By Glenn Coin / The Post-Standard
Published: Sunday, October 03, 2010
Michael Pollan didn't set out to become the nation's Food Defender-in-Chief. The first of his six books was about gardening; the second, about a one-room writing cabin he built behind his house in Connecticut.
With "The Botany of Desire" in 2002, however, Pollan set himself on a track of examining our relationship with food. That complicated, entangled relationship between nutrition, culture, agriculture and the environment became the basis for a series of books that have made him famous. In his best-known book, "In Defense of Food," he coined the "Eater's Manifesto," a seven-word guide to ethical and nutritional eating: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
His most recent, pocket-sized book, "Food Rules," expands on the manifesto with what Pollan calls "policies" to deal with the overwhelming food choices we face each day (Rule No. 36: "Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.")
Pollan has also written extensively on food-related issues for The New York Times and The New Yorker. Time Magazine named Pollan one of the world's 100 most influential people; Newsweek put him in the top 10 "New Thought Leaders."
Pollan grew up on Long Island and in New York City, and now lives in Berkeley, Calif., where he teaches journalism. He spoke recently to staff writer Glenn Coin about why grandmothers often know more than nutritionists, why we can't control health care costs until we control the way we eat, and why homegrown tomatoes taste better in Syracuse than in coastal California.
Adam Richman, the host of "Man v. Food," was here a few months ago and he ate a 6-pound frittata. I assume your eating experience will be a little different.
Yeah. I tend to eat what people put in front of me, and I hope it's not a 6-pound frittata.
You're not picky?
You know, the values of being a good guest must be weighed against the values of ethical and political purity. And I tend to eat what's put in front of me. On my own I'm pretty careful about ordering or buying things like feedlot meat, which I don't do, but if I'm at a dinner and that's what people are serving I won't make a scene.
I was going to ask if you were an easy house guest.
I am actually. People feel I'm going to be critical or judgmental, and I'm not. I only ask that people be conscious about what they're doing, not that they follow my precepts.
Although you're the guy who wrote a book with 64 rules.
You're right, you're right. I think of them actually more as suggested policies rather than hard and fast rules. I mean, the last rule is break the rules every now and again. I don't see it as a matter of law so much as a policies to help people navigate what has become a difficult landscape.
I guess that's the omnivore's dilemma, right ? If you can eat anything, what should you eat?
Exactly. We have this interesting predicament as an animal, and we're not the only ones -- rats and cockroaches are also generalists. As creatures go, we have to devote a lot more cognitive power to the eating question. That's always been true. It's gotten worse, though, just because industrial food and food novelty offers us so many choices that our ancestors didn't have to deal with. I mean, 17,000 new products in the supermarket every year. That's really a daunting prospect.
Your manifesto in "In Defense of Food" starts out with "Eat food." That sounds really obvious, but it's not.
Well, in an earlier world it was. Eating food was what your ancestors ate, what humans ate and what nature provided. But now food is so elaborated, so synthetic, so new that the first and perhaps most important challenge that we face is deciding what is food and what is not. A lot of things we are eating I don't think should be dignified with that beautiful word.
Give me an example.
Splenda with fiber. It's a new product. Really silly product. Is that food? I don't think so. It's a chemical derivative of sugar combined with an insoluble, indigestible part of what, seaweed?
For you, it seems food is as much a cultural decision as it is a nutritional one. You put a lot of faith in grandmothers.
I do. Food does so many other things for people -- that's one of the things I'm going to talk about. We eat for pleasure, we eat for community, we eat for identity, but we've tended to focus in a very single-minded way on this very narrow function, which is nutrition. The irony is that focusing on nutrition turns out not to be the healthiest strategy. Cultures that think of food in other ways are, lo and behold, also healthier.
The middle sentence of your manifesto is "Not too much." That's the hard part, isn't it?
That's the hardest part for most people. Marketers make money by enticing us to eat more than we need to.
