Michael Pollan: Fixing Food

[Applause] we are increasingly disconnected from our food we outsource our cooking by eating out in restaurants or buying pre-made and packaged meals at the grocery store but a growing food movement is afoot and at the forefront of that movement is Michael Pollan he's the author of cooked a natural history of transformation and I can tell by the way you're smiling you don't like my saying you're at the forefront of the movement right you're feeling a bit bashful about taking on that moniker well you know I'm a writer first and I'm a little I don't know that much about politics I mean I like to observe politics but I'm not sure I you know I'm ready to lead anything well you have to accept the fact that having written how many books now five folk inspire I hope I've inspired the food okay but leading it I hope they find somebody better well let's all right I'm gonna have you lead us to the thing that I just mentioned in the introduction which is we don't live on farms anymore we don't cook as much of our food as you would like us to is food in some respects and by that I mean the kind of food you want us to eat invisible to us now yeah in this it's opaque in that we no longer know where it comes from how it was produced and we have an industry of course a food industry that encourages us to just take it as this completely self-contained object with no history and no future and just a thing and they discourage us from knowing its origins for good reasons I mean they don't want us to see how it's produced and in fact one of the great battles of the food movement is for transparency and the food industry fights that back right now we've got bills introduced in 13 or 14 legislatures state legislatures in in the United States that would criminalize the publication of photographs taken in factory farms so they don't want us to know how they're producing the food because they want to control the narrative and because the true story would put people off their feet what's their explanation for wanting to make that information illegal to come out they say that you know animal rights activists will sneak in and take pictures and those will be misrepresenting what's really going on and we have had we've had pictures that have ended up in eeeh demonstrating what's happening in these factory farms but you think their real agenda is wow they're really whose agenda the the food company yeah oh just kind of keep us from asking those questions keep us just eating you know they don't want us to know when we get a fast-food hamburger that they're maybe 200 200 animals represented in that one burger and as we recently learned one of those animals wasn't beef it was horse meat in Europe and and that happens when the food chain gets very long globalized and we lose control over it as eaters so they want us to focus on simply consuming food in a package and we're happy to oblige the mention of the time yeah because the food is cheap and and and it tastes pretty good and it does the trick yet we've had a series of events over the last several decades that I think have alerted people to the fact that maybe they should pay a little more attention to where the food comes from we had mad cow disease that was it that was an amazing moment a teachable moment in a way it was limited to Europe for the most part there were a couple cases here but suddenly we learned that wait a minute we're feeding cows to cows they you know don't they eat grass and grain and and so we learned something and then the demand for organic meat soared we had various food safety scandals involving fast food which also increased interest in alternative this big one here that's rightfully fill the Styria case and we had the Al'ar case with apples in America in the 90s which suddenly people were like panic for organic was the headline in Newsweek magazine so every time the industrial food system has a scandal like that interest in alternatives and curiosity about the source of food grows but it never lasts it takes almost it takes just a little bit of advertising to get us to go back to square one it feels like anyway yeah well you know the stories go away but look at the the growth in the alternative markets since 1990 when organic really gets started that that segment has grown 20 percent a year even through this recession organic food growth rates went down but it continued to grow at about 10% a year local food is the fastest growing segment in the food system I'm talking about you know if local farms to institutions and also farmers markets and CSAs so the continuing expansion of alternative the alternative food economy suggests that this is not completely forgotten that people have had their consciousness raised about food and it's convinced many people not everybody and still it's only just a segment that it's worth paying more for food you know more about let me follow up we touched on this a little bit yesterday but let's get into some more depth today about the political nature of food and and by that I mean capital P politics here you you would like President Obama to get much more I know directly involved in the whole food industry and the food issues that we've talked about over the last couple of days however he's got an IRS scandal he has a Benghazi scandal he has a trillion-dollar deficit problem he's got his own Obamacare signature issue that will be before the courts you know long after you and I are dead where is reforming the food system on his list of priorities well it hasn't been very high it's been much higher on his wife's list of priorities I mean she's made it a serious issue and and and she's to be commended for that but I think Obama will discover or whoever as president will discover that after Obamacare is in place and the government is on the hook for a lot more of our health care costs they will discover that the best way to reduce the amount of money we're spending on health care which is you know 1.7 trillion dollars 75% of which is going to treat chronic diseases most of the preventable chronic diseases most of which are linked to diet that the best way to get control of those costs will be changing the way we eat because basically we are the cost of obesity is about 150 billion dollars the cost of type 2 diabetes is just around there too