Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
So what do we do?
Just look at what’s on your plate and ask how it got there. That’s what Michael Pollan asks in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The great thing about him is that he presents himself as just an ordinary guy asking what he should eat. He’s engaging, funny, clever and practical too.
He walks us through these hugely complex problems by asking very simply, ‘What can I do?’ And he does that by looking at what he puts on his plate from day to day – industrially manufactured food, organic or alternative food, food we forage ourselves, the lot.
You believe it’s down to personal responsibility then?
In part, yes. This food is being produced for us. So we have a right – and an obligation – to ask that it be produced sustainably. And at the end of Pollan’s book, he concludes that there is food out there that tastes good, is good for us and is good for the planet.
We all need to wake up to it. And do it urgently too. Otherwise people carry on starving unnecessarily and we will continue to exterminate our fellow species unnecessarily.
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In his first book, campaigner, and historian Tristram Stuart looked into the rise of politically motivated vegetarianism in the 18th century. His second, Waste, is an urgent call to action. Nearly one billion people in the world go hungry every day while in North America and Europe, our farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets, and consumers discard between 30 and 50 per cent of our food supplies – enough to feed the world’s hungry more than three times over. As a result, freegans like Stuart are able to live on what is thrown away by our supermarkets. He’ll only stop taking food out of supermarket bins, he’s pledged, when they cease to throw good food away.
That leads us neatly into your first book choice, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which looks at what is going wrong with government policies towards food production.
Michael Pollan looks at food production through four meals. One is a fast-food meal, the other is an industrial-scale organic meal, then there is a small-scale organic meal and finally he actually goes out and either grows or kills, in the case of the meat, the entire meal himself. That is the narrative.
The premise being that every day we have the dilemma of what we are going to eat.
Yes, if you are a panda bear you don’t have a dilemma because you only eat bamboo shoots but as an omnivore you have got choices. He looks at the way we subsidise big commodity agriculture in the United States – and there are some problems with subsidies. I think that is true for many places in the world, including Europe. It encourages an artificially cheap system for bad food. For example, we subsidise corn growing and make it into high fructose corn syrup at an artificially cheap price, which, of course, is fattening us up at an incredible rate.
The same corn getting subsidised is fed to the cattle that become hamburgers. And we are eating too much of that and the conditions at the massive places where they are reared are not good at all.
What do you think governments should be doing about this?
I don’t think they should be supporting the wealthiest farmers. Often the people who are getting these subsidies you wouldn’t even call farmers. They are more corporations than farms. Instead of focusing on them the government should be paying attention to improving small, sustainable, regional food systems.
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Barry Estabrook writes for The Atlantic, and was formerly a contributing editor at Gourmet magazine. Stints working on a dairy farm and commercial fishing boats convinced him that writing about how food was produced was a lot easier than actually producing it. He is the author of Tomatoland, a book about industrial tomato agriculture. He also writes a blog at Politics of the Plate
