In Defense of Food | Michael Pollan | Talks at Google

hi everyone and welcome to today's authors at Google event it's a great pleasure to have Michael Pollan with us today ever since this program started back in the fall of 2005 people have been writing to me and asking me when are you gonna get that guy who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma when are you gonna get the guy who wrote the botany of desire to come in and like I'm working on it and working on it and so here he is and as you know probably the least in my mind the most requested author we've had over the years old-- keep this relatively short Michael is the the night professor of science and environmental journalism at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and he is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine where I'm sure most of you have encountered his work in the past and where he most recently wrote about factory farms he's the author of five books including the botany of desire The Omnivore's Dilemma and most recently in defense of food which he'll be speaking about today Michael will be speaking for a little bit and then taking questions from the audience if you do have a question please make sure to line up over at the microphone there once the Q&A session begins after the event Michael will be sticking around to sign books for anyone who's interested so with that please join me in welcoming Michael Pollan to Google thank you very much thank you Rick it's wonderful to be here and thank you all for coming this afternoon I'm going to talk a little bit about this book and when I came to write it and what I learned in the process of reporting it but it would be helpful for me to know how many people in this room have read Omnivore's Dilemma or some of Omnivore's Dilemma oh my god okay good that saves me some time well one of the reasons I wrote this book because I was a little concerned for your welfare people who read that book found that in fact their dilemma wasn't solved it was deepened in some ways the dilemma that is about what we should eat if we're concerned both about the environment and about our own health and I kept running into people after publishing that book who would tell me they'd come up to me and say I've read half of your book and I had to stop and that's not you know music to an author's ear believe me you we know and I would say wait didn't get to the good part when I shoot the boar you know it's keep going I say why did you stop and they say well every time I turn the page there's something I can't eat anymore and I'm afraid if I get to the end I'll starve that there'll be nothing left that I feel good about eating so I thought it would be useful to write a book that was a lot more about solutions and that might actually kind of be the Omnivore's solution and the question that so many people had was really a question about health how should you eat if you're concerned about health we all understand instinctively and also we read in the media that you know food does connect to health and indeed we what will kill most of us our chronic diseases that are related to diet heart disease diabetes obesity several types of cancer and so people are very confused on that one point and that's the point I decided to bore in on on this book and I went uh researching well what do we really know what can we say with confidence what is the state of play in the science about the links between what we eat and what happens to our bodies the deeper I got into it I was a little disappointed I guess that the science wasn't better than I thought we actually don't know a lot about the links between diet and health and that's one of the reasons that the that the the best advice that you hear has been changing from time to time and it's one of the reasons that I think people become so perplexed the science is a little sketchy but I realize and I'll talk a little bit about sketchy science but I also realized that it was a the way we were looking at food which is to say this pseudo scientific way we all look at food that was really making our lives difficult and not helping our help and I call this way of looking nutritionism and I want to talk a little bit about nutrition ISM which I think has is is a good name for the ideology that organizes our thinking about food now an ideology is it's a kind of it's an interesting thing it's the set of ideas and assumptions that organize your experience of something your understanding of something usually without you being aware of it at all okay it's kind of deep its deep-seated set of premises that you don't even you know consider question criticized because they just seem so obvious so let me let me walk you through the four premises that I think define nutritionism and you can tell me if this doesn't characterize the typical American way of thinking about food today and perhaps your own way of looking about food today and then I'll try to get you to expunge it from your brains and replace it with something that I think will be healthier and happier okay the first premise of nutritionism is that the important thing about any food is the nutrients it contains that food is essentially the sum of its nutrient parts so that when you're thinking about eating a steak it's really a matter of saturated fat and protein and if you walk through the supermarket today you will be kind of amazed to see you know yeah you can still find cereal on the label or yogurt but look at all the other biochemistry that is bad in the store you know it the vocabulary of food is about cholesterol and fiber and phytochemicals and antioxidants and we all have this this nutrient vocabulary knocking around in our heads this is very peculiar where else in your life your everyday life not your professional life do you have so many scientific terms in your head so that's the first premise that nutrient sir would matters food is delivered is basically delivery systems for nutrients premise number two if nutrients are what matters in food and nutrients are invisible to all except the the nutrition scientist with his or her microscope if you can't see a nutrient if you can't taste a nutrient if you can't smell a nutrient then you need experts to tell you how to eat right as soon as you enshrine the nutrient is the important thing and since we don't we don't have a sensory experience of nutrients suddenly you need experts you need journalists you need doctors you need nutritionists you need scientists to tell you how to eat it's a little like a religion right if you have a religion where the important thing is invisible is it is an abstract you know deity to whom we no longer communicate directly we our relationship to that deity must be mediated by a priesthood and today we have a food priesthood that basically tells us how to eat so that's premise number two we need experts in order to eat third premise like a great many other isms ideologies nutritionism divides the world into good and evil so at any given time in our dietary history there is a satanic nutrient we are trying to drive from the food supply today it's the trans fat for a long time it was saturated fats and then and but if you go back further in history it's very interesting to see that the role assigned to the evil nutrient is constantly changing you go back a hundred years to that this moment of food fad ism characterized by John Harvey Kellogg and horace fletcher these were the great food experts of the turn of the last century had the sanitarium at Battle Creek Michigan where all the elites of their times you know Henry Ford William James Henry James they would go there to be treated for their food issues and and very bizarre Horace Fletcher believed you had to you had to chew every bite a hundred times and that that was the key to health and they wrote these special rousing chewing songs to to inspire people because try chewing something a hundred times it takes a really long time you will lose weight because you're not doing anything else and they had these hourly yogurt enemas for people they had and it was just bizarre food practices and it was considered like state-of-the-art science at the time the great nutritional evil was protein they felt protein which now of course is a nutritional good that it was the worst thing for you and ruin your life so in fact that's why we have breakfast cereal Kellogg became Kellogg of Kellogg's cereal and cereal was invented to push protein off of the out of the morning meal and enshrine the carbohydrate okay so the identity of the evil changes and then on the other side if you have an evil nutrient you need a good nutrient okay it's kind of like the Cold War so there is a there's a good nutrient and the identity of that is always changing what's the good nutrient 'day well it's the omega-3 fatty acid right I mean that is the blessed nutrient you get enough of that you're going to be happy you're going to not have heart disease you're going to live forever and there are other good nutrients well protein is kind of coming back carbohydrates are going out they're kind of evil again and fiber of course has had a nice long run as a blessed nutrient so we've had you know so this is how we divide the world and if we get enough the key to health is getting enough of the good nutrients and avoiding enough of the bad nutrients and then everything will be fine and it's kind of a zero-sum game fourth premise of nutrition is not may not seem controversial to you fourth premise of nutritionism and and perhaps this is the weirdest but we take this for granted that the whole point of eating is health that it's what it's about it's what's at stake when we eat it's all about health now this is a very American idea it's not held by a lot of people elsewhere in the world historically it hasn't been held by a lot of people people have eaten for a great many other reasons besides an obsession with their health they eat for pleasure they eat for community for family what happens around the table very very important reason to eat they eat for ritual purposes there's always been you know religious reasons we eat this and it's part of our religious practice they eat for to express their identity every food culture has a set of taboos where the people who don't eat this we don't eat pork or we don't eat meat so identity is a very important reason to eat all these other reasons for eating are equally legitimate to this single-minded obsession with health and our obsession with health our reduction of eating this incredibly rich interesting experience that engages us with the natural world that engages us with other people to narrow it down to that you know this this this this aperture of this obsession with health it hasn't made us any healthier we are this is what I call the American paradox you know you've heard the French paradox these people who eat all the supposedly lethal food all the saturated fat and triple creme cheese is in foie gras and red wine and lo and behold they have less heart disease than we are they live than than we do they live longer than we are they're skinnier than we are and like we scratch our heads what's wrong here what's wrong with this picture well there is something called the American paradox and that is a people who are very concerned about their nutritional health whose nutritional health is lousy that is a paradox we are becoming we are on our way to becoming a nation of orthorexia orthorexia is a relatively new eating disorder characterized by an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating now think do you know people who have this there are a great number of them doctors report they're showing up in their offices now nutritionism this way of looking at food um I could I could deal with it even though it does rune many many otherwise perfectly good meals I could deal with it if it worked if this narrow pseudo-scientific way of looking at food made us healthier prolonged our life okay we should accept it but all the evidence points to the fact it has done no such thing that for the period in which nutritionism has held sway in this country which I date to the 70s our nutritional health has gotten worse I'll give you one I'll give you a couple examples the first is that for nutritionism to work the science on which its base the science of nutrients would have to be really solid is it well over and over again we have found that reducing foods to their nutrient parts doesn't work so that every time we think we found the really important nutrient the thing in the carrot that makes carrots a healthy food because we do know that if you eat vegetables you will be healthier you will have some protection against cancer you will live longer if you - you know people who eat a pound of vegetables a day live a lot longer than people who don't so this what we all know so we look at the carrot and we want to figure out what is it about the carrot let's find the secret so we can just abstract the secrets skip the carrots and for a long time we thought it was beta-carotene very important antioxidant in the carrot so we took the beta-carotene out of the carrot and we made supplements and we gave them to people and then we looked at what happened nothing happened they didn't work in fact in certain populations populations of of heavy drinkers they got more cancer on these supplements than less there is something going on in a carrot that is more complex than this nutrient that we've isolated this reductive way of looking at carrot isn't right we don't know why there are 49 other carotenes maybe it's those maybe it's a combination of carotenes maybe a carrot is a really complex system not just a collection of nutrients maybe it's the fiber that you ingest with the beta carotene that that serves the antioxidant as it passes through your gut nobody knows the point is that we have the scientists have not yet plumbed the depths of the mystery of a carrot we do not know what's going on deep in the soul of a carrot on the other side of the food chain in our bodies okay there are two ends to the food chain do we understand digestion what happens when we break down complex foods into supposedly simple chemicals no we're starting to but we haven't gotten there yet give you just one fact you're you have as many neurons in your digestive tract as you have in your spinal column what are they thinking why do you need brain cells in your stomach this is not well understood at all we'll figure it out eventually but we haven't yet so the the there there's a there's a fundamental mystery at both ends of the food chain and to to hear to listen to a scientist in nutrition science is some study telling you this is the key to health and long life get this nutrient don't get that you can't believe it yet it simply isn't true and there are a lot of reasons that I go into in the book as to why the science should not be true now I'm not anti science I think we need to do this work I think the scientists need to keep this vocabulary in their head reductive science is very powerful you need you need to isolate variables in order to test them but it's a young science to be charitable nutrition science in my view is sort of where surgery was in the year 1650 interesting fascinating to watch but do you really want them operating on you yet I think I'll wait for the anesthetic I think I'll wait for the antiseptic so let them do this work in the meantime though we can clear our minds of this vocabulary people have eaten very well for thousands of years before they knew what an antioxidant was and they can do it again so if we cannot oh the other and the other important test of nutritionism I need to talk briefly about is so I want to leave plenty of time for your questions the great test case was the low-fat campaign that begins in 1970s and it's just now beginning to peter out because the science is discovered it actually was not very sound the low-fat campaign in a way was uh to the ideology of nutritionism what the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism okay I know that's a rather large statement to make and rather dismissive of the low-fat campaign which has been the prevailing nutritionists wisdom of our age but the low-fat campaign didn't work you can you can look at when it begins around 1980 and discover gee that's exactly when the obesity epidemic begins how is it that we got so fat on this low-fat campaign well there is a couple explanations one is that maybe fat was not the great dietary evil we were told it was and indeed we are learning that fat is a very important nutrient that they're good and bad fats you can't demonize all fat and that there are fats like omega-3 fatty acids that we need and that 70% of our brain cells are fat it is the equivalent of silicon in our brains okay I don't know what it does what silicon does but it helps hold the cell you know better than I but it holds the cells up it is that it's the it's the membrane it's the permeable membrane and you need fat to think you need fat for visual acuity you need fat that's not evil so one one reason it didn't work is that we were wrong about fat and we should have made distinction the other reason it didn't work though is that this nutritionism this way of thinking about food led people down a path of self delusion such that any product labeled no fat was blessed because it didn't have the evil nutrient so you have something called the snack Wells phenomenon do people remember snack Wells you still find them in the supermarket now they're kind of you know crouched in the corner but they used to have whole aisles to themselves this this brand of you know junk food to be uncharitable but you know snacks and cookies that had no fad in it and you know Gino fat you know I could have one of these but hey it's health food I'm gonna have a whole box so people ended up gorging on refined carbohydrates because they didn't have the evil nutrient in it and our low-fat diet was by definition almost a high carbohydrate diet and that's how we got fat we switched we didn't switch but we added refined carbohydrates to our diet about 300 calories per person per day additional eating since 1980 and that is why the average American male or female is 12 pounds heavier today than they were in 1980 and that's why we have our epidemic of type 2 diabetes and all the other health problems associated with overeating so we have the low fat campaign to thank for that and and the ultimate case of that of course and this is what I think we're deserved an apology for from the public health community that pushed us down this path is the case of butter a great part of this low-fat campaign was get off of animal fats so I growing up my mother brought out the stick margarine because she had been influenced by this by this public health message by the government by the food pyramids and by the scientist saying vegetable oils way to go don't eat animal fats so eat margarine not butter now it turns out that the way we made vegetable oil solid at room temperature was by firing hydrogen into it and hydrogenating these oils which happened to create something a kind of fad called trans fats trans fats we now know are really lethal much worse for you than saturated fats they're responsible for a hundred thousand cases deaths due to heart disease every year so we took people off a possibly mildly unhealthy animal fat called saturated fats and we put them on what turned out to be a lethal fad called trans fats and my mother the whole time she was giving us stick margarine said I know one day they're going to figure out that butter is better for you than margarine and we always laughed we thought you know okay mom but she was right but why didn't she trust her instincts because nutritionism had undermined her instincts because we've been told X we should listen to experts about how to eat because the science said butter is bad even though people have been successful eating butter for about eight or ten thousand years but there was something better and newer so what I'm suggesting is that right now and until the science gets a lot better the scientist cannot guide us in our eating decisions so the question then becomes who can guide us in our aiding decisions it's not me you don't want a journalist telling you how to eat either so I went looking though for my own guidance and I I gave a lot of thought to well how have people navigated this this question of being an omnivore of all these different foods some of which are really lethal in the past and of course we have had guides before science is not our only guide to the natural world or to our biology we also have this wonderful set of tools we call culture and culture has been greatly undervalued in the era of science but still I believe is a repository of terrific wisdom now culture and food let me take you back to a state of nature you know countless eons ago and to give you in a sense of how culture helps you navigate a food decision way back when your distant ancestors were in the state of nature they are omnivores they eat lots of different things they're not they don't have their eating decisions program by genes the way cows do you know if it's grass its food if it's not I don't eat it or koala bears if it's eucalyptus leaves it's lunch otherwise I don't know what it is so they have this they're hardwired and it's really easy for them to eat and they have really small brains as a result big stomachs small brains we go the other way we have a rather small digestive system but really big brains to help us because you need a lot of cognitive equipment to sort out this very interesting risky landscape so you're in your band of you know of fellow humans in the state of nature somebody bends down picks up a mushroom taste it keels over and dies the other humans say to themselves we've got to remember this we need some kind of mnemonic device this mushroom is really bad for you what can we do well we have this thing called language you know we're using it right now we're and it's working why don't we give it a name a really memorable name good idea let's call it hmm let's call it the death cap who would eat a mushroom called the death cap and so they named that mushroom the death cap and for countless generations since then people have stayed away from the deaf cap people who knew the language stayed away from the death cap so this is you know in a proto form this is how culture helps us it helps us remember we learn from the trial and error of our ancestors what to eat and cultural wisdom is encoded in cuisines you know the combinations of food the fact that in Central America people eat beans with with corn it just so happens it gives you the exact combination of amino acids you need to have a complete protein that was a kind of wisdom encoded in culture culture is cuisines also culture is what your mother told you culture is the wisdom passed down through generations that you know you don't have dessert before a meal you have a big breakfast you eat this with that not with that so this is you know what we've had for a long time and I think we can recover it so the second part of this but the last part of this book is really an attempt to offer some distilled cultural wisdom tradition in food is not just hoary old conventions okay it's the wisdom of the tribe and so what I try to do is is develop some of that my advice for eating comes down to seven words I give away on the cover of this book eat food not too much mostly plants it was a little alarming when I realized I could boil down everything I learned in two years to seven words and I was a little afraid to tell my publisher it's going to be a really short book but as it turned out you know it's a little complicated to figure out what is food how do you distinguish food from the edible food-like substances that increasingly are filling the grocery store and I spent 14 pages defining food this is something that did not need to be done a hundred years ago but the fact is so I have a set of rules in this book that that should help you when you go to the supermarket or at a restaurant to distinguish the food from the edible food-like substances so for example I think one of my rules is and this is very much rooted in culture don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food now your great grandmother may not be around she may or may not have been a good cook but just imagine her with you when you're rolling down the aisle at the Safeway okay and and she picks up or you pick up this box of go-gurt portable yogurt tubes and she takes out of the box there's lots of packaging she removes this plastic cylinder soft plastic feels a little like toothpaste and she looks at it in like how do you would get this in your body and then she looks at the and she looks at the ingredients and that yogurts a very simple food it's milk with a little bit of bacteria voila you have yogurt but there are 15 other ingredients in that go-gurt portably what are those things she can't recognize any of those chemicals you can't recognize any of them your first grader can't pronounce them so that's not food that's not food Sam goes you know when she picks up that honey nut cheerios cereal bar with the layer of synthetic milk so you don't have to pour milk on it he just can eat it in the car you know she doesn't recognize that milk is not doesn't come in solid form unless it's cheese so that's one rule and there's a series of other rules that are equally you know dumb but they're they're really algorithms to help you and if you run these algorithms you will find yourself gravitating more towards food and away from edible food-like substances another very simple one is shop the perimeter of the grocery store and stay out of the middle the perimeter happens to be where all the food that has been least fiddled with in the last hundred years still resides talking about fresh fruits and produce meat fish dairy products now there is the yogurt the go-gurt is in there but a couple of snuck in but by and large that is the real food and the other stuff is in the middle the stuff that's been heavily processed the reason for that is makes good sense the stuff along the edge is perishable it does what all food should do which is to say rot eventually and so it needs to be replenished a lot and so you want to be near the walls and the doors and the truck you know the loading dock and all that kind of stuff the stuff in the middle lasts forever you know I have I have a Twinkie on my shelf in my office that I bought as a prop for a talk two years ago and while I'm there on the phone you know just kind of listening to someone talk every now and I reach over and give it a squeeze and it's as soft as the day I bought it two years ago now why is that well what is wrought rod is the other creatures we share this planet with the the molds the bacteria the insects the rodents taking an interest in our food and going after it making a play for it the molds are not interested in that Twinkie why because they're not stupid there's nothing there's nothing of nutritional value there so that is another rule don't eat anything that won't eventually rot that's a very good rule of thumb the food and the food that's most perishable is probably the most nutritious and so that's another and there's a whole series you know don't eat foods that are more than five ingredients that have ingredients you can't pronounce that have high fructose corn syrup in them not because high fructose corn syrup is necessarily any worse for you than sugar but because it's a marker of a highly processed food and and because I mean do you know any chefs or home cooks who cook with high fructose corn syrup you know it's no it's strictly a tool of the food scientist at you know General Mills or somewhere like that so avoid that if you can and best of all get out of the supermarket you know if you shop at the farmers market that's all food your great-grandmother will recognize everything at the farmers market I mean there may be some cultural differences that you may not recognize certain fruits or vegetables but basically that's all food you can't go wrong there you can't go wrong joining a CSA subscribing to a farm and getting a box of produce every week you know and it's you know it really does come down to eating real food and also though I learned that it's not just the content of our diets that's important it is also the form it is the manners with which we surround our eating and that gets to the next point not too much you know it's not enough to tell people eat less nobody really understands that what's less what's more but what I did was look at how other cultures navigate abundance because we're not the first people in history to have to deal with the fact that maybe there's too much food around and it's all very tempting so and cultures have very interesting rules for this to make sure that people don't eat too much one is small portions you know part of the French paradox which you know could be about the fact the nutrients but it could also be that they have small plates you know if you go to go to Paris and look at the size of the plates they're really small the French you know think have a real taboo on on snacking eating in the car they think is disgusting we eat a fifth of our food in the car today so there are manners that surround food that are that are almost as important as what we eat another rule of abundance in Okinawa they have a saying called hara hachi boo I'm sure I'm mangling the pronunciation basically it means eat until you're 80% full that's it what a weird idea I mean how would you know it's 80% unless you went all the way and doubled back again but so you do that once and see but but the very idea of of stopping before you're completely stuffed is downright unamerican if you ask Americans and psychologists have done this how do you know when it's time to stop eating they'll tell you well when the plates empty when the bags empty when the TV show is over I mean it's always some external visual cue that we use to regulate our appetite which leaves us vulnerable to whoever's designing the portion size whoever's advertising the food on TV whatever you know other people you know rather than listening to these signals we're getting from our bodies and part of the problem with Americans is we eat so fast and we are the fastest eaters on the planet just about that there's no time it takes 20 minutes for those brain cells in the gut to tell the brain cells up here you're full stop and if you finish your meal in 10 minutes that feedback mechanism isn't happening so one of the other tips is eat slowly and don't eat alone you know if you can't eat with other people when we eat socially we tend to slow down and we have time to get those visual signals so I have a whole lot of you know kind of rules of thumb algorithms for for eating in a way that will help you to eat less without even being aware of it I also advise you know don't get your your fuel where your car does don't buy food at the gas station that's all right edible food-like substances except maybe for the milk gas stations have become processed corn stations you know there's high fructose corn syrup inside for you and there's ethanol outside for your car get off that you don't want to be on the same food chain as your car and you know so I've got you know a whole bunch of those rules and and the basic idea though is to take back control over our eating from the corporation's we have allowed to cook for because that's really what's happened in the last 50 years you know 50% of our food dollars go to food prepared outside the home in the interest of convenience in the interest of the seductions of food science we are letting large corporations cook food for us and we have learned and we see it reflected in the pub the state of our public health that they don't cook very well and your by the way your food service is an exception in this rule I had a very nice lunch and a truly memorable cookie but we need to start cooking again and that's a very radical idea cooking and gardening have become subversive acts in this culture right we outsource those things to other people I'm suggesting that we've given up a lot by doing that and that we need to rediscover cooking because if you're going to shop the periphery of the store if you're going to shop at the farmers market none of this stuff is microwavable you're going to have to do something with it you have to cook it it's not really hard and it doesn't really take as long as you think I think we've been kind of bamboozled into thinking cooking is really complex and heroic and you have to be an artist because we watch these heroic chefs and it's daunting and you know we say we don't have time but we do have time to watch cooking shows so even if we took that time and we've also you know you will hear people say I don't have time to cook but it really pays to think well is that really true I mean we have found as a culture all of us you know have found two hours a day for the Internet in the last 10 years or seven years where did we get those two hours well some of them you know some of us are stealing it from our employers that seems clear then you guys probably know the exact numbers of how many people are doing that at work but we took it a little bit from television and we took it from the family meal and we took it from cooking and I'm saying we should give back some of it to cooking but it's too important and meals are too important to outsource it corporations will always cook with lots of salt sugar and fat why because we are hardwired to like those tastes and for good reasons in the state of nature they're hard to find and really important and full of energy but now they're really cheap in our economy and it's the easiest way for for a food manufacturer to seduce us and so they load it up and the fact is those nutrients are making us very sick so you want to you know salt your own food sweeten your own food fatten your own food and you'll do a much better job of it even if you don't know how to cook so it really is about taking back control and the beauty of it is we have choices today that didn't exist 30 or 40 years ago we are not dependent on the manufacturers we're not dependent on the Safeway we have beautiful farmers markets we have CSAs we have you know there is this movement rising today of alternative food local food it's vibrant it's the fastest growing corner of the food economy so that this book which I where I really do suggest people get out of the supermarket focus on where their food comes from buy well grown food you know grown by good farmers because we know that food is more nutritious now we've proven it this would have been the manifesto of a complete crackpot 40 years ago you would have had to be one of those health nuts who goes back to the land grows their own food goes off the grid now you can leave the Western diet without leaving civilization and eat better and enjoy it more too because pleasure is a very important part of this we should be eating for pleasure we should be eating for community and if we do that eat real food for those reasons health will follow it will be a mere by-product it will be given so I'm going to leave it there and I would love to answer your questions we've got a microphone set up there so if you've got a question so people in other locations can hear you please step up to the microphone thank you thank you very much somebody did their homework oh yes mister