Michael Pollan

For a free country, we’ve got an awfully tyrannical food chain. Our current system of food production is really founded on a contempt for life; it pummels the planet and exploits migrant farm workers, defying the laws of both nature and man. If we truly are what we eat, I guess that makes us a nation of nature-hating misanthropes.

We’ve shoehorned corn into every corner of Iowa, and shoveled it into every cow--or so it seemed to me as I watched the screening of King Corn that Eating Liberally co-hosted this week at the Tank with our friends from the Green Edge Collaborative. We’ve taken the already fertile soil of our heartland and jacked it up on steroids, to grow a bazillion bushels of a variety of corn you can’t even eat till it’s been processed into some sort of by-product.

We coax an astonishing amount of corn from each monocropped acre by saturating this precious topsoil with fertilizers and herbicides, and then we convert this nutritionally bankrupt bounty into high fructose corn syrup, or feed for cows whose digestive systems literally can’t stomach it (hello, E. coli), or the eco-disaster we call corn-based ethanol.

As King Corn’s food court jesters Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis discovered in their pilgrimage to our feedcorn fiefdom, this ultra-efficient method of growing corn has created ever larger farms run by fewer and fewer farmers, draining the soul of our rural communities even as it depletes the soil (and drives our diabetes epidemic, and fuels global warming, and makes cheap spaghetti sauces sickeningly sweet, and--oh, nevermind.)

And this is the model of agriculture that Wall Street, K Street, and Main Street all celebrate as a shining example of good ol’ American know-how that the rest of the world would do well to emulate. Feedcorn is on the march!

We were fortunate to have Ian Cheney on hand at our screening to do a Q & A, and the questions were pretty much the same ones people peppered Michael Pollan with at an Omnivore’s Dilemma reading I attended in April of 2006 (Pollan, an advisor to the King Corn crew, appears in the film expounding on the evils of industrial agriculture against the backdrop of his own abundant veggie garden, including a suitably monstrous patch of dinosaur kale!)

What folks want to know, after reading Pollan’s books or seeing a film like King Corn, is “What can we do about this awful food system?”

The knee-jerk response is, of course, to endorse community supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, but Cheney noted that we run the risk of creating an alternative food chain that serves only those fortunate enough to live in the more affluent communities where farmers’ markets and upscale stores like Whole Foods thrive.

Living at the Ethicurean epicenter of NYC, it’s easy for me to opt out of our crappy food chain; I can walk to Union Square and shop at the Greenmarket four days a week all year round, and whatever I can’t find there I can get at the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s that are a stone’s throw from the Greenmarket. There are several mom-and-pop health food stores in our neck of the woods, too.

So it’s easy for me to follow Pollan’s advice to stay out of the supermarkets. But a few miles north of us, in East Harlem, they’ve hardly got any supermarkets left to stay out of. As the New York Times reported last Monday:

To us farmers’ market fanatics, the very notion of a New York supermarket as a source for fresh, healthy food seems laughable; the typical supermarket is a food desert to us, with aisle after aisle of mysterious food-like substances encased in plastic and no grass-fed anything. But when your only sources for food are bodegas and fast food joints, a supermarket that actually sells fresh--though far-traveled--fruits and vegetables is a step up.

No wonder more and more city dwellers are becoming urban farmers, as another New York Times article noted yesterday; communities decried as food deserts are creating their own oases by reclaiming unused lots where they grow fruits and vegetables for themselves and even sell the surplus to others.

The Times article heralds the revival of urban agriculture that’s taking root all around the country, with the help of organizations like Milwaukee’s Growing Power, and NYC’s own GreenThumb and Just Foods, two groups who’ve done so much to support our community gardeners and local farmers. I had the pleasure of hearing Growing Power’s founder, Will Allen, speak at the Food & Society conference in Arizona last week and came away convinced that Growing Power’s one-acre farm represents the future of urban agriculture.