I mean these are huge numbers and it's all preventable it's all a matter of the food system so we have a government now that it's essentially subsidizing both sides in the war on obesity in the war on type 2 diabetes we are subsidizing the worst possible food in the marketplace and then we're subsidizing the healthcare cost to deal with that problem and when a guy like the mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg comes in and passes this new law saying you can't do the big soda pop anymore they take him to court and he loses yes well you know but Bloomberg's a very interesting case to look at look here is a guy who comes in as mayor he sees he's told that the budget deficit in New York City is a real problem because you have this big public hospital system which New York has and he says well why is that getting so expensive and explained to him that every new case of type 2 diabetes diagnosed and teenager cost that system $425,000 in for the life of that patient so he says well how do you reduce type 2 diabetes it's really kind of simple lower soda consumption and he tries and he first he goes to the legislature and tries to get a soda tax and the soda industry defeats him barely then he tries to say all right how about we're not going to ban larger portions than 16 ounces but we're gonna say if you want to they've got to come in these 16 ounce cups this is not radical social engineering this is what behavioral economists call a nudge effect that you just pause between that first 16 ounces before you go to 32 or before you go to 48 or 64 we actually have 64 ounce soda cups that's a big gulp that is very gulp and in fact that's what it's called and but this is considered outrageous nanny-state and they go they get all over his case and he loses in court there'll be another round it's not a very well reasoned decision there's a good chance if he stays in office long enough or if the decision comes down soon that he'll win the next round I think I found it a very curious phenomenon because we tolerate social engineering all the time we just don't see it every time you walk into the grocery store there is social engineering going on as Michael Moss explains basically you when you go down the cereal aisle the sweetest chocolate is mark meh Louis cereals are at eye level and the simple oatmeal which is the healthiest thing in the store just about is down by your feets right okay you can't even see it that's social engineering why don't we object when corporations do it to it and do it to us yet it's outrageous when it's done for the public good the Pied Piper of America today though Jon Stewart had a field day with Mayor Bloomberg's big gulp and yeah he did I know I went to town on it and when you know it's affecting paraphrase LBJ of a Walter Cronkite once I've lost Jon Stewart I've lost America yeah how do you get ahead how do you make progress when this is so easy to ridicule well I think it's a real challenge I think what's gonna happen is one of these proposals is gonna succeed somewhere it may be a soda tax instead of a ban on big cups and because it sounds silly I mean it is easy to make fun of and if you're Jon Stewart you want one issue where you can side you know take that side and that's an easy one it's a gimme but one of these soda taxes will pass I don't know that they'll work I don't even know that the cup thing would work what I'm suggesting is we need some social experiments to see what will work try a bunch of things try a bunch of things see what sticks and and it may be taxation and it may be changing the food environment in various ways there's some harmless ways that no one objects to that are having some success if you arrange the buffet line or the or the or the the lunch line in school and change the order in which things are found you will change the way people eat so for example if you if you have to put vegetables on your plate before meat you will take up more of the space on your plate with vegetables than meat so these little adjustments in the environment can have a profound effect and we need to we need to play around those contexts let me follow up on the first lady because for I guess five years now she has really been beating the drum of getting kids to move and eat better and so on yeah because she sees what's happening with childhood obesity I think she then met with the food industry what's happened well I think her message has been somewhat diluted I think at the beginning it was a really clear message which is food matters to your health dramatically part of being a good parent is taking charge of your kids diet and she planted an organic garden at the white house and she you know visited farmers markets and promoted real food and then something interesting happened and she gave some very tough speeches to the grocery manufacturers if you go back and read those speeches you'll be shocked at how tough they were about marketing to kids and formulating their products and it was a real challenge to them they came to her the food industry and said we want to be part of the solution now what do you do when the food industry tells you that you can't tell them to get lost if you're the first lady I would probably tell him to get lost she can't do that so she enters into a negotiation with them to reformulate processed food now you can argue whether that is a worthwhile undertaking or not but you can't avoid doing it once they've come to the table so she's negotiated sugar levels and salt levels and I worry that the effect of that and we'll see if they keep their promises the industry has made various promises to her but tweaking processed food has not worked in the past not going to get it done it's not going to get it done we we tweaked food we got all the fat out of food we had this low-fat campaign you'll recall from this the 80s and the 90s and we got very fat on the low-fat campaign because as soon as we see a health claim low-fat no-fat we eat more of it and in fact when they took out the fat they added carbohydrates instead lots of sugar lots of white flour so I don't think that will work I think the key is to get people off of processed food to the extent that you can that processed food is the problem and and incremental changes in its formulation is not going to make a difference I also