[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Michael Pollan: We Are Headed Toward a Breakdown in Our Food System

[Bill Totten]

by David Beers

The Tyee (June 12 2009)

AlterNet (July 04 2009)


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 British Columbia
wild Chinook salmon, a tangle of salad greens and several glasses of good
Okanagan Pinot Gris in the swank environs of the Blue Water Cafe 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
(2007) and In Defense of Food (2009). 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. {1}

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 {2} 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 sixteen-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 {3}, 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 {4}, 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 US
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, fifty 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.

Links:

{1}
http://blog.bookstocooks.com/2009/06/ubc-farm-pollanated-june-6-2009.html

{2} http://100milediet.org/

{3} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Salatin

{4} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry


http://thetyee.ca/Books/2009/06/12/PollanGardenFresh/

http://www.alternet.org/story/141072/


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