As the Times notes, this “one-acre farm crammed with plastic greenhouses, compost piles, do-it-yourself contraptions, tilapia tanks and pens full of hens, ducks and goats…grossed over $220,000 last year from the sale of lettuces, winter greens, sprouts and fish to local restaurants and consumers.”

Allen’s model demonstrates that city dwellers do have the capacity to produce at least some of their own food in an eco-friendly, socially responsible manner. And as more and more folks become aware of the rampant abuse that’s a hallmark of industrial agriculture, from cruelly confined chickens to Florida’s enslaved migrant farm workers, people are seeking alternative food chains untarnished by institutionalized exploitation and environmental degradation.

For a really comprehensive and inspiring look at the enormous potential of this movement to provide less privileged folks with an abundance of fresh, affordable produce while building community, preserving open space and creating an environmentally beneficial habitat, check out “Vitalizing the Vacant” from Thoughts On The Table blogger Annie Myers, who never ceases to astonish me with her clear, beautiful prose and even clearer observations.

Annie’s one of a dozen or so twenty-somethings I’ve met who blow me away with their commitment to changing our world; I was too cynical and alienated when I was that age to do much more than mouth off about our decaying culture. I’m doing that still, while folks like Annie and the Real Food Challenge students and “Greenhorns” filmmaker Severine Von Tscharner Fleming are running around remaking the world the way they want it to be. Considering how badly we've messed things up, it’s the least we can do to cheer them on.

I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but this whole Earth Day thing is really just a front for a cabal of dirt-loving luddites determined to destroy life as we know it in America. Dig down below that crunchy granola surface, that coalition of fruits and nuts (so annoyingly high in moral fiber) and you’ll find a half-baked conspiracy to deprive us of some of our most cherished traditions: lush lawns unblemished by dandelions or dangling laundry; easy-to-heat, awful-to-eat cuisine; four wheel-drive vehicles with single digit gas mileage, and so on.

These terroirists hate our freewheeling ways, and, no, that’s not a typo. It’s a homegrown insurgency inspired by the French notion of “terroir”--the way that a specific region’s soil and climate influence the foods and beverages produced there.

Wikipedia loosely translates terroir as "a sense of place;” locavores, aka food mile fanatics, describe it as “the taste of here.” It’s a foreign concept to most Americans, whose terroir tends to be the suburban supermarket; there’s no “here” there, just overprocessed, overpackaged food that’s traveled thousands of miles by truck, ship or plane.

We’ve been awfully piggy about our oil consumption, as Jad Mouawad noted in the New York Times last Sunday:

Keep in mind that we’re only 4% of the world’s population. A graph accompanying Mouwad’s piece showed that other developed nations have managed to keep their consumption levels in check or even lower them significantly; Sweden and Denmark have reduced their oil use by 32% and 33% respectively.

Our oil consumption, on the other hand, rose 21% as we hitched our wagon to a fantasy of infinite—and cheap—fossil fuels, and went on building bigger houses, buying bigger cars, choosing longer commutes, eating more fossil-fueled fast foods.

Along the way, we glorified wastefulness and gluttony, converted fertile farms to sterile sprawl, stopped building sidewalks, marginalized mass transit, banned backyard clotheslines and front yard food gardens, and sent our soldiers off to die defending what is, at the end of the day, a pretty indefensible way of life.

And now we’ve got an agri-culture war here at home. Rising fuel and food costs, along with concerns about global warming, have given a growing army of “front-yard farmers,” as the Wall Street Journal calls them, plenty of ammunition in their war to replace resource-hogging, planet-polluting lawns with food gardens. Read the objections from grass-addled neighbors who view these minifarms as a blight, and you’ll see why Michael Pollan qualifies growing one’s own food as a “subversive” act.

Pollan’s the most high-profile combatant in the grow-your-own guerrilla campaign, his latest contribution being a piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine’s “green” issue that cites planting a vegetable garden as one thing an individual can do to combat climate change and shorten the food chain. But he’s got plenty of company; Rip-Out-Your-Lawn-And-Grow-Veggies is a hot literary genre these days; in addition to Pollan’s best seller, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, there’s Heather Flores’s Food Not Lawns and Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates: Attack On The Front Lawn.

