In Defense of Food?
theroachman
Posts: 362
A veering off from the Monsanto thread with a wider look at large scale corporate farming. This interview is probably as good as the book. Covers many of the things that are wrong with our current food culture.
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Pollan: Nutrition 'Science' Has Hijacked Our Meals -- and Our Health
By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted April 3, 2008.
Much of what lines supermarket aisles is not food. It's merely foodlike, and it's making us sick.
Why would anyone need to write a book called In Defense of Food? If we can afford it and can get our hands on it, we eat food several times a day. Or do we?
According to Michael Pollan, most of what Americans consume isn't food. He calls it "edible foodlike substances." He also says that the way we consume it is not really eating. It's something we do pretty unconsciously as we work or drive or watch TV.
We all know about the US epidemic of obesity and diabetes over the past 25 years, top of the steady rise of chronic diseases over the past 100. Paradoxically, this happens just as Americans and the food industry are ever more aware of nutrition. What's going on here?
Pollan claims that in the Western Diet, good old food has been replaced by nutrients, mom's good advice by nutritional experts, common sense by confusion, and for most, a relatively good diet by a bad and dangerous one. The book in which he makes all these claims and advises us simply to "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants," has topped the New York Times best-seller list.
Michael Pollan's previous books include The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and The Botany of Desire. Pollan is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
Terrence McNally: How did you grow to focus on plants and then food?
Michael Pollan: Well all my work really begins in the garden. I was a very passionate gardener beginning at age eight, although I fell away from it for a few years. In the 1980's I was living in New York and took up gardening at a weekend house in northwestern Connecticut. I got very absorbed in the garden as a place to look at our relationship to nature.
Like a lot of Americans, my understanding of nature and our relationship to it was shaped by Emerson and Thoreau and Melville and Whitman. When I actually started to garden, I realized all those ideas about the romance of nature were distinctly unhelpful. Thoreau's love of wilderness and worship of the wild really doesn't equip you when the pests come and destroy your crops, when the woodchuck attacks your broccoli.
I got into trouble following their philosophy. I didn't have a fence, for example. I thought a fence was too alienating from the natural world. I got into a war with a woodchuck -- just like Bill Murray in Caddyshack -- until I was defoliating my property and pouring gasoline down a woodchuck burrow. I was like William Westmoreland in Vietnam, willing to destroy the village to save it.
I realized then that the garden was a very interesting place to examine our relationship to the natural world. Traditionally when Americans want to think about nature, we picture the wilderness, we go camping, we go to Yosemite. But nature is happening in our homes, in our gardens, in our lawns, and on our plates.
TMN: At that point you were writing about other things?
MP: I was an editor at Harper's Magazine, and I began writing a series of essays about what was happening to me in my garden, my woodchuck war, my dad's battle with the neighbors over his front lawn. These kinds of issues became my first book, Second Nature.
I started looking at our relationship to plants and animals, and at drugs, since a lot of drugs are plants that change our consciousness.
TMN: And that shows up in The Botany of Desire?
MP: Yes. When I was working on Botany of Desire, I visited industrial farms in Idaho to see how industrial agriculture works, and I was shocked. I was absolutely floored by these vast monocultures, the amount of pesticides that are used, the fact that the farmers are afraid to go into their fields for five days after they spray for fungus because they know how neurotoxic this stuff is.
more
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/80868/
The book
http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781594201455?&PID=32513
******************************************************
Pollan: Nutrition 'Science' Has Hijacked Our Meals -- and Our Health
By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted April 3, 2008.
Much of what lines supermarket aisles is not food. It's merely foodlike, and it's making us sick.
Why would anyone need to write a book called In Defense of Food? If we can afford it and can get our hands on it, we eat food several times a day. Or do we?
According to Michael Pollan, most of what Americans consume isn't food. He calls it "edible foodlike substances." He also says that the way we consume it is not really eating. It's something we do pretty unconsciously as we work or drive or watch TV.
We all know about the US epidemic of obesity and diabetes over the past 25 years, top of the steady rise of chronic diseases over the past 100. Paradoxically, this happens just as Americans and the food industry are ever more aware of nutrition. What's going on here?
