Michael Pollan

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“Food Feels Different To Many People”

July 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We definitely need GMOs since even if we were friendly to our environment, and we’re certainly not, eventually the climate that allows our agrarian culture would change, and then we would be staring at famine. Even with this scary reality, no one wants to trust Monsanto with the process, the company’s name having become a curse word. From “Inside Monsanto, America’s Third-Most-Hated Company,” Drake Bennett’s Bloomberg Businessweek piece:

“The 32-year-old farmer sits in the bouncing tractor cab, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, a baseball cap, jeans, a Bluetooth headset, and a look of fatigue. The steering wheel is folded up out of the way. When the tractor nears the end of a row, its autopilot beeps cheerfully, and he taps a square on one of the touchscreens to his right. The tractor executes a turn, and he goes back to surfing the Web, watching streaming videos, or checking the latest corn prices. ‘You see how boring this gets?’ [Dustin] Spears asks. ‘I’ll be listening to music for 12 hours. I’ll refresh my Twitter timeline, like, a hundred thousand times during the day.’

Spears is an early adopter who upgrades his equipment every 12 months (next year’s tractor will have a fridge in the cab, he says) and who just bought a drone to monitor his fields. He can afford to: Corn prices are high, and farmers like him can take home hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Still, he thinks such technologies—the smart planter software and sensor array, the iPad app offering planting and growing advice—are only going to get more common. So does the company that makes many of those tools, as well as the high-tech seeds Spears is planting: Monsanto, one of the most hated corporations in America.

In a Harris Poll this year measuring the ‘reputation quotient’ of major companies, Monsanto ranked third-lowest, above BP and Bank of America and just behind Halliburton. For much of its history it was a chemical company, producing compounds used in electrical equipment, adhesives, plastics, and paint. Some of those chemicals—DDT, Agent Orange, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—have had long and controversial afterlifes. The company is best known, however, as the face of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. …

Technology has already dumbed down everything from flying an airliner to filing one’s taxes, and in so doing made those tasks safer and more efficient. But food feels different to many people. ‘You know, when this data-intensive system recommends you buy a certain seed, it’s going to be a Monsanto seed,’ says the author Michael Pollan, a prominent critic of industrial agriculture. ‘So I have a strong objection to letting any one company exert that much control over the food supply. It depends on the wisdom of one company, and in general I’d rather distribute that wisdom over a great many farmers.'”

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“Photosynthesis Is ‘The Best Geoengineering Method We Have'”

July 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Slate piece by Michael Hertsgaard, Michael Pollan argues that we should clean up our environment utilizing the certainty of photosynthesis over the possibilities of terraforming. An excerpt:

“According to Pollan, photosynthesis is ‘the best geoengineering method we have.’ It’s also a markedly different method than most of the geoengineering schemes thus far under discussion—like erecting giant mirrors in space or spraying vast amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere to block the sun’s energy from reaching Earth. Whether any of these sci-fi ideas would actually work is, to put it mildly, uncertain—not to mention the potential detrimental effects they could have.

By contrast, we are sure that photosynthesis works. Indeed, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that photosynthesis is a major reason we humans can survive on this planet: Plants inhale CO2 and turn it into food for us, even as they exhale the oxygen we need to breathe.

What does all this have to do with eating meat? Here’s where Pollan gets positively excited. ‘Most of the sequestering takes place underground,’ he begins.

‘When you have a grassland, the plants living there convert the sun’s energy into leaf and root in roughly equal amounts. When the ruminant [e.g., a cow] comes along and grazes that grassland, it trims the height of the grass from, say, 3 feet tall to 3 inches tall. The plant responds to this change by seeking a new equilibrium: it kills off an amount of root mass equal to the amount of leaf and stem lost to grazing. The [discarded] root mass is then set upon by the nematodes, earthworms and other underground organisms, and they turn the carbon in the roots into soil. This is how all of the soil on earth has been created: from the bottom up, not the top down.’

The upshot, both for global climate policy and individual dietary choices, is that meat eating carries a big carbon footprint only when the meat comes from industrial agriculture. ‘If you’re eating grassland meat,’ Pollan says, ‘your carbon footprint is light and possibly even negative.'”

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“We Can’t Be Eating More Meat — The Planet Can’t Take It”

October 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Michael Pollan, who tells us to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” has a new Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Some excerpts follow.

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Question:

If it turns out that a diet based almost entirely on animal fat and protein is best for us and at the same time that such a diet is the worst for the planet, what should we do?

Michael Pollan

We can’t be eating more meat — the planet can’t take it. Plant-based diets are the key, meat should be treated more as a flavor principle –as it is in traditional Asian diets– and not the center of the plate. To exonerate saturated fat is not to say we should all eat 16 ounce steaks! plants are still better for you, and lots of red meat is correlated with higher rates of cancer.

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Question:

How do you feel about Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban?

Michael Pollan:

On Mayor Bloomberg’s ban– it’s not on soda, but only big cups. And I think it’s an experiment we need to try. The proof is in the pudding. But the soda companies are trying to stop him, as they are trying to stop soda tax proposals nationwide. Can we just give one of these plans a real-world test? Reducing soda consumption will do more for the public health than just about anything else we can do in the food area– let’s test to see if that’s true!

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Question:

I am not sure how to word my question but I would like to know exactly you came to write about food? This is a very selfish question because I myself have a yearning to do the same as you. I began thinking I should major in Food Science but after taking an English class and writing many papers on GMOs I”m not sure if that was the right choice. So I was wondering if you had any advice for a hopeful food writer, or specifically what majors I should look into. I was thinking about possibly double majoring in English and Anthropology.

Michael Pollan:

I was an english major, so obviously had no plan to write about food– I might have taken biology if I did. But I followed my curiosity, and a passion for gardening –and growing food– turned into a series of essays on what gardens have to teach us and this eventually brought be around to looking at agriculture. You can predict these things. But English and Anthro is a great prep for just about anything.

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