There are websites to inspire the would-be urban homesteader, too, such as Kitchen Gardeners International, whose founder, Roger Doiron, is on a mission to convince the next occupant of the White House to revive the wartime tradition of the victory gardens that provided us with plenty of homegrown produce during World War II. And The Path To Freedom website documents the astounding quantity of food one family produces on a fifth of an acre in Pasadena, California.

But the curb-your-carbon-footprint campaign doesn’t stop at the curb; it’s infiltrated the institutional food sector, too, as an article in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times noted. Enlightened eaters are encouraging university and corporate campuses to drop the mass-produced glop and start serving “real food,” i.e. meals made with as many fresh, local, organically grown ingredients as possible. Efforts to reduce waste and compost kitchen scraps are becoming more common, too.

At the forefront of this movement is a coalition of students who are launching a national campaign called The Real Food Challenge, whose goal is to “create a food system that truly nourishes people, communities, and the earth.”

In other words, a food system diametrically opposed to the one we have now; you know, the one that nourishes obesity, diabetes, animal abuse, worker abuse, pollution, and global warming. The one that our tax payer dollars have been underwriting even as it undermines us all, as Christopher Cook, author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis points out in an op-ed in today’s Christian Science Monitor.

So how do these wild-eyed idealists define “Real Food”?

Aha! You see, they even admit that overthrowing our uber-consumer culture is part of their agenda. So don’t be fooled by the rash of feel-good festivities and token tree hugging that inevitably breaks out around Earth Day. It’s really an all-out assault on your right as an American to plunder the planet. Alert Homeland Security! Code Green! There's an elevated risk of attack by trowel-toting terroirists.

There are simple carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, and then there’s the Twinkie, made from military industrial-complex carbohydrates. It’s got some of the same ingredients as tracer bullets and artillery shells, as I learned from reading Steve Ettlinger’s Twinkie, Deconstructed.

Ettlinger’s book, just out in paperback, documents the 39 ingredients it now takes to make a Twinkie, many of them minerals and chemicals, some derived from crude oil. This petroleum-based pastry is about a million food miles removed from your grandma’s yellow sponge cake, which had a shelf life of maybe two days, max.

Today’s Twinkie, on the other hand, stays frighteningly “fresh” for an unnaturally long time (officially, 25 days, but we all know it’s really more like 25 months.) Real butter turns rancid too fast, so the Twinkie gets its butter-like taste and texture from petrochemical-based ingredients like diacetyl, a close cousin to acetylene welding gas, and butyric acid, a flavor which Ettlinger gleefully informs us is “a natural component of Parmesan cheese, rancid butter, and, unbelievably, vomit and perspiration.”

Twinkie, Deconstructed may amaze and appall you, but the fact is that while a Twinkie is not particularly good for you, it’s not all that bad for you, either. It’s just an amalgam of industrial ingredients and artificial flavors posing as an actual pastry. How did we ever fall for this oily oblong cake with the mystery “cream” filling?

Take a trip down Madison Avenue’s memory lane via YouTube with the classic seventies Twinkie ad at the top of this post and you'll find out. Watch the housewife-on-a-budget vow that no matter how tight money gets, she’ll never deprive her kids of “fresh, wholesome” Hostess Twinkies, because “you can’t skimp when it comes to your children.”

Fast forward to this series of Flickr photos taken last month entitled “It’s What’s For Breakfast,” in which a visibly disgusted mom in Portland, Oregon documented five days of the hot "food" served free to kids at her local public school in the morning before school. Stuff like “Bagel-ers,” which are some kind of bagel and cream cheese concoction, and a pancake-sausage-breakfast-sandwich that “tastes like sugar,” and a cereal bar made of whole grain oats glued together by “corn syrup, sugar, high fructose corn syrup. . . followed by a long list of other ingredients most of them with names only a chemist would understand.”

