the carrot lobby?

MP: Specifically carrots. The next big lobby. But there is also money in this 
farm bill for fresh produce in school lunch. There's about $2 billion. See, 
the price of getting the subsidies was getting the California delegation on 
board, and their price was a couple billion for what are called specialty 
crops. Fresh fruit and produce that is produced largely in California. There 
is money; it's not subsidies; it's kind of demand driven. There's money to 
put it in schools and there's other money to encourage you to eat your five a 
day, if California was willing to stand up to Iowa and Illinois and realize 
that the bigger farm economy is here. If they got organized they could really 
drive some useful change. A lot of the public health solutions around food 
would be very beneficial to California farms, because they tend to be growing 
vegetables and fruit.

MJ: If a consumer can't afford or access all organic, what's the best place 
to start? Is it organic milk for your kids…?

MP: In terms of buying organic I don't think that's necessarily the most 
important thing you can do or the only thing you can do. I think there are 
certain products that it's worth buying organic just because the alternatives 
have so much pesticide. There's a list of the dirty dozen that you can get 
off the Web. Strawberries, potatoes. A handful of crops that have very high 
pesticide residues if you don't buy organic. If you eat that a lot, that's a 
good place to invest.

But there are other things, like broccoli and maybe asparagus, that have very 
little pesticide residues and that might not be such a good place to invest. 
Farmers market food has very little pesticide and it also has the benefit of 
being very, very fresh and therefore often nutritionally superior. It's 
picked at the moment of ripeness rather than a week or 10 days before, which 
often happens with organic food that goes to the supermarket. And there are 
moments, there are seasons, when food at the farmers market is cheaper than 
food at the supermarket. And then knowing what to do: "Okay, this week I'm 
going to buy A LOT of strawberries and then freeze them, can them, make 
jelly."

That's one of the ways we used to eat economically. One of the things that 
happened is that we lost the cultural skills that used to allow people to eat 
well cheaply. For example making three or four meals from a chicken, rather 
than buying chicken breasts. Every peasant cuisine has incredible ingenious 
tricks for getting a lot of nutrition out of a small amount of ingredients. 
There are people who don't have the money to invest in better food, but 
perhaps they have the time. There's a trade-off: The more time you're willing 
to put into food preparation, the less money you have to spend. And people 
have gone out and done studies on "Can you eat locally on a food stamps 
budget?" And you can, but you've got to put in like all day Sunday cooking 
meals. And a lot of people feel as pinched for time as they are with money, 
but you're going to have to invest more time or more money if you want to get 
off this industrial food chain, and that is a challenge.

MJ: What do you say to those who claim that organic and locally grown would 
mean lower yields and greater starvation worldwide, if we could somehow 
engineer that to happen?

MP: Show me the evidence. There's a lot of research that suggests that 
organic yields are close or superior to conventional yields depending on 
factors like climate. In a drought year an organic field of corn will yield 
more—considerably more—than a conventional field; organic fields hold 
moisture better so they don't need as much water. It simply isn't true that 
organic yields are lower than conventional yields. You can find studies that 
suggest that there's a yield drag of 20 percent. You can find others that say 
there's a yield benefit of 10 percent. I think it's incredible that organic 
yields should be that high considering how little R&D money has been spent. 
All money for agricultural extension, land grant universities has been toward 
developing industrial food. Lots of money has been invested toward maximizing 
yield. If you took even a small amount of that money and put it toward 
organic research, I don't have any doubts you could match those yields.

MJ: You talk about weaning us off of an industrial system. I'm curious about 
the mechanism. Should we be trying to go as quickly as possible toward 
organic and local or does a move like that let the perfect be the enemy of 
the good?

MP: That's why I don't know if organic is the last word. It's sort of an 
all-or-nothing idea, and it's very important—I mean, you think of another 
time that we looked at a technology, we've looked at a development and said, 
"This is a mistake; we're just going to not do that anymore"? Childbirth is 
one thing, or nursing, where there was a glamorous technological approach 
that we turned away from. And it's interesting that it should be around these 
very basic technological questions. But people getting it partly right is 
very important. Getting your chickens out in the open and out of those cages 
is important, even if you're not getting them organic feed. Those will not be 
organic eggs, but they will be so far superior. There are many varieties of 
sustainable agriculture we should support; it doesn't have to be a zero-sum 
game. Let 1,000 flowers bloom and let's see what works. The whole problem of 
industrial agriculture is putting all of your eggs in one basket. We need to 
diversify our food chains as well as our fields so that when some of them 
fail, we can still eat.

MJ: Do you have a secret food shame?

MP: I have a weakness for potato chips. I don't really have a big sweet 
tooth, thank god. My junk food would be like nuts, chips. I can't think of 
something that I'd be really embarrassed about.

MJ: How far would you go out of your way to avoid a McDonalds or something 
like that?

