Michael Pollan: "Don't Buy Any Food You've Ever Seen Advertised"

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted May 15, 2009.

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.

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

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—

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

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.

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

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.”

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?

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—

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

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.

See more stories tagged with: food, michael pollan

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Environment! Sign up now »