Michael Pollan: Eating Is a Political Act

By Mark Eisen, The Progressive. Posted November 8, 2008.

Michael Pollan has got people talking. His recent books, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, have captured the public imagination, setting off countless coffee shop discussions, dinnertime arguments, and oh-so-many blog posts.

Even more impressively, his exploration of modern-day agriculture and the dysfunctional American diet has prompted his readers to look at their own eating habits with a new sense of understanding and often a desire for change.

Pollan has taken Wendell Berry's memorable phrase "eating is an agricultural act" one step further. "It's a political act as well," Pollan advises.

A lot of people agree. The alternative food movement -- organic farming, local food systems, sustainable agriculture, and more -- is burgeoning today because, one family at a time, consumers are backing away from the global food network. Instead, they patronize farmers' markets, buy food shares from CSA (community-supported agriculture) farms, and favor grocers who sell local meat and produce.

Pollan's books are essential reading in this movement. He details the importance of grazing to a sustainable farm's operation and the problems of corn as the cornerstone of U.S. agribusiness. But most of all he gracefully chronicles his own journey of discovery in a food world where, amidst $32 billion in advertising, baleful health consequences are carefully obscured.

Pollan's topics include a thorough demolition of "nutritionism," the reigning health ideology that offers dizzying and ever-changing advice on polyunsaturated this and low-fat that, often in the cause of selling highly processed food products.

A good diet is really pretty simple, Pollan declares: Avoid "edible foodlike substances." Instead, eat real food. "Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."

I caught up with Pollan two days after he returned from a book tour in New Zealand and Australia. At fifty-three, he looked fit but tired from the travel. He lives on a leafy avenue in Berkeley with his wife, painter Judith Belzer, and their fifteen-year-old son. He teaches journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, after a ten-year stint as an editor at Harper's Magazine. We talked over cups of Darjeeling tea in his kitchen. Here is the edited and condensed interview.

Mark Eisen: You argue that consumer ignorance is essential for maintaining the industrial agriculture system.

Michael Pollan: If people could see how their food is produced, they would change how they eat. My interest in the topic traces to two moments, in 2000, when I learned how our food is produced.

One was driving down Route 5 in California and passing the Harris ranch, which is a huge feedlot right on the highway. It's a stunning landscape. I had never seen anything quite like that.

Miles of manure-encrusted land teeming with thousands of animals and a giant mountain of corn and a giant mountain of manure. And a stench you can smell two miles before you get there.

Most feedlots are hidden away on the High Plains. This one happens to be very accessible. Then I visited an industrialized potato farm in Idaho and saw how freely pesticides were used. The farmers had little patches of potatoes by their houses that were organic. They couldn't eat their field potatoes out of the ground because they had so many systemic pesticides. They had to be stored for six months to off-gas the toxins.

These two things changed the way I ate. I don't buy industrial potatoes, and I don't eat feedlot meat.

It's only our ignorance of how our food is grown that permits this to go on. Most people, if they went to the feedlot or to the slaughterhouse and saw how the animals are raised and killed, would lose their appetite for that food.

The industry knows this. It works so hard not to label where the food comes from, how it's made, and whether or not there are GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in it, because they know very well from their own research that people don't want food grown that way.

ME: The national organic rules, which took effect in 2002, are credited with creating the boom in organic food sales. Yet you seem skeptical.

MP: Something was gained and something was lost when the federal government defined what "organic" meant. The rules were drawn in a way to make organic friendly to large corporations looking to do organic as cheaply as possible and on as large a scale as possible.

For example, the fight over whether you should really require pasturing for dairy so the cows can eat grass: They drew those rules so broadly that companies like Aurora and Horizon could slip through with very large industrial feedlots.

An "organic feedlot" should be a contradiction in terms, but it's not under the rules. They really wanted to make it possible to have a mirrored food supply. So you could take everything in the supermarket and make its organic doppelganger. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? It's a mixed thing.

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Mark Eisen writes about food, political, and business topics from Madison, Wisconsin.

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