MP: Not that far. Last summer we stopped at a McDonalds. Because my son, 
who's 16 now, had this Proustian moment where we were on this road where 
there was this McDonalds where we used to stop. And he just had this craving 
for chicken nuggets. I wasn't sure exactly what to do, and I just said, "Eh, 
let him have his chicken nuggets." Special-occasion food is a great 
institution. I think our problem is that we let special-occasion food become 
everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries. One of my rules of eating 
is that if you're willing to cook it yourself, have all the junk food you 
want. I mean, if you're willing to make that Twinkie, great. Or even fry 
potatoes. It's so much work and it makes such a mess that you'll have it 
about once a month, which is about right. So I said, "Sure, and why don't you 
get the biggest box you can." And the first one he was like, "Dad, this is so 
good. I forgot how good these are. You got to try one of these." But by the 
six or seventh he was like, "Ohh, I got a stomach ache." And he realized it 
wasn't that great. I mean, this food is engineered for the first bite and 
it's really effective, but I tried it and it's all just fat and salt and some 
notion of chicken flavor; I wasn't impressed.

MJ: Nick Kristof of the New York Times proposed that Obama create a secretary 
of food. Thousands of people have signed an online petition to make you the 
secretary of food. If you were offered that position, would you take it?

MP: No. That would be such a mistake for all concerned. I don't have the 
skills to run a bureaucracy of 97,000 people and a budget of $100 billion. I 
think I can be much more useful on the outside. Not that this would ever 
happen. You can't even imagine the opposition to even the whisper of such a 
position. Harry Reid said recently that the two most powerful lobbies on 
Capitol Hill, and he should know, were the insurance industry and 
agribusiness. They are fierce and they are powerful and they are not going to 
let anyone even remotely like me cross that threshold.

MJ: You've been a mentor to many a young journalist, both when you were an 
editor at Harper's and now at Berkeley. What do you say to people right now 
who are coming into this industry? It's pretty grim out there.

MP: It's really grim. I'm at a loss with my students as to what they should 
do. I still think that knowing how to write, knowing how to clearly argue a 
position and tell a story, is an incredibly valuable and extremely rare 
skill. It will be rewarded in some way. The cultural authority of print—in 
the midst of this whole Internet revolution—I am constantly amazed at the 
power of print. They may not pay you as much for that print as they once did, 
and finding a business model to support that print is going to be a 
challenge, but it still has more influence than anything else when you're 
talking about that realm. One well-done op-ed piece will trump whatever you 
put on television or the Web. The prestige and authority of print in Western 
culture goes way back to the Bible.

MJ: Do you think that pursing a topical specialty is key to ongoing success?

MP: One of the things that I urge students to think about is, in addition to 
developing your skills as a storyteller or analyst, know about a subject. You 
need to be able to sell not only that you can tell a story but that you have 
something to say. And you're not going to have something to say unless you've 
mastered a subject. And you don't have to stick with it your whole career. 
You can change. Then when you're trying to get assignments you offer 
something more than sheer writing ability. You have a head start. You have a 
point of view; you know where the bodies are buried. And also, a very 
important source of work for writers these days is public speaking. You're 
someone who can go out there and make speeches and talk about a subject and 
get involved in the community that cares about it. That's a really important 
strategy. Looking ahead, it's not hard to predict the topics that it will be 
important to master. One is resource economics. Water, energy, food. These 
are real basics that are coming into crisis. Knowing enough about these 
issues gives you something in the marketplace that is more than just putting 
a good sentence together.

Look, people are reading like crazy.

MJ: I know, I keep telling people that sales of serious nonfiction are up.

MP: And look at what people are doing on the Web; they're reading. It's just 
that they don't want to pay for it. Nowadays you can publish anywhere and you 
can find the right audience. A couple of years ago I had an idea I wanted to 
do for the Times and they weren't interested. I wanted to write a piece about 
slow food. So I went and did it for Mother Jones. Well I reached all the same 
people I would have reached at the Times because of the Internet. The 
difference, though, is who's going to give you that really nice fee? It's not 
an audience problem; it's a business problem. And also giving people enough 
money so that they don't just opine but they can research and report and 
investigate. The danger when you choke off the financial line to writers is 
that you get more opinion and less information. You see that on the Web.

We're going to wake up one day and there will not be a major paper in a state 
capital or a major city and certain things will not get uncovered and you 
will have a corporation scandal that the TV reporters didn't get and people 
on the Internet didn't get and people will sorely miss those newspapers. You 
start to see that now on the bloggers. It was sort of fun to make fun of the 
papers when they were big and strong, but now that they're not…

MJ: You don't have their reporting to riff on…

MP: Exactly. How many bloggers live by the grace of the New York Times and 
the Washington Post? I think as a society we're about to have that moment. Do 
we really want to see these institutions go or become weakened? If you're 
producing something that people want and need, good information about the 
state of the republic, there will be a way. We're just at that moment of 
reinventing exactly what that way is. But it will happen. I wouldn't 
discourage anybody from getting in, but, I mean, you can call this a 
profession, but you're not going to have the security that comes with other 
professions. We're all freelance at this point. We're going to have to 
reinvent ourselves every 5 to 10 years. You can look on that prospect with 
dread or excitement. You have to take an entrepreneurial view of your career 
and do a lot of different things. If that's what you're looking for, 
security, than go to law school I guess. But if you're up for something a 
little sketchier, it's still a great career. It's a culture that still reads 
and still listens and that's not going to go away.