Or Steve Ettlinger. Twinkie, Deconstructed is not a Fast Food Nation/Omnivore’s Dilemma-style indictment of our food chain; it’s a science writer’s agenda-free foray into the peculiar world of processed foods, an odyssey Ettlinger embarked on in response to his daughter’s innocent question, “Daddy, what’s polysorbate 60?”

After reading Twinkie, Deconstructed I have a better understanding of what goes into the “cakelike cylinders (with creamlike fillings) called Twinkies that never grow stale,” as Michael Pollan describes them in In Defense of Food.

What I don’t understand is why our agricultural policies continue to promote these “edible foodlike substances” (Pollan's words, again.) It’s bad enough that your tax dollars are paying for all those amber waves of grain that get turned into nutritionally bankrupt foods and environmentally disastrous biofuels. But did you know that the USDA actually penalizes commodity crop growers who want to replant their fields with fruits or vegetables?

I didn’t, until I read Jack Hedin’s op-ed in last Saturday’s New York Times. Hedin, a small organic vegetable farmer in southern Minnesota, reveals that, at a time when farmers’ markets are popping up all over the country to meet the growing demand for fresh local produce, the USDA is working “deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding.” Why in the world would they want to do that? Hedin explains:

The USDA actually fines farmers who have the audacity to switch from growing commodity grains to, say, melons or tomatoes, as Hedin learned the hard way. Talk about passive/aggressive. The USDA’s telling us we’ve got to eat more fruits and vegetables even as it’s thwarting the efforts of small family farmers to help us do just that.

At a time when Michael Pollan and those Skinny Bitches are convincing this nation of meatheads that a plant-based diet is better for us--not to mention our fellow creatures and the planet--our government is in cahoots with Agribiz and Big Food to keep us hooked on a chemical plant-based diet. And that’s a shame, because the epidemic of diseases caused by our Western diet poses a far greater threat to mankind than Middle Eastern terrorists.

Joe Wilson went off to Niger in search of “yellow cake” and came up famously empty-handed in the fiasco we’ve come to know as “PlameGate.” Little did he know we’ve got a yellow cake-based weapon of mass destruction right here at home.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: My question for you this week comes courtesy of Rand Waddoups, Wal-Mart's Senior Sustainability Director (or something like that). Apparently, he's been reading Michael Pollan, and it's got him thinking about what his employer--who happens to be the number one food retailer in the U.S.--could do to fix our broken food chain.

Waddoups posted an entry on Wal-Mart's corporate blog on Tuesday entitled "Sustainable Industrialized Food?" in which he quotes Pollan's observation that we're "eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods."

He then asks:

I know food, in general, is a very sensitive topic for a lot of people, but what do you think should and can be done in the short term to make the industrialized food chain better? What products should Wal-Mart have that they don't to meet your desires for a more sustainable food assortment? If you could choose one item you would want removed from stores, what would it be?

Dr. Nestle: Remove one item? I'd say cigarettes--which is what Wegmans has already done--but I think it's the wrong question. Wal-Mart needs to ask a different question: What could Wal-Mart do to promote a more sustainable food system?

Here, the answer is lots. Retailers control the food chain. If retailers say "we insist that our suppliers demonstrate that their foods are grown sustainably," guess what: they will be. So how about Wal-Mart sets up some standards for the production of foods it sells? That ought to have an immediate impact.

Well, of course, where else would you expect to find America’s first feng shui’d fast food outlet? A McDonald’s in the Los Angeles suburb of Hacienda Heights has opted to bag the golden arches’ classic red, yellow, and plast-icky décor in favor of “leather seats, earth tones, bamboo plants and water trickling down glass panels.” As the AP reports:

One of the owners, Mark Brownstein, explained that he and his partners hope to benefit from their proximity to a renowned Buddhist temple, which is supposed to bring good luck. They’re also betting that the more serene setting will attract the area’s growing Asian population, as well as other customers seeking to “tap their inner Zen,” as Brownstein put it.

