Quote of the Day #17

"I'm a pretty harsh critic of 99 percent of America's meat system, but there is that 1 percent I think is important to defend, because first there are good environmental reasons to eat meat in a limited way.

If you believe strongly in building up local food economies, there are places where meat is the best way to get protein off of the land. It's too hilly, too dry. Having animals is very important for sustainable agriculture. If you're going to have animals on the farm, they're going to die eventually, and you're going to eat them.

But I have enormous respect for vegetarians. They're further ahead than most of us. They've gone through the thought process in making their eating choices. They've just come out in a different place than I have.

I think we're going to focus on meat-eaters the way we have on SUV drivers. There will be a lot of pressure and education to show that a heavy meat diet is a big contributor to climate change, and that there are many good reasons to eat less meat."
-Michael Pollan

In Defense of Food

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Any discussion of In Defense of Food must of necessity start with the author's beguilingly simple summation of the book's central message: "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." These seven words connect in both tone and content Michael Pollan's follow-up to his stunning expose of the American food landscape, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Their simplicity belies a number of challenges readers may face in striving to abide by them, but the words themselves are still a precious gift from Pollan.

The skeptical may ask why changing the way we eat is so important. Well, as Pollan notes, those peoples not wedded to the Western diet have "thrived on seafood diets, diary diets, meat diets, and diets in which fruits, vegetables, and grain predominated." The key to optimal health has been "a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients."

So our challenge isn't, contrary to what we've long been told, to consume the perfect balance of vitamins and minerals, fats and carbs. This prevailing logic, which Pollan dismisses as "nutritionism" and the result of an unholy alliance of food scientists and food marketers, has bestowed on us precious little but the misery of "a predictable series of Western diseases, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer." Our challenge is how to break free of a diet that while it may be killing us, is also as American as Hostess Fruit Pie (Apple).

This is where readers may feel Pollan's book is somewhat lacking, since its relatively short length (201 pages) doesn't allow for an in-depth discussion of just how to implement such a wholesale change in the way we eat, particularly given how surrounded we are by what Pollan terms "edible foodlike substances." The facts alone, as compelling a case as is made here, don't diminish the cravings we may have for that Snickers bar or can of Diet Coke, even if the facts do increase our level of guilt.

In fairness, Pollan's "Eater's Manifesto," as this book is subtitled, doesn't claim to offer a prescription for how to eat, much less a rigid diet. Pollan is a journalist, not a preacher, so remaking our own diets may just fall to us. Fortunately, Pollan does help us figure out how to interpret the essential message of the book by offering guidelines which are as useful as they are pithy, and include the following:

• "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." This means you, Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt tubes! Jeez, have an apple already.
  
  
• "Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, B) unpronounceable, C) more than five in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup." You really don't need 41 ingredients (certainly not azodicarbonamide, whatever that is) to make bread, but that's what Sara Lee uses to create Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread.
  
  
• "Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle." You could also put it this way: Food on the outside, fake on the inside.
  
  
• "Pay more, eat less." Sounds backwards, but if you want good, real food grown in healthy soils, you're gonna hafta pay for it. And while no one likes the latter piece of advice, if we all just took a little less on our plates and avoided seconds, we might just be healthier.

I, for one, am greatly thankful for Michael Pollan's efforts in defense of food. To celebrate, I think I'll go have a salad.

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The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Omnivore's Dilemma, as author Michael Pollan sees it, is the horrendously complicated process of how Americans today go about answering the simple question of what to have for dinner. Fortunately, we have a writer as skilled as Pollan to uncover what happens to our food before it gets to our mouths, and how we can use the knowledge we gain along the way to nourish our bodies as well as our minds. Subtitled A Natural History of Four Meals, the book tells us not just what we're eating, but where it comes from, how it gets to our plates, and what impact those processes have on the world we live in.

Pollan's genius is in both how he structures the book and how he uses the characters behind each meal to engage the reader; it's clear this guy knows a thing or two about storytelling, not to mention food.

Those with a weak stomach, be warned: Part I, in which we are introduced to the industrial food chain that flows on a "river of corn," is a tough read. Most of us know in the deeply denied backs of our minds that life for a steer on a factory farm is pretty grim, and as Pollan follows "cow 534" from ranch to feedlot, even the most carnivorous among us may lose our appetites. But it's not just the treatment of animals one finds troubling here; it's the degree to which our entire food chain is awash in corn, and the implications that has for public health, the environment, and the economy of the Heartland, that is most unpalatable.

To bring the point home, we meet George Naylor, the Iowa farmer who understands exactly what he's doing as he sells corn for less and less money every year, why his grandfather's multi-crop farm made so much more sense, and ultimately, why he can't afford to change anything he's doing.

One's appetite improves somewhat in Part II, which takes us through the world of "Big Organic," or as Pollan dubs this section's meal, "supermarket pastoral." On the one hand, the more we buy from large-scale organic farms, the supposedly healthier our food is, not to mention the people working the fields where pesticides aren't sprayed, and the waters in which chemical fertilizers don't wind up killing all of the downstream marine life. Unfortunately, all that organic produce we feel so virtuous for buying? It's shipped thousands of miles in many cases, particularly to those of us on the East Coast, and the carbon footprint created is significant.

Gene Kahn comes to symbolize the contradictions at the heart of Big Organic. Once a pioneering hippie founder of the organic movement, Kahn is now a General Mills vice president running Cascadian Farms, the massive organic operation that supplies a great deal of what we purchase at Whole Foods.

And then, as soon as have a grasp of what big business has done to our food system, Pollan takes an abrupt left turn in Part III, and spends about 100 pages talking about grass farming. Yep, from the point of view of Joel Salatin, the "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer," it's all about what you do with a pasture. Salatin's Polyface Farm becomes in many ways, the ideal the book is searching for. It's practically off the grid, but it still finds a way to prosper economically because its efficiencies aren't dictated by the free market; they're based on how nature itself works. By harmonizing Polyface's operations with the natural world, Salatin is a throwback, but given what Pollan has to say about the meal, this crazy farmer is doing something right.

The fourth and final meal occupies the rest of the book, and since it's primarily acquired by hunting and gathering, two omnivorous dilemmas are central to Part IV: the ethics of meat eating and, with respect to mushrooms, how do we know which ones won't kill us? Pollan devotes a great deal of energy (and angst) to the first question, and it's a great service to all of us who've ever flirted with vegetarianism. The second question, in which he ventures to the top of the snowy Sierras to forage for fungi, is no less fascinating. As are his hunting and foraging companions. One of these is Angelo Garro, a Sicilian archetype of the "slow food" movement, who guides the author through the sometimes bloody world of the 21st-century hunter-gatherer, at least as far as one who resides in Berkeley, California, can be spoken of in such terms. Ultimately, Pollan's "last supper" is probably the most satisfying, but it requires the most work on his part, and as he points out, it's not an option for most of us. What is an option, now that we've learned where our food comes from, is to make more conscious choices about what we eat. We may just figure out what to have for dinner after all.

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