“Yes, but not the head,”someone answered. The question is about as preposterous as the state of our nation’s large-scale farming enterprise known as agribusiness. Michael Pollan, best selling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (among others), and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, is one of the country’s leading experts on food. Last October he published “An Open Letter to the Farmer in Chief”.
“What this means is that you [the President], like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact” so easy to overlook these past few years” that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention….[Y]ou will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on” but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them.
Pollan is referring to agribusiness, our modern agricultural system which is run by agricultural conglomerates, Washington and Wall Street overseersbureaucrats at the US Department of Agriculture. These power mongers have collectively adulterated our diet, annihilated our nutrition, and destroyed the health of Americans with the exclusive reliance on corn for cattle feed (livestock is not meant to subsist entirely on corn), corn oil, high-fructose corn syrup, and the myriad of other corn derivatives. That’s why corn grown in Iowa gets into the structure of a hair follicle ” even the molecular structure ” belonging to a guy from Massachusetts.
“We turn the corn into high fructose corn syrup to sweeten the sodas,”says Pollan. “We also turn the corn into cheap feed lot meat. The soy we turn into also cheap feed lot meat and hydrogenated soy oil, which is what all our fast food is fried in. It has trans fats known as lethal. So we are basically, you know, subsidizing fast food”
“We’re seeing that corn is the number-one reason that fast food is so cheap and available,” said Meredith Niles, a food policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety. “U.S. programs are subsidizing obesity in this country”
Virtually every cow or chicken used in fast food chains across the country is raised on a diet of corn making it blaringly clear that our government subsidizes the nations inferior eating habits. As Pollan and others have illustrated, corn is central to agribusiness and receives more government subsidies than any other crop. The growth of corn as a crop is heavily reliant on oil. Corn requires fantastic quantities of fertilizer and pesticides which in turn require huge amounts of fossil fuel to produce.
In his latest book, In Defense of Food, Pollan contends that most of what we eat today is not food, it’s “edible food-like substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science.”And he makes note of how we eat our food, not as family but instead in grim rushed solitude, “..in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone”
He urges us to eat the kind of food our great grandmothers considered food and suggests old-fashion food needs to be defended from the modern food industry and food science.
This brings is to Mr. Pollan latest book effort: Michael Pollan wants your food rules to include in his new book. His premise is simple”culture has a lot to teach us about how to choose, prepare and eat food, and that this wisdom is worth collecting and preserving before it disappears”
“In recent years,”says Pollan, “we’ve deferred to the voices of science and industry when it comes to eating, yet often their advice has served us poorly, or has merely confirmed the wisdom of our grandmother after the fact. Eat your colors,’ an Australian reader’s grandmother used to tell her; now we hear the same advice from nutritionists, citing the value of including as many different phytochemicals in the diet as possible”
Send him a food rule you try to live by. “Something,”says Pollan, “perhaps passed down by your parents or grandparents. Or something you’ve come up with to tell your children..”
Indeed.
Related articles
- Food Seen as Health or Not (chefann.com)
- Obama Should Select Author Michael Pollan To Lead USDA (livinlavidalowcarb.com)
- Mercury Found in High Fructose Corn Syrup: Hungry For Change (takepart.com)
- Op-Ed Columnist: Obama’s ‘Secretary of Food’? (nytimes.com)