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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONLost In The Supermarket
Michael Pollan On How The Food Industry Has Changed The Way We Eat
The complete text of this selection is available in our print edition.
At mealtimes, most of us pick what sounds good, or what’s quick, or what’s cheap, or maybe what’s good for us. Rarely do we stop to consider where our food comes from, or how our eating habits affect our culture and our environment. In his new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press), journalist Michael Pollan asks what we should eat. How we answer, he says, defines our relationship with the natural world.
Pollan grew up on Long Island in the early sixties, when farms still outnumbered strip malls on the outskirts of New York City. An avid child gardener, he grew tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, peas, and beans in his family’s landscaped suburban yard. At harvest time he’d sell the produce at a little stand to his sole customer, his mother, who was his primary influence when it came to growing food. (His father was, in Pollan’s words, “the great indoorsman,” whose idea of gardening was to stay in the garage tinkering with the irrigation system.)
Pollan’s mother also inspired his love of writing and literature, and by the age of fourteen he was writing for his highschool literary magazine and newspaper. He majored in English at Bennington College in Vermont, where his mentors were novelist John Gardner and author Alan Cheuse — now a book critic on National Public Radio. Believing “writer” wasn’t a realistic career choice, Pollan got a job as an executive editor at Harper’s in 1983. Four years later he became a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and his work has appeared regularly there ever since.
For Pollan, an early proclivity for gardening grew into a lifelong fascination with plants, nature, and food production. His books deal with the intersection of human society and the natural world, from Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (Grove Press) to The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (Random House), which was excerpted in the May 2003 issue of The Sun. What distinguishes Pollan from most other journalists is his willingness to immerse himself in his subject matter. Whether diving for abalone in chilly waters or hunting a feral pig — which he did for his latest book — he likes to get personally, messily involved.
Over his career of more than two decades, Pollan has received numerous journalism awards, including the Humane Society’s Genesis Award and the Global Award for Environmental Journalism for his reporting on genetically modified crops. In 2003 he was appointed the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant leaving the rocky soil of northwestern Connecticut for the grow-anything terrain of northern California. (He now lives just minutes from the Berkeley campus.) I spoke to him in his living room, where artwork by his wife, Judith Belzer, hung on the wall. In person Pollan is energetic and easy to talk to, with a boyish face that belies his fifty-one years. My only regret is that I didn’t get to sample any of his cooking.
Cooper: What was your goal in writing your latest book?
Pollan: To answer the question of what I should eat — for my health, for my karmic well-being, and for my pleasure. There’s a huge amount of confusion right now about what to eat, and people want to be more conscious of what they’re eating, either because of their health or because they care about the natural world and animals. People want to do the right thing. What the right thing is, however, depends on what you value.
Cooper: What is “the omnivore’s dilemma”?
Pollan: It’s the existential predicament we’re in regarding food. Humans need to eat a great many different types of food to get all the nutrients we require. If you look at our teeth, our jaws, and our digestion, you see that we’re designed to eat meat as well as vegetable matter. But deciding what to eat out of all the potential foods available is a complicated process. The world is full of toxins. Not all plants want to be eaten, nor all the parts of each plant. Fruit wants to be eaten as part of the plant’s reproductive strategy. Leaves, no. One bite of some mushrooms will kill you.
Our human ancestors had to navigate this promising and perilous landscape of good things to eat and poisons. As a result, they developed cognitive tools that enabled them to remember how something felt and tasted and what effect it had on them. Many anthropologists and sociologists believe that the size of our brain and its sophistication flow directly from this dilemma of what to eat. Most omnivores are pretty smart. Rats, for example, have complex mechanisms for figuring out what to eat. A cow, on the other hand, eats only one thing, so its skill is not in its brain but in its gut, which can take grass and get every nutrient the animal needs from it. That’s a form of intelligence too; it’s just not sheer brain power. The cow doesn’t have to devote a lot of time to figuring out what to eat: if it’s grass, it’s dinner. Anything else is poison.
As human cultures developed, they established rules about what to eat and how much to eat and what order to eat things in, which helped solve the dilemma. But the cultural tools that once helped us choose our meals are rapidly disappearing. Families used to control what their members ate and pass along learned wisdom in the form of a food culture. Now that’s gone. Most people don’t eat as families. We eat individually, going one-on-one with the food supply, which is how the food industry likes it.
Today we find ourselves in an industrial food environment that is very good at fooling our eating instincts. For example, we’re instinctually drawn to sweetness and repelled by bitterness. Fat tastes good to us and feels good in our mouth. Why should that be? Well, both sugar and fat have very high concentrations of energy, and our human ancestors needed to store up plenty of energy, in case their food supply ran short.
Now McDonald’s pushes our evolutionary buttons by making things very sweet, salty, and fatty. And that’s where we start getting into trouble. Our instincts don’t work in the industrial food environment, because they lead us to eat too much sugar and fat. In a sense, we’re facing the omnivore’s dilemma all over again, only instead of being in a natural landscape, now we live in a landscape of supermarkets and fast-food franchises.
