In Praise of Wendell Berry, the Original Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan has become unavoidable and it's hard to argue that that's a bad thing. Here he is being interviewed by a Times blogger, and here he is being interviewed by a blogger for Gourmet. And here is In Defense of Food, the book he calls "An Eater's Manifesto," at number 1, top of the pops, on the Times best seller list.

With Pollan getting ink by the barrel and pixels by the billions, Gourmet, in its print edition only, does us the enormous favor of reminding us that before Michael Pollan there was Wendell Berry, who, as an essayist, poet, writer of really good novels, and farmer, has bona fides that Pollan doesn't (not that Pollan claims to have them). Here's an excerpt from Gourmet's story about Berry, which was written by John T. Edge:

... Berry has argued tirelessly for independent communities, small family farms, and local foods. His outlook marries agrarian and environmental ideologies, but he doesn't settle for either. A traditional agrarian values small farms and argues that they are essential to the politcal and social well-being of the nation; Berry claims they are key to our ecological health. Environmentalists often concern themselves with the against-all-odds protetion of wilderness; Berry believes land was meant to be worked by man.

While I'm sure that's not all he believes about land, it's an important point, and what Berry means by it is that land was meant to be worked by man and not by machines, namely huge grain combines. Small is beautiful.

I have a notebook in which I used to jot down quotations from things I was reading. Here are a few from Berry:

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

The Appalachian Group to Save the Land and the People ... What impressed me was the complexity of purpose announced in its name: it proposed to save the land and the people. This seems to me still an inescapable necessity. You really cannot specialize the work of conservation. You cannot save the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land. To save either, you must save both.

Good cooking must be said to begin with good farming.

We have these Wendell Berry books on our shelves: The Gift of Good Land; What Are People For?; A Continuous Harmony; Recollected Essays; Home Economics; Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community; and In the Presence of Fear (all books of essay); and Fidelity: Five Stories; A Place on Earth; The Wild Birds; and Nathan Coulter, all fiction.

Praising Berry doesn't diminish Pollan -- in fact Pollan acknowledges Berry as one of his inspirations. He's well worth checking out.

Michael Pollan Argues That Food Safety is Another Reason to Buy Your Food Locally

If a seemingly innocuous vegetable like spinach makes 200 people around the country sick because it’s contaminated with a deadly strain of E coli, is it better to change the way we produce and distribute food or to employ technology to disinfect food?

In today’s Times Magazine, Michael Pollan argues persuasively for the former. The foundations of his argument are statistics that are eye-opening and insights that, while not new, are worth reiterating. He writes:

… the way we farm and the way we process our food, both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few decades, are endangering our health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.) Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem — chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.

Pollan’s solution is to rely on localized, decentralized food as much as possible. If you buy your meat and vegetables from local producers, you know exactly what you’re getting and where it came from, and you know who is responsible if something goes wrong. A decentralized food supply also means there is less of a chance of something big going wrong – and by big, he includes deliberate contamination by terrorists.

He also points out that when our food supply became industrialized, the government’s response was to regulate. Those regulations are now threatening to put small meat producers out of business.

Essentially it’s the “Small is Beautiful” argument that E.F. Schumacher made years ago. It’s also an issue that consumers can influence simply by their spending decisions. Buy locally produced vegetables, meat, and dairy products. The benefits are many.

Coincidentally, the Times business section today has a column arguing for the one specific solution – irradiation – that Pollan says would be the wrong response. That column is here. Read both, but Pollan is right.

Eating Close to Home

Those of us who think we’d be better off if our sources of food were closer to us should read the latest dispatch from Michael Pollan, who explained in Sunday’s Times Magazine why the Farm Bill about to come before Congress is bad not just for us elitists who can afford to shop at farmers markets for half the year but also for less well-off people looking to make the most out of their food money (and for the country's immigration problems, by the way).

Among many other good points, Pollan says that federal farm subsidies have made it possible for the price of corn-syrup-sweetened soft drinks to fall over the years while the price of real food has risen steeply:

...the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent.

Here’s also a link to a January story in the Times mag whose subtitle should become the slogan of anyone interested in seeing the American way of eating improve: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

In fact just go here and read through the list. Pollan's one of the most important journalists working today.

Listening to Michael Pollan

By luck I was in the car shortly after noon today and heard Leonard Lopate interviewing Michael Pollan about his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. I think Pollan is great, and the interview was worth hearing. You can get the podcast here.

Food, Farms and the Next President

"Dear Mr. President-Elect," is the way Michael Pollan starts his long discussion in the Sunday Times Magazine about how we should change the way we produce and eat our food. It's comprehensive and radical -- in that it gets to the root of the problem -- and indispensible (as is, by the way, the New York Times, in case we've forgotten).