Now, I happen to be a big fan of feng shui myself, despite having spent my whole adult life as a jaded New Yorker. Some vestige of my Valley Girl childhood compelled me to pick up a paperback called Feng Shui Tips For a Better Life a few years back. This handy little how-to persuaded me that I had nothing to lose by hanging a few strategically placed wind chimes and mirrors and painting my front door red.

When my feng shui “cures” actually started to work, I became a believer and even an amateur practitioner of sorts, advising friends on how to cope with a toilet located in their “relationship corner,” or a collection of chi-crushing clutter (chi being the “life force” that gets squished under stacks of unread New Yorkers or neglected Netflix.)

The layout of our own apartment is the reason why Matt and I are so obsessed with food, according to Sarah Rossbach's “Interior Design with Feng Shui:

The doorway to our kitchen is barely a foot from the entrance, so food seems destined to be the center of our universe, if you buy into feng shui theory.

The Hacienda Heights McDonald’s is buyin’ it, but while its décor has been overhauled to inspire good health, happiness and prosperity, the menu is still larded with the same old artery-clogging, cruelty-contaminated animal products. Talk about a chi-killer! Oh, that Agribiz aftertaste.

If McDonald’s really wants to create a healthier, more life-enhancing dining experience, they might want to fine tune their feedlot-flavored menu. Yeah, I know they sell salads; they just don’t promote them. Consider the "dollar menu"; you can get a double cheeseburger, or a side salad. Which do you think most folks are gonna choose? Would it kill them to offer an entrée salad for a buck?

Too bad Bob Langert, McDonald’s Vice President for Corporate Social Responsibility, just went on sabbatical a couple of weeks ago, or I’d ask him why McDonald’s continues to come up with gluttony-glorifying, planet-polluting stuff like the Angus Third Pounder. As the experts who met at an Oxford University-sponsored health conference in Sydney last weekend just announced, obesity and other "lifestyle diseases" are killing millions more people than, say, the terrorism our government is spending billions to combat.

The Sydney conference attendees also noted that “insufficient physical exercise is a risk factor in many chronic diseases and is estimated to cause 1.9 million deaths worldwide each year,” so I’m sure they’d applaud Langert’s decision to take a break and work on his backhand. If only his time off would also encourage some forward thinking. Sorry, dude, but bad food will never be good feng shui.

Q. What do tree huggers, animal lovers, nutrition experts, and Michael Pollan have in common?

A. They all want YOU to eat more plants and fewer animals.

This may be a tall order in our “where’s the beef” culture, but with meat consumption fingered as a major factor in climate change, more and more carnivores have been cowed into cutting back on factory farmed flesh.

OK, so you’re not ready to become a Seitan worshipper, but you’d like to try to steer clear of steer-based cuisine. Looking for some inspiration on how to minimize the meat in your meals? You can’t do better than Veganomicon, a witty compendium which brashly—and accurately—declares itself to be “the Ultimate Vegan Cookbook.”

How good is this book? My meat-loving better half picked up my just-bought copy last night and was still drooling over the recipes a half hour later.

Veganomicon’s been on my must-read list ever since I heard its authors, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, on NPR’s Weekend Edition a month ago. But being a blogger on a budget, I don’t dash out to buy every book that whets my appetite. And being a dumbass, I don’t think to just call the publisher and say, hey, will you send me a copy of this awesome-sounding book so I can blog about how awesome it is? (The publisher of this particular book is, like, six blocks away from me; I probably could have just walked over there and asked for a copy.)

But no, my strategy is to add tantalizing titles to my wish list at the Strand, which enables us impoverished book junkies to feed our habit by discounting new books. So when the Strand called to say that my copy of Veganomicon had arrived, I popped over to pick it up and brought it to the cashier. “Do you need a bag?” she asked.

“Nah, that’s OK, I’ve got one,” I said, pulling out my obligatory cloth bag. And it’s a good thing I had remembered to bring it, too, because I ran into No Impact Man on my way home, pedaling down Fifth Avenue in his trademark three-wheeled No Impact Mobile loaded up with locavore staples from the Greenmarket. How embarrassing would that have been, if he’d spotted me with a plastic bag carrying a book on how to eat more sustainably?

