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and check out this recent short interview with Michael Pollan....
and this piece from Saturday's New York Times on the current fortunes of organic food.
Friday, October 31
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As for the New York Times article, to me the rhetoric surrounding “organics” is false, because I believe it should be a given that all food products meet the requirements of “organic.” I see no reason why “organics” should cost more than “non-organics.” To reference to the real academic community of New School, the article which appeared recently in “the New School Free Press” typifies the kind of misconceptions that can occur around that rhetoric: yes obviously an “organic” marshmallow-parfait is not healthier than a “non-organic” apple, and there plainly are no proven “health benefits” to an “organic apple” versus a “non-organic apple”--but this quite ignorantly misses the point. People who “shop organic” do not do so for their health, they do so because they do not want pesticides, chemical fertilizers, et cetera to destroy land, human communities and, of course, the often deferred and misunderstood idea of the “environment” (en, meaning “in,” viron, meaning “circuit”... thus “in the circuit”). I’m also against “Whole Foods” for similar reasons: those of you who will take or have taken the Amsterdam exchange will or have become quickly aware that every food store there (in Europe) is a “Whole Foods”; therefore no reason for Amsterdam hipsters to wait for one to open up in their neighborhood, or constantly be taking the L to Union Square.
Pollan on the radio. Links food immediately to “the energy crisis,” and in evoking “food as solar technology” echos a video of “Al Gore” I watched after listening to this where he advocates solar technology as the best alternative energy. (It’s kind of funny the question this answer is apropos of specifically enumerates (no more and no less than) “clean coal” and “nuclear power”--which Al acts like he doesn’t hear. The inquiry was obviously shaped to see if Al would say outright what everybody knows, “clean coal” is bogus and “nuclear power” is a great way to have babies with three heads (who then get names like “Trig”).) Pollan also advocates “decentralization of the food system” (Communist!) calling food with less nutrients “junk” (haha), raising the price of meat (God forbid), and treating waste from confined animal operations as pollution (no, really?).
I suppose I wouldn’t be saying anything new if I pointed out that meat-eating causes more global warming than energy and the other sacred American thing, “cars,” combined.
(It made me so mad when I gave a talk on renewable energy my senior year in high school and came up on the topic of electric cars and someone was disappointed to find he couldn’t drive his car for “more than eight hours straight”--please, do you really want to be in that cushy leather seat for more than eight hours? Get a motel room, take a break.)
As for Pollan’s “natural” history of meals, first corn echoing “Fast Food Nation” and also his comments on the radio, corn being feed for the cows, the “sugar” that goes into the soda, et cetera, begins by shedding light on the “artificial nature” of corn as human intervention creating species, similar to his talk about apples in BoD. Scary-looking words flash in neon, like “dextrose,” “maltodextrin” and “maltose.” He even takes a few shots at high-sugar alcoholic beverages before we recede into yet another mess, “grass,” which continues to prove the extreme inefficiency of meat-farming.
Perhaps this is all (really) old news to me because my mom has read both of Pollan’s books (has an extensive collection of DVD-documentaries on similar topics, went to France for cooking school, et cetera), and has an ever-increasing interest in using the local farms available to her in Pennsylvania. I am personally an ex-vegetarian (age nine to eighteen), my brother is a vegetarian still, and my mom’s boyfriend has been a gardener and a strict vegetarian for years (who had a vegetarian dog, has three vegetarian cats, and a cageless vegetarian rabbit). My grandparents on my mother’s side were farmers (corn, soy), so to an extent I’ve lived this book. Though I do not think this is an unusual history for a student of Eugene Lang.
Pollan's multifaceted take on the metaphors involved with different types of meals, all available (to varying degrees) in the American landscape, was a truly journalistic approach to the politics and "karmic price[s]" behind what we eat. By taking his investigation to such a personal level he lives his philosophy that "at either end of the food chain you find a biological system--a patch of soil, a human body." He directly involves himself with the investigation of the living elements of the food system. He explores consumer passivity as well as farmer/grower activity, examining how either way of eating affects our relationship with the natural world. Most poignant at the end of the reading was his encouragement that "we can still decide, every day, what we're doing to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in" (257) - so much of the first section of the book makes the reader feel as helpless as George Naylor and his agricultural (read: monocultural) neighbors, unable to affect the military-industrial complexes surrounding mass agricultural production in America. But Pollan attempts to provide an antidote for this helplessness, which is perhaps why his book has become so wildly popular: he gives the reader first awareness, then advocacy, then agency to change his/her personal eating habits, thus contributing to the most satisfying food chain possible.
