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What the majority of Americans are eating today is not really food but is instead what [Pollan] calls "edible foodlike substances" created by a $32 billion food marketing machine and food scientists determined to save us from ourselves.

Not-So-Happy Meals

Michael Pollan Speaks Out on How Food and Eating Are Marketed to Consumers

by Betsy Model

or bestselling author Michael Pollan — an editor, writer and academic professor who had spent years writing about food, gardening, ethics and the intersection of all three — it really had become an omnivore's dilemma. This generation's supermarkets and warehouse stores offer American consumers literally thousands of eating options within the confines of just a few aisles, but, Pollan argues, rather than making our lives easier, the very abundance they offer has only made things more complicated. Once consumers take into consideration every item — where the food comes from, its ingredients, its nutritional claims, its actual nutritional content, and whether it is labeled organic, free range or "natural" — what in the world are we supposed to take home for dinner?

Contemplation of those questions, combined with an actual physical quest for answers on where some of our food originates — meat, fish, dairy, produce and grains — led Pollan to chronicle his findings in The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006). The title spent more than seven months on the New York Times bestseller list, but, as Pollan discovered when he toured around the country and listened to what thousands of people had to say — and ask — during personal appearances and radio broadcasts, it easily raised as many questions as it answered. While The Omnivore's Dilemma dealt with the ethical and nutritional issues of what we've been eating, it didn't actually tell us what to, well, eat now.

To that end, Pollan told Sun Monthly, he sat down and wrote In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Like its predecessor, the new title has also had an amazing run on the New York Times bestseller list, and in an effort to take us back to basics, Pollan says, he gave the subtitle yet its own manifesto-ish subtitle: "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants."

In fact, claims Pollan, we only have to think back a couple of generations — before the days of nutritionally enhanced water, microwavable meals and drive-through food chains — to come up with the answers we're looking for. And, he says, our health, our planet and our waistlines will be the better for it.

"If your grandmother wouldn't know what it is you're describing — things like Go-Gurt (low-fat yogurt in a tube) or an ingredient on a side panel that includes the words ‘partially hydrogenated' or includes corn syrup — don't eat it," he recommends. "Chances are your grandmother put butter on the table and cooked with butter, at least before we were told, 30 years ago, that products like Crisco and margarine — made with partially hydrogenated oils — were healthier for us. Oops."

Our grandmothers also probably cooked food — whole foods, Pollan points out, not processed food in a box that has 36 ingredients — and from scratch, with at least something in the meal coming out of the family's garden or barn. These days, he notes, laughing, not so much. What the majority of Americans are eating today, Pollan elaborates, is not really food but is instead what he calls "edible foodlike substances" created by a $32 billion food marketing machine and food scientists determined to save us from ourselves. The curious thing, he adds, is that even as we're being offered 100-calorie packs of cookies, zero-calorie sodas, low-fat cheese and reduced-calorie everything, we are, undisputedly, getting fatter.

There are myriad reasons for the trend toward poor health and expanding waistlines, Pollan muses, but part of it is that we're caught up in food as something other than what it's been for millions of years — sustenance and a reason to gather with others. Instead, we're buying into everything from nutritional claims and the latest diet trends to mass marketing intended to get us to buy, literally, more food.

"I think that part of our problem in America," he shares, "[is] not having a food culture that governs our relationship with food and leaves us vulnerable to the marketing messages that are, of course, to eat all you want 24/7. I mean, Taco Bell is out promoting the ‘fourth meal'! They really are looking for new eating occasions, [and] they're designing food for your car. If there were a food culture [here], there would be something to withstand that. Europeans are disgusted by the idea of eating in the car — it's a real turnoff.

"We are," Pollan continues, "a binge culture. The spectrum we see food on is the health spectrum . . . On one end you eat to live forever, and on the other end you eat to kill yourself!"

So what does Pollan do himself? Simple, he says. What he doesn't grow himself — he and his wife tore out the front lawn of their Berkeley, California, home and put in a substantial vegetable garden surrounded by fruit trees — he buys at the local farmers market or at local farms. When he shops at a grocery store, he shops the perimeter of the store almost exclusively, focusing on foods that need to be kept cold like milk, fish, meats and produce (less processing and preservatives, he points out) and goes into the middle aisles of the store only for spices and paper goods. Things that have enough preservatives in them to not require a refrigerator or freezer, or that have more than five ingredients on the ingredient list, stay put. And, he adds, he actually cooks.

"Remember," Pollan says, laughing, "you're not serving nutrients or edible foodlike substances at the table, you're serving food. Cooking is an important part of the problem — when we turn to fast food and heat-and-serve products — and the solution. When people cook they start buying real food, and when they cook they typically don't cook for just themselves. You're cooking for family or friends, and that means you're going to make sure your family is home when the food is done [laughs], so you're going to organize your time together differently. You're going to talk at the table, and there's a certain civilizing process that goes on: children are going to try whatever you cook, you're not going to cook something different for everybody, and you're going to share the food. Sharing food is an incredibly civilizing, socializing act."

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto was published in January 2008 by Penguin Group.

Michael Pollan

Weirdly enough, corn also helps explain both obesity at home and hunger abroad.

The Cornification of Food

by Michael Pollan

o corn. Big deal. Why does it matter? I want to argue to you that this 10 billion-bushel pile of corn that we're growing in this country is the elephant in the room, in our economy and our society. It explains a great deal about the food system and our whole national eating disorder; it explains the American landscape, and I don't just mean the cornfields but the fast-food strips and animal factories; it explains a raft of environmental problems, including water pollution; it explains much of the crisis in American agriculture, the obesity and diabetes epidemics, and even a good part of the energy crisis. Weirdly enough, corn also helps explain both obesity at home and hunger abroad. This sounds like a kind of monomaniacal fixation on one thing, one factor. It's a cornocentric view of recent American history. But bear with me for a while and see if you aren't convinced.

A couple [of] facts. [Corn is] our biggest crop in dollar value, our biggest legal crop . . . Over the past 30 or 40 years, really since with World War II but intensifying in the 1970s, it has conquered a huge amount of the American landscape. It's actually taken over several whole states. Iowa has essentially been conquered by corn. There is very little of anything else left, including people. It has its own corporations, ADM and Cargill, its own department of the federal government, the USDA, charged with promoting the overproduction of corn and then promoting interesting ways to get rid of the overproduction of corn. It has its own university. Iowa State at Ames is the university of corn. It's taken over our diet, it's taken over the diet of all the animals we eat, and now it has taken over our bodies. We are the people of corn.

To get rid of all this corn, we put it in every conceivable product . . . You should come over and read some of the ingredient labels on these products. We dump it on Third World nations. We loot the treasury to subsidize every single bushel of it. We poison our land and water to grow more of it. We change the genetics of animals so they can better digest it, the salmon and the cow. And now, eyeing a hungry beast that might absorb more of this surplus, we're planning to feed to it our cars in the form of ethanol. And we can talk a little more about whether that's a good idea or not . . .

. . . How did corn become really the greatest winner in the dance of domestication here in America? You know how this works, especially if you read Botany of Desire. Domestic species — plants and animals — coevolved with us, essentially, and the ones that put forth qualities that we like, that gratify our desires and needs, are the ones that get to reproduce the most. And they give up a lot. They give up their independence in exchange for our health. In fact, corn is so implicated in our lives and we in its that if we were to disappear from the planet tomorrow, within three or four years there would be no corn left. Corn would vanish, too.

The reason for that is this husk arrangement. It cannot germinate without us to separate its seeds and spread them. So that's how much it's thrown in its lot with us and we with it. So corn can't live without us. It's still a mystery why it created this very unusual setup of its seeds and this husk, but it certainly served us. It protected the husk. It allowed us to harvest it without shattering. And it was a good deal for us for a long time. It helped us settle this country. In fact, without corn this country would have been very hard to settle. But arguably corn now has the better of us. We are doing more for corn than corn is doing for us, I would argue. Corn is calling the shots.

Excerpted from a talk given in Portland, Oregon, on May 11, 2006, and broadcast on the weekly one-hour public affairs program Alternative Radio. For a complete catalog of their programs, available on CDs, transcripts and MP3 downloads, visit www.alternativeradio.org.