We are what we eat

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" author Michael Pollan on how Wall Street has driven America's obesity epidemic, the misleading labels in Whole Foods, and why we should spend more money on food.

By Ira Boudway

Read more: Books, Nutrition, Obesity, Interviews, Eating, Authors, Books Interviews, Food and Travel

April 8, 2006 | On the long trip from the soil to our mouths, a trip of 1,500 miles on average, the food we eat often passes through places most of us will never see. Michael Pollan has spent much of the last five years visiting these places on our behalf. "Industrial food," as Pollan defines it, "is food for which you need an investigative journalist to tell you where it came from." We have been eating such food for so long that most of us have no memory of the much shorter and less complicated food chains that once tied people to the land. We need someone, in other words, to tell us where food of any kind comes from. A longtime writer on food for the New York Times Magazine and author of the bestseller "The Botany of Desire," Pollan is a good man for the job.

In his new book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals," Pollan traces meals across four different food chains, or, if you prefer, markets, arranged in order of popularity: a McDonald's drive-through meal, a Whole Foods dinner, a meal raised on a "beyond organic" pasture farm in Virginia, and what Pollan labels the "Perfect Meal," one whose ingredients he hunts and forages for himself. In the course of his investigations, Pollan comes across an unlikely collection of people -- from Iowa corn farmers, Kansas feedlot managers and food processing scientists, to rebel farmers, San Francisco Bay area gourmands and fanatic mushroom foragers -- yet manages to approach all of them with a common sympathy. As he sees it, the corn farmer dumping nitrogen on his fields, the veterinarian loading corn-fed cattle with medication, and the hog farmer snipping pigs' tails to prevent stress-induced chewing in close quarters are all driven by the same pressures. He lays the blame for our destructive and precarious system, if at all, on those in Washington and on Wall Street -- at the USDA and Archer Daniels Midland -- who set the rules of the game. But then they too, he knows, are responding to a set of pressures that come from all of us and our appetites.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" is equal parts exposi and invitation -- a rolling together of "Fast Food Nation" and "The Moosewood Cookbook" to make the case for saner, more pleasurable eating habits. "Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious," Pollan writes, "but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's way of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reason practicing diversity instead."

Pollan caught up with Salon recently at Le Pain Quotidien in Manhattan to discuss the hard plight of American farmers, the trouble with labels at Whole Foods, and the lure of the Big Mac.

In your book's introduction you write that "The Omnivore's Dilemma" probably isn't for people who are perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain. What do you mean by that?

Well, there are a lot of people who are happy to eat at McDonald's a couple times a day. They don't see it as a problem, and I'm not expecting to turn everybody around. Those of us who are concerned about food issues often make the mistake of preaching too much. But when it comes to food, doing the right thing is often the more pleasurable thing. That's why I like the Slow Food approach. When McDonald's came to Rome, they didn't drive a tractor through the plate glass the way José Bové did in France. They set up a table outside and had Italian grandmothers cook their favorite traditional dishes as a way of saying, "Isn't this better? Isn't there more pleasure at this table than at that one?" It's a better strategy to invite someone to a better table than to turn over the table they are at.

Was access much of problem in writing this?

Yes, it's amazing that it should have become so hard. I wasn't able to get into the factories where corn is turned into high-fructose corn syrup, which you wouldn't think would be so controversial, and I wasn't able to get onto the kill floor of a large meat plant. They allowed me to see everything but the knocker who actually administers the fatal blow. It's become more difficult since Sept. 11. The food industry has a new argument, which is partly sincere. They've recognized that with such a centralized food supply, somebody dropping a vial of bacterium into a vat of hamburger could reach tens of thousands of people. But it has also become an excuse to keep the prying eyes of journalists away from how our food is made, which is unfortunate because we would be better off if we had more transparency in our food system. If there was a right of access to meat slaughterhouses, they wouldn't be slaughtering 400 beefs an hour, allowing manure to be smeared on carcasses, and going so fast that live animals get cut open. The best we could do for the safety of our food supply, for the beauty of our landscape and for the quality of our water would be to decentralize meat and agriculture.

So why don't we see more pressure to change the regulations?

The food industry takes advantage of the fact that we're really out of touch. I mean, some people would be shocked to learn that you can't get a steak without killing a cow. And for some reason food policy is treated as a parochial issue in this country. It's a debate between the senator from Nebraska and the senator from Iowa. The senators from New York and California don't think they have a dog in that fight, which is an enormous error, because these are the rules of the game in which we all play as eaters. And we're giving the right to set these rules to a very small number of interested parties. Maybe we need to start calling it a food bill instead of an agriculture bill. Maybe then people in New York and California would pay more attention. I know as a writer I've learned that you can't pitch a story on agriculture to an editor in New York, but if you call it a story about food, suddenly people are interested. And the same goes for the politics of it. I mean, why are we essentially subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup when we have an epidemic of obesity? These connections don't get made. But I'm hoping that in this next farm bill, since the obesity crisis has come to the public's attention recently, that we'll figure out a way to make public health a consideration.

How would you do that?

I'm not exactly sure, but we need to create a set of rules so that the produce aisle would be competitive with the junk food aisle. That's the beginning of the solution. People living on junk food aren't stupid. If you go into the supermarket with little money, you're going to buy the most calories you can get for a dollar. And a dollar will buy you a couple thousands calories' worth of potato chips, but only a few calories worth of carrots. So the decision to eat badly is rational in that those are the calories we subsidize. Our food policy is geared toward the overproduction of corn and soybeans in order to keep raw materials cheap for the likes of ADM, Cargill, Coca-Cola and General Mills, who happen to exert an enormous control over the farm bill.

Next page: Why we should spend more on our food