In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, best-selling author and Berkeley Professor Michael Pollan, takes on our most daily obsession: eating. For Michael Pollan, the turning point came in the fall of 2002, when the Atkins diet reemerged from the ashes of the ’70s to become the country’s hottest slimming regime.
“Overnight, bread, and noodles disappeared,” he recalls. “These are two wholesome foods people have been living on for thousands of years. I realized then just how confused we are about one of the most basic animal functions, which is to simply figure out what to eat.”
The fifty-one-year-old professor at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, who moved here three years ago from Connecticut after serving as a contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and executive editor of Harper’s, was well-poised to take on such a complex issue. In his 2001 best seller, The Botany of Desire, he shone fresh light on the world of plants, revealing how they thrive by adapting to human needs, in essence using us just as much as we use them.
To address what he calls our “national eating disorder,” Pollan had to backtrack. Eating used to be a simple choice: You ate what you grew or hunted, or what was available nearby. But with the advent of industrial farming, processed foods, and the global economy, what we put in our mouths has become a mystery to us: What exactly is on our plates, and where did it come from? In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan examines four types of meals—industrialized, big organic, local, and hunted/gathered/grown—tracking down the plant sources from which even a Chicken McNugget and steak originate. Pollan’s exploration of these food chains—from corporate to organic farms, feedlots to slaughterhouses—reveals a meticulous patience and reverence most likely born of his childhood love of plants. He started gardening at age eight, in small plots along the driveway of his parents’ Long Island home. Later that fascination led him to the last chapter of Botany, which described his experiment with growing genetically-modified Monsanto potatoes. “That was my introduction to industrial versus organic agriculture,” he says. “I began to understand what was at stake in the way we grow food.”
What’s at stake, he says, goes far beyond a slim figure or personal health. Eating more local and organic food could reduce our reliance on fossil fuel and foreign oil. It could even affect our national security. “At the rate we’re losing farmland to development, by the end of this century we’ll be importing almost all of our produce. We may be happy getting computers or clothes from China, but do we really want to get our entire food supply from them?”
Pretty heavy stuff, and you’d expect the expert quoting it to have strict dietary rules of his own. So what does Pollan eat? “I tend to buy organic, shop at farmers markets, and avoid feedlot beef—which I think most people would do if they saw a slaughterhouse. But I am not a food fascist. If I’m at someone’s house, I eat whatever they put in front of me. Certain social values are just as important.” Besides, incremental change is the real key, he says. “If we all made just one good decision a day—whether it’s organic, local, grass-fed meat, or just cooking from scratch—that would have a tremendous effect.”
By Robin Rinaldi