In the namesake chapter Pollan challenges the classic - "why aren't the French fat" - mythology. Laying the obvious claim that it is not a matter of simple content (our orthodoxy regarding carbs and fats) rather an overarching cultural habitus allied with omnivorism. "They eat small portions and don't go back for seconds; they don't snack; they seldom eat alone ... etc." Thus, the culture of food generally dictates the food itself. I'm certainly not one to disagree with the notion that our culture of commoditification and commercialism has certainly been a detriment to our diet. However, I feel Pollan is too quick to acknowledge defeat; he recognizes the true catalyst behind corporate rationales yet fails to offer a solution. ", the single-minded pursuit of profit," - in this we're given the basic structure behind the progressive systemization. Corn-fed over grass-fed = profit. Fructose over cane = profit. etc. I feel it's ignorant to brand these executives as insidious without acknowledging the possibilities of a cure. Socializing and allying renewable energy to harvesting, maintenance, implicit/explicit costs, private seed, etc. there may allow profitable agricultural based around reformed principles of a new American culture of food. Capitalism can surely coexist and even profit off of a "progressive" reform of America's food culture.
First off I have to say that I really enjoy Pollan’s writing because he speaks to a mass audience and takes a subject that one might find boring or dry and turns it into a story that most everyone can relate to. I really appreciate that while reading this book. When Pollan states “the lack of a steadying culture of food leaves us especially vulnerable,” he answers many of my questions as to why Americans are constantly in confusion being pulled in one direction or another in search for a healthy diet. I remember as a child learning the basic food groups and using the food pyramid as a map to help me know what to eat. Oils, fats and sweets at the top, dairy and meats bellow that, fruits and vegetables below that, and then at the bottom, the most important food group was bread, rice and pastas. This pyramid has become incredibly distorted as I have grown older and Pollan provides some answers as to why that is. Like Fast Food Nation, the food we eat and purchase is the end product a long and complicated process and that totally separates us from the actual origins of the product. This is similar these natural disasters that people are aware of but are also separated from and for some reason people feel comforted by all this separateness.
I would like to hear more about Pollan's perception of the worldwide food crisis that we are now entering an many people worldwide have been facing for quite some time. Agribusiness is even more far-reaching than Pollan lays out in this book, what with forcing farmers to grow cirn and soybeans only, leaving customers with ghosts of what food used to be. At the same time, these companies seek to dominate the food sources worldwide. Food globalization is a very dangerous thing---particularly to those countries that are poorer than the rest. In the name of "food aid" many countries receive food from the United States...grains primarily like wheat, corn, and rice. These countries that used to be self-sufficient, and localized were before able to support themselves...and to eat a wide variety of local fruits, vegetables, and grains. Because American corporations force their foods on these people (and they can be produced and sold here so cheaply) the people of those countries can no longer afford to be self-sufficient. This forces them to buy American grain, making their economies weaker, their bodies sicker, their people poorer...and agribusiness richer and bigger than ever before.
Again with the highbrow foodie nostalgia!
Pollan's account of the transition of food systems from sun-based to fossil fuel-based is thorough, specific, and compelling; when he asserts that eating imported food is akin to eating oil, I am inclined to believe him, rhetorical polemic aside.
But, again, I cannot see how consumer choice (individual decisions to alter purchasing habits) is a viable macro answer to this problem. The vagaries and complexities of the industrial food system make it very, very difficult to obtain and promote reliable information on the environmental costs of food (petroleum-miles, chemical use vs. yield, waste). Moreover, efficiencies developed by the industrial food system are (to some degree) a positive benefit that cannot be meaningfully compared to the benefits of a local food system.