We chatted a bit about saving kitchen scraps and the world (though not in that order), and then I went home to inspect my new acquisitions.

Since Matt snatched Veganomicon out of my hands before I could sink my teeth into it, I haven’t yet read it cover to cover. But skimming through its pages, I was captivated by the authors’ lively, engaging tone and the thoughtfully written sections addressing the challenges that are unique to vegan cooking and baking.

What really shines through and makes Veganomicon so appealing, though, is Moskowitz and Romero’s obvious passion for making tasty dishes, from non-carnivorous variations on classic comfort foods to more exotic entrees seasoned by all kinds of ethnic flavors. Number one on my can’t-wait-to-make list is the acorn squash, pear, and adzuki soup with sautéed shitakes, followed by the tangerine baked tofu. Matt’s first choice is the banana-chocolate chip bread pudding; I’ll be first in line to try it.

This book makes mincemeat of the myth that vegan cuisine is all about sacrifice; it’s not. What really good vegan cooking does is celebrate the amazingly diverse, delicious range of vegetables, fruits and grains that we meat eaters too often overlook. Moskowitz and Romero have perfected a brand of vegan cooking that “draws influences from every part of the world to create an entirely new way to eat.” And it’s exactly the way we need to start eating, now, if we want to save this wonderful ol’ world.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: I just finished Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, and found it to be a fairly scathing indictment of our corroded, corrupted food chain. Any book that calls on Americans to boycott CAFOs and support CSAs is A-OK with me.

But—and this is a big but—I was perplexed that he seems to embrace the “fat is a faux foe” school of thought, which purports that the link between saturated fat consumption and heart disease, diabetes, and obesity is some kind of medical myth. Pollan suggests other potential--and plausible--villains: excess consumption of carbs; insufficient exercise; round-the-clock snacking; the lack of diversity in the Western diet that deprives us of so many crucial nutrients, and so on.

According to this theory, fat is just a red herring (chock full of omega 3’s, presumably) and the connection between the cholesterol in our food and the cholesterol in our blood is another myth, a marketing ploy to sell margarine. So why does every doctor I know tell me to watch my borderline-high cholesterol and go easy on the cheese? Are they all suckers, Lipitor lemmings, co-conspirators in a big fat hoax?

Dr. Nestle: Cheers for Michael Pollan's new book and the great work he is doing to teach everyone about food systems. Of course I love his book. It says exactly what I did in What to Eat, and he is a journalist with a broader reach. I don't see his book as an exhortation to eat more fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. On the contrary, his advice is crystal clear: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." This is just what I said in What to Eat: "Eat less, move more, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, and don't eat too much junk food." It's also just what federal agencies have been advising for the last 30 years, although in code.

As I am constantly trying to explain, the science of nutrition is complicated. I am not aware of any disagreement that high blood cholesterol is a risk factor for coronary heart disease. But it's just a risk factor. That means that people with higher blood cholesterol levels have a greater chance of developing coronary heart disease. How much greater? It depends. Risk factors just mean that on average, across the population, the chance is greater, but for any one individual the specific risk is uncertain and depends on all the other dietary, behavioral, environmental, and genetic factors that also affect risk. As for saturated fat: Surely there is no disagreement that it raises the risk of higher blood cholesterol levels, almost as much as trans fats do. Here too, we are talking about risk, not inevitability.

In the late 1980s, at least three American and international health agencies (the Department of Health and Human Services, the Institute of Medicine, and the World Health Organization) issued enormous reports reviewing the evidence and concluding that people would have a lower risk of chronic diseases if they ate less fat. I was involved in the one from DHHS--the Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health--so I know something about the thinking at that time.

Two factors were involved. The first was scientific: by reducing overall fat intake, people would automatically reduce their intake of both saturated fat and calories and, therefore, reduce their risk of heart disease and obesity-related diseases all at once. The second was political: the principal food sources of saturated fats are meat and dairy products. So advice to eat less saturated fat really means the politically impossible “eat less meat and dairy foods.” In this political context, “eat less total fat” was a euphemism for “eat less of foods of animal origin.”