boland first of all thank you for coming out to Google to bring up the point you just mentioned about you used to be you'd have to be a health nut 40 years ago to advocate these things how would how how widespread are these ideas right now and what can we do to further a counter the idea that it's just the province of the wealthy and the elite to shopping at farmer's markets and well I think you raise a really good problem the fact is in this country today to eat the way I'm suggesting which is to say real food fresh local organic costs more at least 20% more and there are people who can't afford it why is that well there are a lot of reasons one is that it's still a new market and as it grows if those of us who can't afford to spend more on food did so this market would grow and prices would come down the problem with organic food now is a shortage of supply there is incredible demand it takes three years to convert a farm to organic so the supply hasn't caught up not that it will ever get as cheap as industrial food because industrial food has a lot of false economies in it right the real cost of a 99-cent double cheeseburger and McDonald's have been externalized to the environment to the suffering these animals to the to the public health system but it will get cheaper as more people do it the problem is in this country that we're not paying the real price of food we are subsidizing certain kinds of calories with our agricultural policies and not others with the result what we subsidize are the big four grain crops we subsidize corn and soy that is why when you go to the supermarket if you've got a dollar to spend and let's say you're on food stamps or have a really tight budget you're buying calories you know make no mistake you're buying calories to keep your family going the rational decision given the set of rules we've set up is to spend that dollar in the middle of the supermarket where the processed food is because you can get 1250 calories with a dollar they're buying chips or cookies or soda take the same dollar to the fresh produce section and you can only buy 250 calories why well we do very little to support the carrot grower the broccoli grow so we've kind of fixed the system in favor of processed food we subsidize high fructose corn syrup in this country we subsidize hydrogenated soy oil in this country and we do not subsidize fresh produce so one of the things we have to do to make this more accessible is grow the market the other has changed the rules of the food game and reward people for growing real food rather than these industrial raw materials they're growing today there was a wonderful op-ed piece in The Times on Saturday from a farmer saying he was growing fresh organic produce in Minnesota and he was doing so well and it was such a man that he rented some land from a neighbor and that land happened to be subsidized corn and soy land well as it happens there's a rule attached to that land that if you've ever taken subsidies to grow corn and soy that land cannot be used to grow actual food it's illegal and he had to pay a fine of eighty three hundred dollars why is that well because the produce growers in California insisted on such a rule as the cost of their sitting still for the corn and soy subsidies because they want a monopoly on fresh produce so you see we need to change the rules to make healthy food more accessible I think that's the first thing but for those of us who can afford to vote with our Forks we should vote with our Forks we should spend more money we don't spend enough money on food it's that simple when one of my tips is pay more and eat less we spend nine point five percent of our income on food this is less than any people in history less than any people in the rest of the world the French and Italians of a higher standard of living than we do they spend between fifteen and seventeen percent of their money on food I think we have you know we have to value food and and and feel good about spending more for high-quality food and then take care of the people who can't afford to hi thanks for coming sure so we've been talking a lot about fresh produce and it seems like it's pretty easy I mean at least for us we're fortunate and who can afford it to get these at the farmers market especially where we live in everything but what about stuff like milk and meat where all these animals are pumped full of hormones how do we know the cheese and the milk and you know the meat that we're getting is organic or it's not yeah well animal protein is tricky you know when you're buying if you're buying milk and you buy organic milk or are GBH free milk you'll know that those cows have not been shot up with growth hormone and that is a good thing we have too many hormones too much estrogen in our environment we're getting it from plastics we're getting it from the food and it's it's it's one of the reasons why girls are going through puberty about two out of two years to ours two years earlier than they did just a few years ago so it's very important to reduce our hormone consumption also you know in beef Industrial feedlot meat traditionally is those animals receive hormones as well organic ones do not but I don't think organic is the last word and how to grow meat well how to raise animals the organic standards on animals yes it removes the drugs which is great it means that they're getting organic rain but really you know the cows the cattle should they shouldn't be on a feedlot there are organic feed Lots they should be out grazing on grass it's very good for their health and it's incredibly good for the health of the animal protein they produce whether it's milk or meat so I look for grass-fed meat and and I look for organic milk from cows that are pastured and some brands have it and take a look on the label whether they make a point of we keep our animals on grass whenever the grass is green some brands do and some brands don't so watch that read those labels carefully and see if you can find and around here we can find people producing grass-fed beef it's it's a it's a really good product or pastured eggs eggs that actually get outside and eat grass you know you'll find them in the farmers it might cost $6 a dozen and you go oh this is outrageous but it's you know two eggs look alike but that's a completely different food and when you taste it you'll you'll know so and you know six dollars a dozen for eggs it really sounds expensive but you know if you have two for breakfast it's a dollar you know for something really special so you have to get out of that head that you know that's an outrage to spend that much for food if you can afford to spend a dollar on two eggs at breakfast do it first of all I want to thank you for being here I'm really thrilled to see you I have one question you mentioned at the very end about the revolution of eating locally my question for you is to what degree do you think this is really a revolution and do what degree do you think that eating locally is the latest South Beach Diet and a current bad that's going on yeah well you know time will tell but there is something going on I think that's very deep in the culture now around food we have had a series of wake-up calls we had one last week 143 million pounds of hamburger that had been fed to our children in school lunch programs was recalled because of a piece of video produced by the Humane Association did anyone see this video of these animals being tormented on their way to slaughter downer cows entered the which is to say animals too sick to stand up enter the food supply we had mad cow disease a few years ago we had the e.coli and the spinach last year we've had lots of e.coli outbreaks in meat the cumulative effect of all these food safety stories has been to peel back the curtain on the way our food is being produced and our response to that has been by and large revulsion and we seek every time you will see the growth in the organic and pastured meat will take off you know this month and will and yes some people go back to their old way of eating but a certain number never do and so we've seen as as we learn more about the industrial food chain the kinds of abuses that I described and methods in Omnivore's Dilemma people look for an alternative these markets are very strong and the growing really fast for some people would be a fad and they'll go back to McDonald's you know they're people who saw supersize me and you know they vowed never good to go back to McDonald's and and some of them I'm sure her back but some of them are not and then you've got like the kid I was sitting next to me after when I saw that movie in the theater in Berkeley who's 13 years old after the movie came out I says well that's it I'm never going to McDonald's again for me it's Burger King from now on so you know people process these messages in different ways he just didn't get it but I think it's a deep thing I think because and the other reason is I mean you know you're all fairly young and you're not thinking about chronic disease very much but when you have children when you you know see your your children struggling or their friends struggling with weight struggling with type 2 diabetes which we used to call adult onset diabetes and we can no longer call it that because now it occurs in young children one in three Americans born in the year 2000 according to the CDC will suffer from type 2 diabetes this will take seven years off their life cost fourteen thousand dollars a year in health care cost to maintain and and will give their chances of heart disease we'll raise that to 80% okay one in three American children so this is a public health crisis and the solution to it well there - there - fork in the road we can go down the road we're on which is to say normalizing obesity and diabetes making the seats and the airplanes bigger putting dialysis centers on the street corners in our inner cities next to the check cashing shops becoming the lipitor nation I mean that's where we're going and make a lot of money off of diabetes by the way it's a great business and we have lifestyle magazines called diabetic living now or we can just change the way we eat that choice to change the way we eat is so much more practical from a financial point of view so much more beautiful from an aesthetic point of view so much more pleasurable that I think what we're seeing now is is people making that choice some people still a small number but it is growing we're seeing people going back to become farmers young people have decided they want to farm first time the population of farmers in this country is ticked upward so I think it's deep I mean we see it in the in the fight over school lunch we see it in the fight to protect animals from abuse we see it in the fight over the farm bill which was more politically charged than any time in the last 50 years so there are many faces to this movement and it's still a little inchoate and the politicians haven't recognized the political power it's a great soccer mom issue they haven't seized it yet but they will soon I mean part of the reason is that is the food industry is very powerful and it's very hard for politicians to say anything that challenges agribusiness but it will happen so you know you could in five years come back and say you were wrong everybody forgot about local food it's over but I don't think that's true I don't think that's going to happen because you know what not only is it better for you but it actually is tastier it's better the only trade off is money and time but what you know how often are we willing to spend money and time for something that gives us so much pleasure so I think it's here to stay and I also think by the way you guys have a role to play I mean one of the real challenges I keep running into or people saying I really want to eat this way but how do I find the farmers in my area farmers are terrible marketers you know they and they're really busy you know they work 14 hours a day 16 hours a day and finding really smart website software solutions to allow people to form these food networks get out of the Safeway is a really important contribution and there's a few very primitive web sites out there that will help you you put in your zip code and you find out about certain local farmers but the number of times I say well you know people ask me where can I get pastured eggs or grass-fed beef in my area and you know I don't know Indianapolis you know I can't help them in Indianapolis but and I but I know those farmers are there so facilitating that conversation is a really important contribution you guys can make to this movement thank you very much you're welcome also thank you for making this popular because I was raised by the people you described as the health nuts yeah years ago great well they they knew something they got it hi hi you mentioned the newest eating disorder or orthorexia Arthur Rex CI yes um at times I feel slightly orther x''k I guess because but the times when I feel that the most is when I'm around when I'm in a social social situation with food and I'm at a friend's house and they offer me something that I know has high-fructose corn syrup in it and I'm really like uh anti the ingredient not so much the nutrient do you ever are you ever find yourself in those situations do you have any advice for those of us who want to stay away from natural foods but also want to you know keep our friends ya know I you know it's funny people that people are very intimidated to cook for me I find I since I started publishing these books I don't get invited to dinner nearly as much I used to and but I'm a really polite guest I eat what's put in front of me I mean I think social values are very important and so I don't make a big fuss if they put the high fructose corn syrup in front of me it's funny I was an event in Portland two weeks ago and there was a lineup of people asking questions and this little girl this eight-year-old girl comes up to the microphone and she says can I eat candy and my answer was yes sometimes special occasions we have always had through history special occasion food there have been times where we eat a lot there have been times we'll eat things we don't