Pollan's model assumes that consumers have the time (an economic cost that he does not take fully into account), the patience, the knowledge, and the money to make proactive decisions about food. As the NYT article demonstrates, in a recessionary economic environment, these choices become even more difficult. Voting with your dollar means that people with more dollars get more votes.
The harmful externalities of the industrial food system that Pollan so thoroughly identifies should be tackled via macroeconomic policymaking (removal of certain subsidies - corn, oil, etc - and progressive taxation) and environmental regulation.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan represents an comprehensive look at the diet of contemporary America and examines the social, political and economic factors that have created that diet. The book starts off with a discussion of corn, and how it evolved to become the staple of the American diet. I found his discussion of the plant itself quite fascinating and a great segue from The Botany of Desire. I was amazed by the fact that corn, as a species, is essentially an evolutionary blunder that could not succeed- let alone come to occupy more space on Earth than human beings (as Pollan asserts) were it not for the presence of humans to uncover their seeds and allow them to propagate. I was also really intrigued by Pollan’s discussion of the organic foods movement. It was interesting learn the many distinctions that make food healthy for us and for the planet. The book encourages the reader to think beyond organic and to consider local vs. imported and industrial organic vs. beyond organic.
Since I grew up eating organic foods and consider natural, unadulterated produce better tasting and healthier than any alternatives, I always opt for organic fruits and vegetables when I am in the supermarket. Now, after reading the Omnivore’s dilemma, though I will consider a greater range of factors when picking my produce. I will no longer reach without second thought for a Chilean apple, even if it is organic, that had to be flown thousands of miles to my local Whole Foods in Downtown Manhattan or imagine that my free range chicken enjoyed an idyllic life on a small family farm in Kansas. I now think much more complexly about what I eat, which makes every choice of what I eat a little more difficult. I now think that I have a better grasp of what is the omnivore’s dilemma.
Michael Pollan does an amazing job at putting our human relationship with food in perspective. For the majority of Americans that relationship is long distance. Having no clue where it comes from, what it is made from, how it is made, and who is actually benefiting and who is suffering from its purchases, we are blindly picking food items off the shelf assuming and hoping for the best. Who here had any clue how much corn we are actually consuming? I thought corn was a meal I got to enjoy with my family for dinner once and a while in the summer. But it turns out it is in just about everything we eat, and it cannot be certain what kind of toll this is actually playing on our health.
I am impressed with Pollan’s ability to physically and emotionally immerse himself in his ethnographic research. Whether it is his relationship with Steer 534 or his time spent at the killing cones, Pollan seems willing to give anything a shot, which only increases my enjoyment while reading his work.
Melina said:
I really enjoyed this book. I find it to be honest in a similar way to "Fast Food Nation." And at times, much of the honesty is brutal. What I have come to realize, for far in this book, is now humans are indirectly killing themselves with food. By putting these animals in such poor conditions and allowing them such awful health situations, we are basically letting ourselves live the same way. "The unnaturally rich diet of corn that undermines a steer's health fattens his flesh in a way that undermines the health of
humans who will eat it" (Pollan 81). One thing I sensed in this book was a real anger about how things have turned out. Michael Pollan has a way of expressing
his real frustration intelligently. He is sarcastic in many ways. The
most shocking part of the first half of the book was the section on corn. I was truly impressed by
tis role corn plays in our lives. It is essentially the true base of the food pyramid. Overall, this book has shown me the cultural and political side to the
mass consumption and production of food around the world. It is the thinking behind the raw facts of "Fast Food Nation."
Pollan's book prompts readers to seriously contemplate the ethical implications of the food they consume. Behind the 'supermarket pastoral' there exists a process of production in which consumers (mostly unwittingly) participate in. This ignorance is intentional and political- the system of industrialized farming depends on this opacity, because if business practices of farming and food processing companies were apparent in its commodities, consumers might demand an alternative (evident in the organic movement).
Pollan explains the elaborate setup of mass subsidies, scientific management (hormones, antibiotics, GMO), and monocultivation that deplete biodiversity, nutrition, and fossil fuels. I really appreciate how he locates the consumer within this network. In doing so, he effectively highlights the relationships of the food chain that industrial farming disappears and makes us aware of our losses.
