Michael Pollan Breaks Out the Good Stuff

This guy don't mess around with the message. The growing "food movement" isn't about mastication, digestion and elimination. It is a diverse group of organizations and individuals which recognize that the consolidation and corporatization of our food and agricultural sectors over the past fifty or more years is poisoning our environment and killing us.

In the June 10 New York Review of Books, the formidable Pollan gives us a taste (sorry!) of some of the most recent literature from the front lines, and continues his crusade to transform the way we grow, buy and eat our flora and fauna.

Some choice items from the review:

Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history—slightly less than 10 percent—and a smaller amount of their time preparing it: a mere thirty-one minutes a day on average, including clean-up.

Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of food safety scandals opened people’s eyes to the way their food was being produced... mad cow disease...The 1993 deaths of four children in Washington State who had eaten hamburgers from Jack in the Box contaminated with E.coli... the shortsighted practice of routinely administering antibiotics to food animals, not to treat disease but simply to speed their growth and allow them to withstand the filthy and stressful conditions in which they live. 

...the food system consumes about a fifth of the total American use of fossil fuel energy.

...the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers.

Significant social and political costs have resulted from fast food and convenience foods, grazing and snacking instead of sitting down for leisurely meals, watching television during mealtimes instead of conversing—40 percent of Americans watch television during meals...

There is a lot more food for thought (sorry again!) in these pages. I give it four snaps!

BTW: If you haven't read his opus The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, I urge you to do so. It is one of the most gripping and revelatory works of literature I have ever read (sorry Mr. Dickens- it just is).

If this subject grabs your gut (okay, I'm done apologizing) La Vida Locavore is a good one stop shopping blog for food movement related topics. 

 Paul Revere and the Raiders weigh in (Someone please stop me) on the subject: