I have really been appreciating Michael Pollan’s recent tour circuit for his latest book Food Rules. With both The Daily Show and Oprah he has been hitting mainstream media with really important messages about food production and culture and is doing so is a way that is straight, truthful and ultimately seems easier for people to get and get behind (easier that is than maybe his past messages and others in the SOLE food movement. (That’s Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical))
The best of these interviews so far has been with Amy Goodman and Sharif Abdek Kouddous on Democracy Now. They tell him at the beginning that their “food rule” for him is “no sound bites” and he plays along (probably eager for the chance to elaborate really). Even if you have read his books and/or heard him talk, and he does do a lot of repeating, as I guess is necessary, this interchange is worth watching. As he does in the other interviews, he really brings together the complexity of the food culture with clear ways out of many of the tangles we’re in but he goes a bit deeper than the rest and seems a bit more forthright.
My favorite point is his mention of the feminist/labor issues around food and how processed food and classic feminism went, unfortunately, hand in hand due to the need for more income and less entrapment of women in a domestic role. I think this questions gets to the heart of our daily food life; who cooks for us, why don’t we cook ourselves, why don’t we prioritize the time and money to eat well? I really feel that addressing these questions and making changes that align with our heart-of-heart values with the answers can be really empowering, healing, and have great impact on the world.
My least favorite point is his use of the word “fat” as if there is one category and none of the members of that category have any distinction. I know he understands this because he is very current on the research on the role of fat in the diet. People generally understand that there a “good fats” and “bad fats” so he could just at least say “bad fats” but he could take it a step further and separate out whole, traditional fats from industrial oils. He does this already with meat. There is no such thing as meat as one category- there are animals that are eaten that have completely different diets and nutritional profiles even though they are technically the same animals. He explains that he eats less meat than he used to and he eats different meat than he used to (only grass fed for beef for example). I wish he would make the same distinction with fat. He mentioned that school lunches are so deplorable because it is the disposal method for surplus cheap food and because the meals have calorie minimums not maximums. He says the meals need to have less fat- well school lunches have low-fat milk, but we know that’s not really the best choice in terms of providing whole food. So schools have followed the low-fat mantra, but are still terribly unhealthy. He doesn’t really mean that they need less fat, they need less of the processed foods and chemicals that are contributing to disease and obesity in children, which is not whole milk- it is soda (which he does mention), and highly processed carbs, and industrial fats. I wouldn’t change much about what he said, and I don’t think he should bring down the ease with which he communicates by bringing this up in such a way (as I do), but it would help his message stay consistent if he would at least make a careful distinction in this regard.
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thanks sage
keep on
can’t wait to see you again soon
i missed this interview with pollen, and agree it is noteworthy and look forward to sharing it with people around here
Have you read the China Study? What do you think about it if you have?
Uncle “D”
No, I have not read the book, The China Study, but I’ve read some of the back and forth comments between critics and authors. Like most of the “to eat meat or not” debates both sides get emotional and downright snippy about the other side’s authority on the subject and even the other side’s moral character. And here is why I care very little about the results of the study or the findings in the book. Of course I read books like this quite a bit because the science gives us information we can use culturally to create authority on a subject- but when it comes to food, we used to just know. You didn’t have to prove yourself as a peer-reviewed academic to know that what you and your people had been eating for their whole history was the right stuff, because your people were healthy (or at lease did not see the kind of rampant chronic disease we now have) And people have eaten animal protein and have avoided chronic diseases. So I lament the fact that all this work is being done in a lab and through industry and not through a strong and delicious food culture like we have always had before.
The second point about this debate I find frustrating is again the point that there is no such thing as “meat”. No creature or entity is healthy on its own or healthy as someone else’s food (and aren’t we all, eventually, that) if we don’t get our optimal diet. Of course eating cow that ate corn isn’t going to work. For either the cow or the person.
I also don’t appreciate the extrapolation of many of these studies to more extreme diets than the one studied. For example the Mediterranean diet, you will see that they observed that they eat a good amount of yogurt and then the recommendation from this observation is to eat low-fat yogurt. Well, that isn’t the same is it? The China Study observed less meat consumption. The recommendation is to eat no meat. Not the same. Although the authors say it is.
I also think the science about cholesterol on which they, the China Study authors, based a bulk of their conclusions is changing and that there is more going on in the dynamic of heart disease and diet than we understand. Given all the “paradoxes” about saturated fat and cholesterol consumption around the world. The WHO explains Chronic Disease as related to diet and lifestyle and urges people to replace saturated animal fats with vegetable oils, but that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 50 years and these problems have just gotten worse. So is the answer to keep with what we have been doing, but more? I don’t think it is, I think we have to step back to the food cultures that kept us healthy for this long. But what do I know, I’m not a scientist.
Doug, here’s a pretty thorough analysis of the data in the China Study…
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[...] The writer of my book turned out to be Shannon Hayes. An amazing women and great writer who turned her commitment to her household and her curiosity about this commitment into a book called Radical Homemakers. (I mentioned this upcoming work here, and it is basically a thesis of what Michael Pollen mentions when he talks about labor/time/gender and the ways in which these are linked to how we eat (see below)) [...]
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