Pollan says the U.S. government should stop subsidizing the growing of crops -- corn, e.g. -- that have caused high rates of obesity and diabetes. He says we should go back to farming a diversity of crops and abandon the monocultures that now dominate our agricultural lands. He points to Wendell Berry's description of the problems created when animals were moved off farms and onto feedlots:

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

He suggests -- and I loved this one -- that a portion of the White House lawn be turned into a vegetable garden.

You can read it here.

Pollan (and Allport) on Diet and Health

Michael Pollan connects health care reform with agriculture and food policy reform in today's Times:

One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

But the economics of health insurance under a new system will change that:

As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it’s much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill.

But these rules may well be about to change — and, when it comes to reforming the American diet and food system, that step alone could be a game changer. Even under the weaker versions of health care reform now on offer, health insurers would be required to take everyone at the same rates, provide a standard level of coverage and keep people on their rolls regardless of their health. Terms like “pre-existing conditions” and “underwriting” would vanish from the health insurance rulebook — and, when they do, the relationship between the health insurance industry and the food industry will undergo a sea change.

And speaking of diet and health, our friend and neighbor Susan Allport was on Leonard Lopate the other day talking about how changes in our diet have led us to consume a greater proportion of omega 6 fats compared to omega 3's, which may help explain many contemporary health problems. The interview was based on an article she wrote for Prevention. You can get links to both the radio show and the article on her website, here.

More Talk About the Well-Being of Our Food

The discussion about Whole Foods’ decision to stop selling live lobsters because of concern for the lobsters’ welfare reached the Times Week in Review section Sunday. Frank Bruni, the Times restaurant reviewer, looked at the issue and, significantly, I thought, drew a distinction between concern for the welfare of luxury animals like lobsters and the geese that produce foie gras, and the much vaster number of animals that provide our daily chicken breasts and hamburgers:

Are the calls for fundamental changes in the mass production of food simply elitist, the privilege of people wealthy enough to pay more at the checkout counter? Does fretting about ducks give people a pass on chickens? Does considering the lobster allow seafood lovers to disregard the tuna?

"Foie gras and lobster are not at the heart of the real tough issues of animal welfare, which are feed lots and pigs and cattle and chickens and how billions of animals are treated," said Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which traces the messy back stories of our meals. "On the other hand, the fact that we're having this conversation at all — that we're talking about ethics in relation to what we're eating every day — strikes me as a very healthy thing," he said last week. …

"People look at the lobster and try to imagine what its experience would be like, but they don't look at a package of chicken breasts and imagine what the experience would be like," said Jay Weinstein, a Manhattan caterer whose book "The Ethical Gourmet" was published this month. "It's because they're closer to the final step of the killing."

While the lives of "free-range" chickens are hardly ideal, the lives of other chickens are even worse, Mr. Weinstein said. The birds' feet are lacerated by the wire they are forced to stand on, while their beaks are clipped so they can't peck at each other in the tight quarters they occupy. He questioned whether any of that was less offensive than the force feeding of ducks.

Bruni discusses shellfish and fish, and quotes chef David Pasternak (who was profiled memorably last year in The New Yorker) as saying that he can tell from the quality of a fish’s flesh how it was treated while and after it was caught. But there are real distinctions among animals that probably should affect our attitudes about how they are treated and eaten, Bruni and the people he quotes argue:

Ample scientific evidence suggests that various creatures have varying levels of consciousness. "There really is a difference between the sentience of an oyster and the sentience of a lobster and the sentience of a cat," Mr. Pollan said. "These lines really can be drawn."

Some weeks ago I heard Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, being interviewed on WNYC by Leonard Lopate. Schlosser pointed out that the mass alienation from our food and its sources is a relatively new thing, measured only in decades. Until a century ago or less, people were much more likely than we are to know where their food came from. Schlosser’s point was that the more you know about your food and its source, the more likely you are to be concerned with how it was raised and treated.

We may roll our eyes and snicker at the worry over lobsters and geese and chickens, but if we do, in the grand scheme of things, we’re the ones who are out of touch.

Organic and Sustainable Organic: Eat Locally

I somehow missed Michael Pollan’s explanation, in Sunday’s Times Magazine, of why Wal-Mart’s decision to sell cheap organic food is generally a bad thing, but two other blogs – Bootstrap Analysis and Gristmill – didn’t. Here’s the crux of his argument:

Assuming that it's possible at all, how exactly would Wal-Mart get the price of organic food down to a level just 10 percent higher than that of its everyday food? To do so would virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart's version of cheap organic food is not sustainable, at least not in any meaningful sense of that word. To index the price of organic to the price of conventional is to give up, right from the start, on the idea, once enshrined in the organic movement, that food should be priced not high or low but responsibly. As the organic movement has long maintained, cheap industrial food is cheap only because the real costs of producing it are not reflected in the price at the checkout. Rather, those costs are charged to the environment, in the form of soil depletion and pollution (industrial agriculture is now our biggest polluter); to the public purse, in the form of subsidies to conventional commodity farmers; to the public health, in the form of an epidemic of diabetes and obesity that is expected to cost the economy more than $100 billion per year; and to the welfare of the farm- and food-factory workers, not to mention the well-being of the animals we eat.

