The Tao of Cheez Whiz

Michael Pollan gets to the root of our national eating disorder.

by Janelle Nanos


June 5, 2006

Few people have contemplated the Twinkie as deeply as Michael Pollan has. His new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, manages to distill the spongy, creamy husk into an "engagement with the natural world." According to Pollan, our willingness to swill carbonated sugar-water even as we abandon pasta and bread is proof that America is in the midst of a national eating disorder.
    He cites diet fads sparked by a single magazine feature and the number of meals Americans now eat in a moving car (twenty percent). Moving from the massive feedlots that house our hamburgers-to-be to theforests of Northern California, where he hunts and gathers a meal of his own, Pollan obsessively searches for the source of the food that ends in our plates, supermarkets and cupholders. He spoke to Nerve about the edible pornography of the Food Network and organic Cocoa Puffs. — Janelle Nanos

One of your main arguments is that not only are we eating unhealthily, but that we're losing the ability to derive pleasure from food.
The food industry is making us fat and giving us diabetes and cardiovascular disease. There are a thousand hospital admissions a day for food-borne illnesses. But yes, [the food industry] robbing us of pleasure as well. I think the $36 billion spent each year on food marketing really confuses people and makes them anxious, whether it's over their weight or getting enough omega-threes or whole grains. It makes you more vulnerable to their message that they have the solution.

Why are we so obsessed with food? Even with the Food Network and fad diets, we've developed a tendency to leave the cooking to someone else, be it a kid at McDonalds or a celebrity chef.
That's a real anomaly. Cooking has become a spectator sport rather than something we all do. It's sort of like pornography — the more you dazzle people with culinary or sexual prowess, the less people want to do it themselves. After a while, they just want to watch. We want the process to do everything but chew and digest the food for us.

This is part of the reason we make so little association between what we're eating and where it comes from. But does ordering organic groceries online and having them delivered to your door really bring us any closer to the food we eat?
Organic shoppers are often just as disconnected, because organic has become so industrialized. You buy that organic asparagus from Argentina, but the jet that that asparagus took to get here has a tremendous environmental footprint. And in what sense should we really say it's organic? Only in the most narrow, legalistic sense of the word. It's certainly not sustainable.

Is the "beyond organic" concept that some of the farmers in your book are living by the next step in the process?
Organic is going to get bigger and more industrialized, especially now that Wal-Mart is making a major push into the market. The organic food chain will be globalized — it will come from China and Mexico and South America. But there will still be interesting, fresh, locally produced food that is trustworthy and nutritious. Buying that kind of food supports many of the values that people think they're supporting when they buy organic: small farmers, preserving the agricultural landscape near our cities, getting food that's fresher and more nutritious. Organic food from China may have started out more nutritious, but by the time it gets here, you have to wonder.

Is "organic" simply becoming a marketing tool used by these companies to reach out to the urban demographic?
I think they see it as a marketing term. In fact. they specifically say so. A Wal-Mart representative said last week in the Times, "This [organic] agriculture is no better or worse than any other." That suggests that to them it's pure marketing, that it has nothing to do with the environment or health.

Why would he say that to a reporter?
Because how do you sell organic Cocoa Puffs without leaving the impression that conventional Cocoa Puffs have something wrong with them? That's the big principle of the American food system and of course it's a lie. It's a useful fiction. Organic is different agriculture. You can show empirically that it's better. If you run both foods through a mass spectrometer, one will have pesticide residue and one will not.

Why do people buy organic? Is it really to shrink the environmental footprint, or is it for more self-centered reasons?
People make a distinction in their minds between their personal health and the health of the environment, but you can't separate those two things. When the environment is sick, you'll be sick. When we put [the industrial weed killer] Atrazine into the environment as we do when we grow corn, it goes into the water, and we all drink it. And yet, as little as point-one part per billion has been shown to chemically emasculate frogs, turning male frogs into hermaphrodites. It's very frightening. In a way, that's why I think it's a good thing that Wal-Mart is getting into organic, because millions of acres of land won't have Atrazine on it.

But you write on your blog that Wal-Mart could also lower the standards for organic foods.
It's a good news/bad news story. They'll democratize organic foods and more people will be able to make those choices. On the other hand, how are they going to get the price down without cutting corners?

Organic and free-range food has always been considered a class-oriented product. Is this going to change?
Organic food has always been elitist food and there are people who haven't ever been able to afford it, there's no question about that. But people can afford to spend more money on food than they spend now. It's a matter of priority as much affordability for most of us. We simply don't value food enough to spend what we spend on clothing or entertainment or electronics.

Some of my favorite scenes in the book are you sitting down with your family discussing your meals. Should Americans reclaim the dinner table?
The family dinner has been destroyed by food marketing that encourages us to eat in front of the television or in our cars. One-fifth of American meals are now eaten in the car. There's a real effort on the part of the food industry to dismantle the family dinner because it gets in the way of selling us more food. They want each person getting their own microwavable entrée and eating all day long, not just at mealtime. The slow-food movement is trying to rebuild the food culture and remind us of the pleasures of eating as a celebration of social life.

So there is some progress being made.
I don't think people are satisfied with this fast-food nation. Its pleasures are fleeting. It's like eating a Big Mac. The first bite is satisfying, because it's been engineered to give you very specific pleasures, but it doesn't last. By the time you've finished, you feel more bad than good. There's scum of grease in your mouth and you feel full but not satisfied. And there are such better pleasures to be had from food. But this fast-food nation is only sixty years old. It's an experiment, and for many people it's not working.  n°

©2006 Janelle Nanos and Nerve.com