think once you enter into those negotiations you're legitimizing processed food you're saying this is what's normal and this is what people are going to eat and you're regularizing it and I think that's a mistake too but I would also say she had very little choice given the power of the food industry let me take in a bit of a different direction here the current food system in the United States overwhelmingly in the United States but obviously to a lesser degree here - and other places in the Western world is it when you think about the environmental sustainability of it what do you see I see a system that will break down eventually now when we say something is unsustainable we don't just mean we don't like it we have some aesthetic problem with it we see a problem coming that it depends on something it can't depend on I don't know how it breaks down you know for a long time I thought it was well it's dependent on fossil fuel all the fertilizers the processing the transportations it's it's basically ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food that is not a sustainable system when you see fossil fuel in shorter and shorter supply now we found lots of new fossil fuel that we're willing to use so maybe that won't be where it breaks down first I worry about the quality of the soil we have been abusing our soils for now a couple generations and they're not producing as well it takes more fertilizer to get the same amount of food it takes more pesticide to get the same amount of food and that's because our soils are not just disappearing but we're changing their structure their their their life their bacterial life is is in trouble because of all the chemicals we put on it that is a potential a very serious problem and the health care costs of the way we're eating is another we're growing too much of the same thing corn and soy and wheat to some extent and that these monocultures lead to a really unhealthy diet we're not eating enough plants if we were going to get the five a day we're supposed to get of fruits and vegetables you would have to completely revolutionize US agriculture because it's really not producing those kind of calories it's producing calories of fat in in soy for oils and calories of sweetener in corn and high fructose corn syrup so the healthcare crisis is where the industrial food system might break down - it's hard to say where but to to blithely go on assuming we can grow keep growing this kind of food this kind of way indefinitely is foolhardy it's just simply not going to happen I don't know when I don't know how but if you study biology you realize it is industry the logic of industry and the logic of biology are in conflict and when that happens biology always wins it wasn't that long ago I mean if you think about the grand historical scope of this probably around World War two where agriculture was overwhelmingly solar based as opposed to fossil fuel-based so we were there can we get back there well that's the big question I'm optimistic that we can I I can't sit here and tell you sustainable agriculture can feed the world we haven't done those tests we're doing a lot of side-by-side tests we're finding that actually organic agriculture is approaching the yields of conventional agriculture and exceeding them in drought years which is very interesting because organic soils hold moisture so well so that's something to keep in mind the health of the soil may be the key to the future of Agriculture not any fancy seeds from Monsanto we may be focusing on the wrong solutions but where were you I'm sorry repeat your question if you would well I'd once upon a time from around or so - we need a more productive agriculture than what we had before world war two I don't think we can go back to that we have more people around the question is can we do a highly productive sustainable agriculture I have seen models that work they tend to be labor-intensive now is that a blessing or a curse for many years we regard it as a curse you know and our goal was to produce as much food per farmer well this you know depopulated our rural areas and filled our cities and it's gonna it's going to do the same thing in Africa in India unless we figure out ways to use labor on the farm if we've got enough people on the land we can grow plenty of food the other the other thing to keep in mind is that right now I said I couldn't promise you sustainable agriculture can feed the world I can promise you that industrial agriculture is not feeding the world right now we have a we're growing 6,000 calories per person per day in the world right now you only need 2,000 to live so why do we have a billion people hungry right now that's what the UN estimates a billion people hungry but how many people obese well another billion 2,000 other billion and but so there are problems with that system yield is not the only question a lot of the food we're growing is going is we're feeding to our cars in the form of F that's where about you know 20% of all those calories are going and then we're feeding a lot of it to animals to make meat if we ate less meat and and our cars didn't use so much grain there's plenty of food to feed the 11 billion I have heard you talk about the need to reunite animals with the farm on the face of it that doesn't make sense because we think of course well we're also at animals B that's where they I'm afraid they're not on the farm anymore ok X there in the feedlot the meat animals are all in the feedlot we used to grow animals and plants in a very elegant rotation so that on a farm you could grow the feed for the animals the plants fed the animals and the animals produced waste that fed the plants it was a closed nutrient loop then we did something which seemed really smart at the time but doesn't look so smart now we took the animals off the farms concentrated them in feedlots and as Wendell Berry puts it brilliantly we took a solution and neatly divided it into two problems the first problem is we had a fertility deficit on the farm that we had a remedy with with chemical fertilizers the other problem is this manure produced in huge quantities now which had been a blessing on farms became essentially a source of toxic pollution which is what it is it's polluting the water it's polluting the air so it's you can't have a