One of interesting things I found is that we're not the first culture to deal with abundance and that other cultures have come up with interesting strategies to help people deal with it. It's encoded even in things like the French language where they don't say "I'm full." They say "I no longer have hunger: Je n'ai plus faim."[eku: cq: ] If you think about when you're eating, when is your hunger gone? It's usually a great many bites before you're full.
I'm listening to "The End of Food" by Paul Roberts. He's kind of gloomy, maybe even a little Malthusian. How would you describe yourself?
I tend to be a little more positive about these things. I think right now we're in the midst of this feedback loop with food where we've been experimenting with this industrial food culture and we're getting back the information that it makes us sick and not terribly happy, and that the food might seem cheap but isn't really when you calculate all the real costs.
In some ways I think the response to my books is not about the books so much as it is about a culture that is recognizing that the way they're approaching food is not contributing to their health or happiness, and they're looking for alternatives.
You've also made the point that health care reform is linked to food reform -- our diets are making us sick with things like diabetes.
Yes, we have to connect those dots between health policy and agricultural policy, and between agricultural policy and environmental policy. You could come up with policies that perhaps keeps the Farm Belt happy but they might contribute to exploding costs of Medicare and Medicaid. That conversation is now happening.
Do you think you've had some influence on that with your books?
It's not really for me to say. My books are part of a movement and there's a lot of people writing this stuff. I think my gift, such as it is, is the ability to tell these stories in a compelling way, not necessarily to have brilliant new insights.
Let's get back to food rules for a minute. Rule No. 58: "Do all your eating at a table. No, a desk is not a table." I know a lot people in this newsroom who break that one all the time.
I'll bet. I was thinking about newsrooms when I wrote that.
Is there any hope for us?
Yeah, (laughs) I think so. Look, there are a lot of forces encouraging us to eat alone and at our desks, including our employers who kind of like feel they get better productivity when you don't go out to lunch. I think every lunch at a desk is a missed opportunity for pleasure, so I try very hard never to do that.
You wrote that "Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future." How long can we keep postponing those costs until we have a day of reckoning?
I don't know what form the day of reckoning is going to take. You know as a journalist it's hazardous to predict the future, and we're not very good at it.
I think we see some trends, and one is rising health care costs. I think we're spending $1.7 trillion on health care and at least $500 billion of that, more than a quarter, is related to chronic diseases that are entirely preventable. It's not clear how long we can go on spending that money. That is going to put a lot of pressure for change in the diet.
There's also pressure coming out of animal agriculture right now. Antibiotic-resistant diseases of all kinds, which have been strongly linked to the way we're raising our animals -- that's going to get people's attention. When we no longer have effective antibiotics, that's going to create enormous pressure for change in animal agriculture.
On your website you have a picture of the cabin that you built in "A Place of My Own" -- the very sturdy, but somewhat off-kilter cabin. Do you miss that?
I do. I still own it but we haven't lived in that house for seven years and it's been rented out. It's a very meaningful place to me. It's where I wrote a couple of my books, and I am nostalgic for it.
Where do you write now?
I've got a pretty good office, but it's in the house.
Did you build that one, too?
No, no. I realized that building is not my thing. I'm not very good at it. I'm sticking to the garden.
You must have a big garden out there.
No, it's very small. In Berkeley nobody has a lot of land -- we have a postage stamp. I get a lot of food out of it, though, because I have a very long growing season. What I got out of a quarter of an acre in New England I get out of three raised beds here. We get something out of the garden all year long, even it's just lettuce.
For somebody who likes to garden that must be a great advantage.
It's a mixed bag. I liked gardening on the East Coast better. I like the fact that it stops and you get a break. You can grow better tomatoes (in Syracuse) because you have hotter summer than we have. Here the summers are cool and cloudy, so the crops that need a lot of heat don't do so well.
Contact Glenn Coin at gcoin@syracuse.com or 470-3251.
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