Generally bad, but not universally bad. He also discusses how the industrialization of organic farming is likely to lead to reductions of a pervasive pesticide called Atrazine and, for people concerned with the health of coastal waters, particularly the Gulf of Mexico, reductions of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (nitrogen, of course, is the cause of the vast areas made lifeless in summer by hypoxia).

But back to the “generally bad” category: Pollan also makes the point that buying organic produce grown in Mexico or New Zealand or elsewhere is hardly sustainable environmentally because of the transportation involved. You might be getting strawberries without pesticides, and there might be no pesticide residues left in the local soil, but how much fuel did it take to get that strawberry up here?

His piece reminded me that one of the best thing we can do for the environment and definitely the best thing we can do for sustainable agriculture is to eat locally, and if you eat locally it’s easy to eat organic.

Farmers markets are opening soon throughout Connecticut, Westchester, Long Island and New York City (if they haven’t done so already). We’re big fans of the New Canaan Farmers Market, which opens on Saturday. At least three organic farmers sell their stuff there: Riverbank Farm, Shortt’s Farm, and Stones Throw Farm.

So forget industrial agriculture. Eat locally.

On Sustainability

Michael Pollan starts another excellent piece, about the dangerous way we produce our food here in America, in yesterday's Times magazine with a discussion of the word "sustainability":

The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places.

He goes on to tell two stories of unsustainability -- the MRSA staph infection and the die-off of honeybees -- that, after you finish reading, turn out not to be so unexpected after all. Here's his Times piece. Read his other stuff here to see how it all all fits together.

Blight

Michael Pollan is always arguing (plausibly) that the centralization of our food supply makes it easier for pathogens like salmonella and E. coli to spread far and wide. The news over the last eight days that a blight being spread by tomato plants bought as Wal Mart shows that the same thing can happen not just to the consumers but to the food supply itself.

As far as I can tell, my friend and former colleague Bill Cary broke the story a week ago, here. The Times website has it today.

Farmer in Chief?

Can we credit the decision by the Obamas to plant a vegetable garden at the White House to Michael Pollan's Times piece in October, called "Farmer in Chief"? I say yes, and I say it's good news.

Over the Weekend: Don't Feed the Seals a Twinkie and Other Stories

Counting Seals ... An annual count of seals in the northeast took place a few days ago. Estimates are that as many as 3,000 winter in the Sound, and some are now breeding here. Here’s a good account, from the Journal News, which has some stories about dumb people treating the seals as if they were as docile as stuffed toys.

Citizens Summit ... A reminder: the subject of this year’s Long Island Sound Citizens Summit, scheduled for April 8 in Bridgeport, is global warming, which threatens to overwhelm everything that's being done to restore the Sound. Scott Carlin, a professor at C.W. Post, talks about the local implications of global warming here, in Newsday.

Papa Needs a Brand New Boat ... A preservationist from Mystic Seaport is going to Cuba to see if he can restore the Pilar, Hemingway’s boat.

McMansions ... I wonder if people in places like New Canaan and Greenwich will eventually develop a nostalgia for McMansions and try to establish historic districts. New Canaan’s Oenoke Ridge Road would be a likely candidate. I happen to think that on a planet faced with the prospect of global warming, huge, oil-burning houses surrounded by vast plains of lawn that require once-a-week mowing and blowing are immoral. The reviewer in yesterday’s Times of a new book called House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live had some other thoughts on McMansions and the people who live in them:

It would have been interesting to explore the McMansion problem, the design world's correlative to the obesity epidemic. Is there something about a need for status that's overshadowing a need for coziness? Is there a great insecurity about new money that leads to these enormous facades? Is it braggadocio or simply confidence that's expressed in the McMansion's size? Are we building mighty fortresses? Is the divorce rate falling because people can live separate lives in the same house, phoning from one wing to the other to negotiate bedroom visitation?

Wild & Scenic ... People in eastern Connecticut are working to have the Eight Mile River watershed designated a National Wild and Scenic River. The Courant has a good story about it.

Legalize It … The always-interesting Michael Pollan, who wrote about killing your own food in yesterday’s Times magazine, says hunting feels a bit like getting stoned.