sustainable agriculture without plants and animals in in a rotation we have to figure out ways to depopulate those feed Lots and get plants and animals working together again that is new I mean that's a / chol that's right that's right it's a very old idea it's another case where the logic of industry and the logic of biology or ecology are at odds because it's much more efficient in terms of units per acre of land or farmer - to produce meat in feed Lots but from an ecological point of view it's incredibly wasteful do you think the food industry though has managed to convince people that it has to be the way it is because if we try to go back to the way it was or figure out whatever the modern-day incarnation of that is there won't be enough now he will have food scarcity and you don't want that well first of all as you suggest we're not talking about turning back the clock the modern organic or sustainable farmer is doing something that his grandfather or great-grandfather would not recognize recognize that's a common myth when people say my grandfather was organic he didn't have any chemicals it's a lot more than no chemicals it's very sophisticated systems of generating fertility and controlling disease and controlling pests so that's the first thing the second thing is yeah that's of course industrial agriculture uses that argument to frighten people and they tell us we need industrial agriculture to feed the world they've been using that argument for many years to convince farmers to grow more than was good for farmers they needed an ideology to say we know your prices would be better if you grew a little less but why don't you over produce and we'll dump it on the rest of the world and so it's been the ideology of industrial agriculture forever that this is the only way to feed the world we need to we shouldn't assume that we need to examine that that's a that's a that's an assumption and it's and it is unproven all right in our last few minutes here let me quote you to you we did this in 2010 for the New York Review of Books and we'll talk about whether there's a potential for a worldwide movement here to do something about this among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric of the food movement we can include school lunch reform that campaign for animal rights and welfare the campaign against genetically modified crops the rise of organic and locally produced food efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes food sovereignty farm bill reform food safety regulation farmland preservation student organizing around food issues on campus efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure the communities have access to healthy food initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools farm worker rights nutrition labeling stay with me here feedlot pollution and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients in marketing especially to kids question that sounds like a huge potential movement yeah is it but it sounds like a meth - right I mean you see they brought singing out of the same hymn book yeah well that's very hard to do food movement is has all these different threats all these different constituencies they need to find a couple issues to rally behind where they subordinate their individual passions like any like any political movement and and form an agenda that they all can push there is a food movement rising it's very interesting to watch it's very exciting to watch there is a generation of people in their 20s or devoting their lives to these issues they see it as their way into the environmental issue and their way to into restoring a sense of community because that's a very important it's a communitarian movement it's very much about using food to establish community and keep local communities going and vibrant but it's a hodgepodge and it needs leadership it definitely needs leadership if you compare it to a civil rights movement like gay rights where everyone can get behind one or two very simple principles this is really hard and it's going to take a while to happen but you know what as long as people see progress and we all see progress it's it's such a hopeful movement it's and it's one of those movements and I think this is one of the reasons young people are so behind it that you don't have to wait for government to act government is a follower on these issues basically we can all act today we get three votes every day and people are finding by exercising those votes in support of the kind of Agriculture and a kind of economy they want they're seeing this alternative rise so that will feed the movement because it's it's offering progress every day but in our last minute here with and with apologies to Occupy Wall Street which didn't have a leader this thing needs a leader yeah who's leading this movement right now you know those leaders are being born now I mean they're they're people I meet them all the time people in their 20s the slow-food youth movement all around the world there's an incredible crop of people there people in food studies programs all over North America right now not a megaphone they got it they got to take over politics they got to take over television I gotta and we need allies in Congress and we're starting to get them there's a handful of people in Congress who really get this and some politicians going to discover the power of this issue and is gonna win on it and then everyone's gonna look up we have to realize our national politicians are pretty late to the party very this is starting in the grassroots and but you watch it in five years we'll be talking about a serious political movement I hope you'll come back and talk to us about it then I'd be happy to our guest is Michael Pollan and his latest book is called cooked a natural history of transformation we're always grateful that you spent so much time with us here at Evo and we wish you well in your future endeavors thank you Steve support Ontario's public television donate at TV org

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Views: 45,263

Rating: 4.8938055 out of 5

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, social issues, cooking, farming, agriculture, domesticity

Id: 4fLUmzhqkAw

Length: 24min 55sec (1495 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2013