What none of us could foresee was the food industry's response--to flood the market with low-fat products that contained just as many calories, this time from sugars (among them, high fructose corn syrup). "Low-fat," as we now know from Brian Wansink's work, is a signal to eat more calories. So it’s no surprise that people gained weight. One of the things I like most about Pollan's book is its emphasis on foods, not nutrients. We now understand that to focus on fat or carbohydrates outside of their food sources is to confuse the issues. So is a focus on nutrients without taking calories into consideration. Pollan’s book gives good advice about what to eat and is a great start to the new year.

I’ve been a diehard Michael Pollan fan ever since I read his first book, Second Nature, back in 1991. So I can never wait for the next Pollan book to come out—and, thanks to the Strand bookstore, my trusty source for review copies—I never have to. (Pollan himself was perplexed last April when I handed him my copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma to sign at a Manhattan book party on the day it was released, asking “Where’d you get this?”)

His new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, is due out on New Year’s Day, so the Strand landed me a copy just in time for Christmas. I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I do love the choice of a pristine head of red Romaine—the variety of lettuce richest in iron, potassium, and folate--as the “cover crop” for a book bemoaning the rise of “nutritionism.” Rich in irony, too.

In Defense of Food’s subtitle, An Eater’s Manifesto, is a subterfuge: what lies beneath those nutrient-packed bronze and green leaves is really an out-and-out assault on the way America eats. Culture wars? That’s so last century. Welcome to the agri-culture wars, where Big Food, Agribiz, food scientists, and nutritionists battle not for our hearts and minds but our stomachs.

Pollan documents the decline of “real” foods in our diet—i.e., things that our grandparents would recognize as edible--and the corresponding dominance of processed, packaged substances full of gobbledy-gook ingredients masquerading as food on our supermarket shelves. Beware of packaged foods making health claims, he warns; the mere fact that a food is in a package means it’s already been processed, and is therefore, in all likelihood, less nutritious than the more wholesome produce that languishes on the supermarket sidelines, its health benefits unlabelled and unballyhooed.

The FDA, “under tremendous pressure from industry,” Pollan notes, “has made it only easier for food companies to make increasingly doubtful health claims…When corn oil and chips and sugary breakfast cereals can all boast being good for your heart, health claims have become hopelessly corrupt.”

And don’t look to nutritionists and the latest diet studies to help you make wiser choices, according to Pollan, who dissects the flawed methodologies and contradictory findings behind all the food fads that have left consumers so befuddled about what to eat. The low-fat craze gave way to the low-carb craze, which has in turn fed the “fat is just a scapegoat” mini-craze. Oddly enough, Pollan buys into this latest fad, which claims (among other things) that saturated fats and cholesterol don’t contribute to heart disease after all.

His dismissal of the “lipid hypotheses” seems to be based on some pretty sketchy science, so I’m according it the same skepticism he directs towards all the other nutritional studies. Yes, there are plenty of pharmaceuticals making billions off of cholesterol-lowering drugs, but I’m not sure that means there’s a conspiracy to convince us all that high cholesterol is unhealthy.

Pollan notes that the meat-heavy Western diet inevitably leads to high rates of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes in every culture that adopts it, but theorizes that this may be due to the foods we’re not eating—namely, fruits, vegetables and whole grains--rather than an excess consumption of animal fats.

In Defense of Food documents, in depressing detail, how the advent of industrial agriculture has robbed the American diet of anything resembling diversity:

Pollan cites the endless incarnations of corn and soy that the food industry foists on us before concluding that the only way to achieve a truly varied diet of predominantly plant-based, naturally nutritious whole foods is to simply stay out of the supermarket altogether, if possible, and rely on farmers’ markets instead. If only there were enough farmers’ markets across the country to make that a viable option for more Americans.