eat normally one of our problems has been that special occasion or banquet food as it's known in some cultures has been made daily food and actually one of the rules that I don't have in this book that I thought of since that I would add is eat all the junk food you want as long as you prepare it yourself so if you think of something like french fries you know which we really shouldn't eat that much of if you said alright I'm gonna have french fries but only when I cook it or cook it for my friends with fried chicken another great example it's so much trouble you know if you were going to like buy the potatoes wash the potatoes peel the potatoes slice the potatoes fry the potatoes figure out what to do with the oil clean up the kitchen which is going to be a mess you're only going to make french fries like once a month which is probably about as often as you should eat french fries but the industry allows us to have those special occasion foods every day and I think that's part of the problem so I guess my advice would be yeah when you're in those kind of situations it's it's a weekend night and you're at someone's house for dinner don't worry about it don't make yourself crazy I'll try thank you umm I sometimes suspect that Google is lying when it says that our mission is organizing the world's information that it's really this gigantic food experiment that you take highly educated people put them in this work place we have more than 15 different cafes I here at the Mountain View Google campus different styles of food they've experimented with different ways of labeling it I haven't been able to prove it but I think the fancy toilets in the bathroom and our required badges have something to do with this experiment okay I don't know if you've seen a knotted food of food at Google certainly an unlimited amount is available to us at breakfast lunch and dinner to have anything to say about it well you know I've read a little bit about it and I observed the I did a kind of a scout of the the the cafeteria in this building which you know is I mean it's real food you know it is food and I think you guys are really lucky because most people eating lunch in corporations are stuck with a lot of microwave things processed food I mean there was actual guy who took my salad and put it in a bowl and add a dressing and tossed it and you know I like that human touch most food services that the chef has been removed and replaced by machines it's usually processed off off-site and brought on so I think that you know what's happening here is very exciting and I gather that's at least some of the cafes make a real effort to source locally and I think that's really important the buying power of institutions I mean this is the next this is the real tipping point in this food movement will be when the school's when the universities when the corporation's start sourcing with an eye toward local organic whatever they decide is important but but putting values besides value you know cheapness at the heart of that that's where the real buying power that will change the whole food economy will go that's when Cisco changes that's when Aramark changes all these companies that usually cater you know big companies like this and so pressure from workers is very important you know as quality of life becomes an important thing when you're trying to hire people in a competitive labor market the quality of the food service will matter it already matters on college campuses Berkeley College at Yale the one that Alice Waters had a hand in you know changing their food service she made it all organic and local and yes it cost more and she had to raise money to help pay for it but suddenly students at other colleges were forging IDs to get into Berkeley College it became a very desirable college to be at and so if the food is done well it's not just the sourcing obviously has to be cooked with care to it will become a real selling point for you know for corporations for schools and and Stanford is actually doing some really good work too I mean you get a grass-fed a really good grass-fed hamburger at Stanford's food service right now that's a big step because that grass-fed meat cost a lot more but it's just far superior from any measure environmental or health so I think it's a I think it's a very positive thing that's going on here around food and I was very hard to see it thank you you're welcome hi my question has to do with water because I drink a lot of this stuff and I've always sort of thought maybe it's not really natural to drink actual electrolyte infused water so what's your what about vitamin water protein water protein water but my question is more specific to smart water but just sort of liquids and beverages in general I mean look bottled water is you know environmentally it's it's it's not a good thing I mean importing water from Fiji you know we're doing that I mean we're drinking water from you know halfway around the world you know one of the problems is when you start privatizing water like this that support and political care for municipal water supplies goes down and I think that we really have to focus on making the tap water as good as this stuff and you know in a lot of places it is I don't know about the local water here but in Berkeley in San Francisco we have amazing water we have Hetch Hetchy water from you cemani in San Francisco why would anyone you know buy a water bottle except possibly to refill it yet we do and so I think we've been sold a bill of goods this enhanced water thing I mean this is nutritionism you know that if you put some protein or vitamins in it that's not where you're going to get that's not where you should get your vitamins so I think it's kind of a joke I mean the positive thing is look that there is an economic imperative at work which is to say the food industry the way the food industry works it's very hard to make money selling simple things you can't sell rolled oats and make very much money in 79 cents a pound in the store but you can make some money selling Cheerios and you can make even more money selling those honey nut cheerios cereal bars with the synthetic milk and then you're getting like what 1020 dollars a pound for the oats so adding value is very very important coca-cola the fact that Coke and Pepsi now make money on a simple thing like water from that perspective is it if these companies have to be around and they want to distribute our food and they want to talk you know taunt us with their machines everywhere better that they fill them with water than soda but it's completely superfluous so this is a good new book coming out about bottled water by a very good journalist and Katie I forget her name Pete Michael thank you so much for coming to Google today thanks for your great questions thank you it's good to be here

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 262,121

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan, healthier eating, healthy foods, dieting, organic food

Id: I-t-7lTw6mA

Length: 59min 13sec (3553 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 07 2008