When talking about vegetarianism, Michael Pollan formulates a discussion between meat eaters and animal people. For the animal people’s arguments he finds support in philosophers and legitimate analysis from books that support their view, writers such as Peter Singer, Tom Regan, James Rachels, Steven M. Wise, Joy Williams and Mathew Scully. All their arguments are respectable and reasonable. But in Pollan’s made up debate, the meat eater’s arguments are solely those posed by Pollan himself, and as a meat eater myself I find them irrelevant. I would never defend my eating habits by saying: “Why should we treat animals any more ethically than they treat one another?”(310). I like the taste of meat, and I am sure Michael Pollan understands that. What he doesn’t understand is that unlike a pig locked up in a cage or a bunch of chickens smothered together with no space to move in, a human slave endeared hardship, struggled through injustice and stood up and fought for equality, as did women and other civil rights movements. They had the ability to demand for their rights and that is how they achieved equality. The only acknowledgment for animal rights doesn’t come from the animals themselves, bt from philosophers and writers like Pollan, who unfortunately I find difficult to accept as a decent work capable of defending the animals “cause” (In this case the “cause” is placed by animal people on the animals, which shows how dominant we are over animals).
The Omnivore's Dilemma is not a book about food. It is a book about interactions. Michael Pollan asks the reader to examine food practices as a way of reflecting on their participation in society. He proposes that we encounter food in so many ways that go beyond taste instead ecnourages the reader to think about food as ritual and process. He brings up common images, like a visual description of the supermarket, but he does not leave it here, he comments on the visual transformation that food undergoes before reaching the human consumer and how this has a denaturalizing effect on the consumer. You are not eating a chicken that came from a chicken coop, no you are eating a processed piece of meat? in the shape of a drumstick breaded and spongy. Bloodless, boneless food is not animal. Michael Pollan's book is not about food, it is about humans. It is about humans interaction with the products they consume and the transformation of the animal into a product---the product to be consumed.
In The Omnivores Dilemma Michael Pollan critiques the way Americans produce their food. He believes that the over use of corn in food production has many ethical and health implications. Corn is used to feed the cows chickens and pigs that we eat. It actually makes the cows sick over an extended period of time. Also, corn is used to make high fructose corn syrup which is found in many processed foods. This is partly responsible for an increase in obesity and its corresponding health problems. Producing corn and other crops using agribusiness techniques utilizes millions of pounds of fertilizer and pesticides which damages the environment and human health. This was the first time I had ever thought about the implications of the mass production and usage of corn. Pollan’s answer to this problem is in part to move away from agribusiness techniques and our modern fast food culture towards an agriculture that relies more on organic and locally grown foods.
Pollan begins his book by addressing a topic familiar to this class—the concept of what makes “natural” and “unnatural” environments. Just as a metropolis is comparable to a termite colony, a supermarket can be seen as a landscape teeming with flora and fauna, fruit and animals. He then goes on to describe the slightly harder to identify “boneless and bloodless geometrical cuts” of various meats. This description brought to mind the very concept of factory farms which take in whole, living beings and both rapidly and mechanically dismembers them until they become unidentifiable items, no different than furniture parts. What also struck me was the different ways we approach the foods we consume. When it comes to “natural” commodities, such as fruits and vegetables, we have at least vague knowledge of where they have been grown, what kind of plant/substance to which they initially belonged (shrub, tree, soil) and what environments they originated in (tropical, imported, or locally grown). Yet when it comes to animal products, we seem to take on a sort of “don’t ask don’t tell” attitude. People, at least in my experience, rarely consider which part of the animal they are consuming, and in some cases (ex., spam, bologna, hotdogs) they don’t even know what kind of animal it came from. We don’t know the farms or even the states in which they were raised and slaughtered in, nor do we ponder their original size, shape, sex, or breed. At the very most we are aware of whether or not they are labeled “organic” or “free range”—another topic Pollan later investigates. And the same goes for fast food, junk food, and candy; even a Twinkie, argues Pollan, contains substances which once originated in part from some living creature. In his book, Pollan cleanly and eloquently discusses industrial food production system, which is largely reliant on the processing and consumption of corn; organic farming and its increasing popularity in the United States; and personal—or hunted and gathered—food, which is both rewarding and impractical.
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