Author Michael Pollan stands next to crab trapsfor local fishing at a wharf in Vancouver June 5, 2009JOHN LEHMANN
"By the way," says Michael Pollan, in the middle of a mild-mannered rant against the industrialized food system, "this is delicious."
We're having lunch at Go Fish, a tiny seafood shack on Vancouver's waterfront that serves local, sustainable fish fresh off the boats. Disappointed that we have arrived too early for the day's catch of B.C. spot prawns, Mr. Pollan skips quickly over the oyster tacones and grilled wild salmon on greens, and goes straight for the halibut and chips.
It's reassuring to see the man behind the phrase "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," clearly relishing a basket of deep-fried goodness.
He's in Vancouver on the only Canadian stop of his tour to promote the paperback release of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto , the New York Times bestselling follow up to The Omnivore's Dilemma . In it, Mr. Pollan, who lives in San Francisco, looks at the state of what's on our plates and encourages us to reject processed products in a return to real food. He's also here to attend a fundraiser for the University of British Columbia Farm, currently battling for protection against future condominium development.
All of this takes place just before the release of the documentary Food Inc. The film - which opens June 19 in Toronto and Montreal - points its cameras at the feedlots and chicken processing plants Mr. Pollan described in The Omnivore's Dilemma . When the producers approached him to contribute, Mr. Pollan says it was an easy decision.
"Print only reaches a certain section of our society," he explains. "The best newspapers in the world reach a very tiny percentage, but visual media can access a much wider audience."
There is, he admits, a more visceral reaction to seeing images of factory farms than to simply reading about them: "I think meat eaters will watch this and it will give them pause," he suggests. "Going to feedlots changes the way you eat. Seeing the production of industrialized chicken changes the way you eat. I still eat meat, but I do so in a much more conscious and deliberate way. I am very picky - and I don't eat industrialized meat."
In In Defense of Food , he quotes U.S. writer and farmer Wendell Berry's phrase, "Eating is an agricultural act." Mr. Pollan then takes this notion up a notch to make the very act of putting food in our mouths a political act. "Vote with your fork," he urges, a homily oft-repeated during the course of his Vancouver visit.
"It's very clear that if we are going to have healthy food compete with junk food then there has to be a shift at the policy level," he says. "We subsidize corn and soy - the building blocks of fast food. The corn becomes the animal feed, becomes the high fructose corn syrup. Of the obscure 37 ingredients on the chicken nugget, 20 of them are sourced from corn and the rest is from soy that's been turned into hydrogenated oils and animal feed. It's no wonder it's the cheapest food out there, because we make it so. We have governments who on the one hand rail about the epidemic of obesity and diabetes and on the other we're signing farm bills to subsidize high fructose corn syrup."
He shrugs off the charges of elitism that come with his distaste for McDonald's and others like it. Yes, he says, it costs more money to eat well, "but you have to address that politically. You have to make healthy calories compatible in price with unhealthy calories."
The change in the White House can only be good, he suggests. "[President Barack]Obama connects the dots between the health care crisis on the one hand and the way we grow food and the climate crisis on the other. My sense is that politically we'll get more of him pushing alternative food chains rather than him dismantling what already exists - and maybe that's all we can expect right now. …
"And having the first lady of the U.S. giving her children real food, talking about the importance of cooking, planting a garden - this is really important. We may look back on her garden and consider it one of this burgeoning political movement's most significant moments."
Mr. Pollan believes in growing and buying food locally. The erosion of farmland to development at UBC is but a microcosm of what's happening across the United States, he says. "We're losing something like 16 acres of agricultural land a minute in the U.S.," he says. "And we are going to need this land to feed our cities. The luxury of developing all the land where people live and having the farms thousands of miles away was a luxury underwritten by cheap fossil fuel."
His answer: We should be planting gardens, growing food in pots, supporting our local farmers and shopping as little as possible in the supermarket. We should also, he suggests, be cooking every meal from scratch - and don't be telling him there aren't enough hours in the day.
"The time issue is a hard one," he concedes. "But people have navigated this in the past, cooking several things on a Sunday and freezing them, for example. We find time for things we value and my theme in this book and in all my work is that food is too important to neglect. In the last 10 years we've somehow found two hours [a day]to surf the Internet - where did that time come from?
"If we decide cooking is important to our health and our family life," he says, "we'll find the time to do it. People spend a lot of time waiting for takeout - or watching cooking shows on television. And the ads during all those shows are for fast food - they're not for cooking utensils."
He fosters a particularly deep scorn for food advertising directed at children and the false health or environmental claims of corporate food manufacturers.
Currently, he says, PepsiCo is spinning their Frito-Lay chips as a local product: "They've figured out that potatoes grow somewhere close to someone," he laughs. On hearing about Hellmann's Canadian mayonnaise marketing campaign "Eat real. Eat local," Mr. Pollan snorts derisorily at the absurdity of a processed food jumping on the locavore agenda.
"I think," he says, "that the rule to end all rules should simply be, don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV."