OK, I'm officially a Michael Pollan groupie. I've even signed the petition to nominate him for Agriculture secretary in the new administration, which may be more silly than anything else. But here's a 20-or-so minute radio interview that sums up the problem with our food system today. Well worth a listen, and then zip over to your local library and check out The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. (My favorite concept from the latter book: don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. My grandmother came from Italy and always cooked like she was feeding an army, but she definitely would recognize a chicken nugget as something that should be ingested!)
If you want to read something on the relationship of food policy to our current state of over/undernutrition, check out this post that I've had saved in my reader for most of the year.
UPDATE: Pollan wrote an open letter to the next president a few weeks ago in the NYTimes Magazine. Among other things he suggests the position of "Farmer in Chief" and turning the White House lawn into a Victory Garden. Yeah!
Where did we leave off?
6 hours ago
Hi Maria,
ReplyDeleteIt's been awhile. I hope you're doing well. Reading Omnivore's Dilemma had a way of offering me a foundation to much of what I was thinking about in regards to food and food culture. I think I'm going to re-reread it some day soon.
A friend, who lives off fast food, asked me about a food choice that he recently made. He said he was standing in the frozen food section deciding between a "all natural" froze meal and a "organic" one. They were both on sale, cheaper than the conventional meal. He asked me what I thought would be better. I told him to flip the boxes over and choose the one with the fewest ingredients or the one with the most ingredients that he could pronounce and know what they are. He liked that idea, because to him it was something practical and convenient.
I've thought about that idea since I read In Defense of Food. When Pollan talks about "Eat Food," it really made me think about the things that I treat as "food," but are really "food-stuff."
I didn't mean to go into all that, I really just wanted to see if you had listened to Michael on NPR a few weeks back talking about his open letter to the next president. Here's the link if you haven't heard it yet, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95896389
peace,
steve
Thanks for dropping by Stephen. I didn't hear the interview -- thanks for the link. I think he was on Fresh Air, too, recently. I'm going to update the post with the NYTimes article link.
ReplyDeleteHey Maria ... I'm a Michael Pollan fan too. I read "In Defense of Food" last summer and have been striving to eat only real food (as opposed to "food like substances) since then. We fell off the wagon once recently and went through a McD's drive through ... it made us all queasy for the rest of the day. Funny how it never used to bother us.
ReplyDelete