Michael Pollan, Condensed – An Interview with Mother Jones Magazine
Cows love Michael Pollan!
Michael Pollan had a great interview with the Mother Jones magazine. In it, he concisely portrays what are the quintessential points of contemporary food activism. If haven’t had time to pick up his books In Defense of Food
MJ: If you had a magic wand, would you get rid of subsidies or reform them?
MP: I’d give farmers the exact same amount of money to do something else. It’s a dead end to try and eliminate subsidies, because then you get all of America’s farmers, who have political power out of all proportion of their number, unified against change. Right now the incentives are to produce as much as possible, whatever the costs to the environment and our health. But you can imagine another set of assumptions, so that they’re getting incentives to sequester carbon. Or clean the water that leaves their farm, or for the quality, not the quantity, of the food they’re growing.
MJ: Why is having a secretary of agriculture from an urban community, where the majority of eaters live, such an impossibility?
MP: Good question. For many, many years the interests of farmers and eaters were the same thing. When the great public health problem was not enough calories for everybody, having policies that encouraged farmers to produce as much as possible made sense. Now our problem is different; it is the poor who suffer disproportionately from diet-related illnesses and chronic diseases. So merely giving them enough calories is not the answer. One of the more encouraging things that Vilsack said was that he was going to put nutrition at the center of his nutrition programs, which must have struck a lot of listeners as, “Well, duh,” but in fact nutrition has not been at the center; disposing of agricultural surplus has been. One thing to consider is getting these programs out of the Department of Agriculture. Eaters are the biggest interest group of all, and their interests are not being taken into account.
MJ: The food activism community is criticized as being elitist, blind to the issues of cost. How do we democratize better quality?
MP: It is the important question. One of the problems is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don’t have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.
Michael Pollan goes on to list examples of cities which have encouraged year-round farmers markets to thrive. Inner city health improves and local agriculture is supported. It’s a win-win situation.
I have just one bone to pick with regards to his interview; When asked what had surprised him as he researched In Defense of Food he said, “I was also surprised that those diseases that we take for granted as what will kill us—heart disease, cancer, diabetes—were virtually unknown 150 years ago, before we began eating this way.” He neglects to consider that the average person died (from today’s “preventable” diseases) before heart disease or cancer afflicted him. It’s true that the way most people eat exacerbates those diseases, but it is misleading and unscientific to suggest that that is the only cause of our modern health issues. This is a small point, but it irks me to no when statistics are provided without context.
Still, it’s a really great piece. It can help explain why, despite the economic crisis, the New York Times has recently devoted several front pages to food topics. By spending five minutes reading this article, you can pretty much understand the huge web of issues coursing through the food movement right now. So, if you haven’t read a Michael Pollan article/book yet, please pick this one up.
March 26, 2009
Tags: agriculture, Barack Obama, farmers, food, Health, Michael Pollan, nutrition, policy, USDA Posted in: Health, Politics
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