Pollan claims that in the Western Diet, good old food has been replaced by nutrients, mom's good advice by nutritional experts, common sense by confusion, and for most, a relatively good diet by a bad and dangerous one. The book in which he makes all these claims and advises us simply to "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants," has topped the New York Times best-seller list.
Michael Pollan's previous books include The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and The Botany of Desire. Pollan is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
Terrence McNally: How did you grow to focus on plants and then food?
Michael Pollan: Well all my work really begins in the garden. I was a very passionate gardener beginning at age eight, although I fell away from it for a few years. In the 1980's I was living in New York and took up gardening at a weekend house in northwestern Connecticut. I got very absorbed in the garden as a place to look at our relationship to nature.
Like a lot of Americans, my understanding of nature and our relationship to it was shaped by Emerson and Thoreau and Melville and Whitman. When I actually started to garden, I realized all those ideas about the romance of nature were distinctly unhelpful. Thoreau's love of wilderness and worship of the wild really doesn't equip you when the pests come and destroy your crops, when the woodchuck attacks your broccoli.
I got into trouble following their philosophy. I didn't have a fence, for example. I thought a fence was too alienating from the natural world. I got into a war with a woodchuck -- just like Bill Murray in Caddyshack -- until I was defoliating my property and pouring gasoline down a woodchuck burrow. I was like William Westmoreland in Vietnam, willing to destroy the village to save it.
I realized then that the garden was a very interesting place to examine our relationship to the natural world. Traditionally when Americans want to think about nature, we picture the wilderness, we go camping, we go to Yosemite. But nature is happening in our homes, in our gardens, in our lawns, and on our plates.
TMN: At that point you were writing about other things?
MP: I was an editor at Harper's Magazine, and I began writing a series of essays about what was happening to me in my garden, my woodchuck war, my dad's battle with the neighbors over his front lawn. These kinds of issues became my first book, Second Nature.
I started looking at our relationship to plants and animals, and at drugs, since a lot of drugs are plants that change our consciousness.
TMN: And that shows up in The Botany of Desire?
MP: Yes. When I was working on Botany of Desire, I visited industrial farms in Idaho to see how industrial agriculture works, and I was shocked. I was absolutely floored by these vast monocultures, the amount of pesticides that are used, the fact that the farmers are afraid to go into their fields for five days after they spray for fungus because they know how neurotoxic this stuff is.
more
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/80868/
The book
http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781594201455?&PID=32513
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson~
The Tie-Dye Lady is HOT!!!
~Ralph Waldo Emerson~
The Tie-Dye Lady is HOT!!!
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~Ralph Waldo Emerson~
The Tie-Dye Lady is HOT!!!
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")
i read this roach, and i was searching myself for a response the other day, but failed to come up with anything of substance.
i think the problem is i just flat out agree.
i would argue that a reversion to "sustainable", labor based, agriculture is the only hope for an equitable future for mankind.
the unfortunate reality is that this probably necessitates a severe reduction in global population.
A great movie that relates to this (not overpopulation, though) is Cuba: The Power of Community or "How Cuba Surived Peak Oil".
I found it on a torrent, and it attempts to analyze how, through the fall of its major trade partner - the Soviet Union - Cuba was forced to prematurely undergo the oncomming global reality of "Peak Oil".
The effects on transit and agriculture in particular are studied and expounded upon at length in this documentary, as well as, like the title says, an analysis of how the very relationships of "community" itself became of necessary importance in the face of an oil crisis.
The land can not continue to bare the brunt of petrochemical based agriculture. We are almost out of functioning topsoil at a global level.
The world can not continue to be complacent with a reliance on oil as a life support system for its food supply. We are almost out of usable oil.
:(
If I opened it now would you not understand?
The main problem to me is not just the population growth. It the disconnect people in the US have as to how their food ends up in the local mega super market. People just do not see how much oil and natural gas is used in the whole high tech food game.
People need to remember how to grow their own food again, buy local foods and live more simply if we are to survive or we may end up like the dinosaurs.
There just seems to be this miss guided blind trust that a combination of Government and high tech capitalism will save us. It goes for Republicans, Democrats, conservatives and environments.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson~
The Tie-Dye Lady is HOT!!!