Who is Michael Pollan? He is not a member of the comedy troupe, Monty Python. That’s Michael Palin. Michael Pollan is the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC-Berkley. He is an author and lecturer on food policy. He is also the subject of an online petition to urge Barack Obama to make Pollan the next US Secretary of Agriculture. It would be a bold move and one that would upset the incestuous applecart of agribusiness and the USDA. Needless to say, I’ve signed the petition.
I first heard about the petition, while I was driving to my mother’s house on Thanksgiving. I was listening to a rebroadcast of an interview with Pollan on the “Brian Lehrer Show” – a local NPR program. The interview first aired two full weeks before the election, but by then several thousand people had signed the petition urging Obama to make Pollan his Secretary of Agriculture. Not that Pollan was lobbying for the job, mind you.
Pollan and Lehrer talked about the high price of “cheap” food. Pollan discussed at length the policies of Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s notorious Secretary of Agriculture. Under Butz, an agricultural economist, agribusiness firmly took root in America’s heart land – laying waste to responsible agricultural practice and the family farm and contributing the America’s bulging waistlines. Butz’s mantra to US farmers, “Get big or get out.”
Under Butz’s direction, agriculture not only “got big”, it abandoned all pretense of responsible farming in the process. Much of modern agribusiness is monoculture – the planting and cultivation of only one crop like corn, soybeans, wheat or potatoes. And they’re not planting a wide variety of each crop. 85% of our nation’s potato crop is one variety of Russet potato. These crops are in turn, bioengineered, highly fertilized (monoculture farming depletes the soil) and sprayed with enormous amounts of pesticides. The chemicals are essential, because without them, these crops would fail.
Under Butz, it wasn’t simply agriculture that got big, we all did. Today, agribusiness produces 3,800 daily calories for every American man, woman and child – that’s about 1,000 more than we need to consume each day. Six out of every ten adults, me included, is overweight. Since 1970, the proportion of obese American children has more than doubled. Forty percent of our nation’s health care costs are linked to obesity. Obesity is responsible for the epidemic of diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.
To ensure the Americans eat all of their 3,800 calories, agribusiness has spent countless dollars not only urging us to eat more, but also to devise ways that we ingest more calories than we realize. Our meals are supersized – not only in fast food restaurants, but in high end eateries and at home. Sugar has been replaced by high fructose corn syrup, a sugar that metabolizes like a fat. HFC is in everything from cookies and cakes to ketchup, “healthy” fruit juices and even sugar cubes! Part of the evil that is HFC is that it alters the way metabolic hormones work, including muting those hormones that make us feel full. Lovely.
Pollan would be a breath of fresh air on this treacherous food landscape. I close with a quote from the first chapter of his bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma:
“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world: this book is probably not for them; there are things in it that will ruin their appetite. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kind of pleasures that are only deepened by knowing.
Copy & paste to friend: (Click inside box; Ctrl + C to copy; Ctrl + V to paste)
|
|
read more blogs!
Blogs by eastham:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Michael Pollan for Secretary of Agriculture! |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|