TracyFood

Pollanization: an Urban Farm assignment, recycled for your reading pleasure (?) 22 May 2007 11:46 pm

Posted by Tracy in : Michael Pollan, books, cooking, eating, school , trackback

So last week for Urban Farm we got a list of Michael Pollan articles and the assignment to read one (of our choice) and write a one-page response, due last Thursday. Oh darn! I was momentarily tempted to cop out and recycle my response to “Unhappy Meals” or write about his more recent New York Times Magazine piece, “You Are What You Grow,” I decided to go with something I hadn’t read before, namely The Nation’s “One Thing To Do About Food”. (I also finished Second Nature not long before the assignment was due, but I have much more than a page to write about that book.) Anyway. Here is what I wrote for class:

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In The Nation magazine’s September 11, 2006 forum article “One Thing to Do About Food,” Alice Waters, chef-founder of Chez Panisse restaurant and the Chez Panisse foundation, asks an impressive list of other luminaries — Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Troy Duster, Elizabeth Ransom, Winona LaDuke, Peter Singer, Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini, Eliot Coleman and Jim Hightower — what one change each would most like to see in food. Michael Pollan’s response is to call for wider awareness of and participation in food and farm politics, in particular the 2007 U.S. Farm Bill.

As in his 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his April 22, 2007 New York Times Magazine “The Way We Live Now: You Are What You Grow,” Pollan’s short essay for The Nation points out that U.S. agricultural subsidies, such as those legislated by the Farm Bill, support commodity crops like soy and corn, with the result that foods containing these ingredients — including most factory-farmed animal products, processed foods, and especially fast food — are artificially cheap. Many of the other forum contributors, including Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Wendell Berry, Troy Duster and Elizabeth Ransom, Peter Singer, and Carlo Petrini, have scathing comments about the public health consequences of this cheap, low-quality food, not to mention its social and ethical implications. The other theme shared by Pollan’s piece and the other contributors’ remarks is the importance of knowledge about food and food systems. Which leads nicely to my own opinion.

Nobody asked, but the one food-related change I would like to see is everybody making their own food more often — as often as possible even — by cooking it using minimally processed ingredients, the better to know exactly what it is we eat. (I’d also like to see people take it one step further and grow food, the better to know exactly where food comes from, but cooking is closer to home.) As a professional cook, I serve people who can’t cook or won’t cook, and although I know it’s bad for my job security to say this, I sincerely wish there were fewer of both. What stops us from cooking, from gardening, from really knowing what’s in our food? Lack of knowledge, perhaps, but most of all I think lack of time and energy, which blur the line between “can’t” and “won’t.” Some people will never love cooking like I do, but I believe that we all can and should do more to know and love everything we eat. Cooking our own food (ideally with some home-grown ingredients) is a good place to start. So are the suggestions by Michael Pollan and his coauthors in “One Thing To Do About Food.”

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Hey, I only had a page, and I almost forgot this assignment was due, so considering the last-minute nature of the writing, it’s not completely awful. And I’m very serious about the cooking thing. It freaks me right out when people say they don’t cook. So all of you reading this who do, thank you. And now I must go to bed.