His other prescriptions for our overweight, undernourished nation? “Pay More, Eat Less”—i.e., the ol’ quality over quantity adage. Scale back the Paul Bunyonesque portions, if you don’t want to look like a lumberjack on steroids. And for pete’s sake, stop with the snacking! I went to Radio Shack the other day to buy some batteries and was astonished to see a candy kiosk; is there any other country in the world where junk food is so ubiquitous? The so-called French paradox is not such a mystery, according to Pollan—they frown on snacking and seconds. We glorify gluttony and grotesquely large portions.

So we consume soda, chips, cookies and candy all day long, but we no longer have time to prepare a decent meal, much less to sit down and savor it with friends or family. The antidote for this sorry state? Pollan gives a nod to Carlos Petrini and his Slow Food movement:

Pollan’s final piece of advice is my favorite: “Cook, And, If You Can, Plant a Garden.” As a longtime edible landscaping enthusiast, I know well the joys (and sorrows) of growing your own food, and the way it connects you to the seasons, and the land. Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but it’s a gratifying kind of labor, and besides, when things go wrong, as Pollan notes, “gardening cultivates in you a deep respect for the skill of the farmer who knows how consistently to get it right.”

The simple act of growing one’s own food was a nearly universal skill a few generations back, but after World War II, we let the military industrial complex invade our pantries and install a regime of partially hydrogenated hucksters and high fructose corn syrup imposters, relegating real food to the fringes of the shaggy left. We built sterile strip malls on fertile farmland and became so alienated from nature that we didn’t realize, until a little birdy told us, that we were fouling our own nest when we saturated the air and soil with toxins.

What Pollan advocates is nothing less than a wholesale rejection of the modern American food chain. It’s a radical proposal, he admits:

Pollan is just the latest agri-culture warrior to call for a return to real foods; In Defense of Food is, as he admits, “a work of synthesis, built on a foundation of research and thinking laid by others.” Indeed. If the snappy slogan that sums up Pollan’s book—“Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants”—sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it echoes the mantra of one of the mentors Pollan acknowledges, NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle, who wrote in her book What to Eat last year:

The basic principles of good diets are so simple that I can summarize them in just ten words: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables.

Pollan’s succeeded in reducing Nestle’s formula to a mere seven words, which, in this era of ever shorter attention spans, is, I suppose, a public service. In any case, In Defense of Food is a welcome addition to the arsenal of agri-prop lit. The fight for a saner, shorter food chain is just heating up, and I’m grateful we have a compelling voice like Pollan’s to help rally the troops.

Industrial agriculture may be perfectly legal, but it defies the laws of nature, as Michael Pollan pointed out in Sunday’s New York Times in an excellent piece entitled “Our Decrepit Food Factories.”

Proponents of factory farming inevitably cite the “efficiency” of breeding thousands of animals in close quarters. But there’s growing evidence that this mass production of meat and poultry is also a super-efficient way to breed super-bugs like MRSA, “the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS,” according to Pollan.

Pollan also addresses the “colony collapse disorder” that’s decimating the honeybees we depend on to pollinate a third of all our food crops. Why should anyone be surprised that when you pump the bees full of high fructose corn syrup and truck them cross country from one monoculture crop to the next, they succumb to some mysterious malady? The real mystery is why we think we can go on doing this stuff.

The fundamental—and fatal—flaw of industrial agriculture is that it simply disregards the needs of every living organism from the soil on up to the sows. And this systemic abuse of nature is spawning all kinds of illnesses.

Pollan’s far from alone in pointing the finger at factory farms. Today’s Baltimore Sun profiles a community in Pennsylvania that’s fighting the expansion of a nearby hog farm. The 300-acre operation is seeking to expand from 450 pigs to 4,400 despite the fact that the fumes from the farm are already making its neighbors sick:

David Gemmill, the farmer seeking the expansion, insists his farm does not pollute, and he doesn’t abuse antibiotics, so it's “impossible” that his pigs are making anyone sick.

"People get sick every day from something – don't bring that back to the farmer," he told the Baltimore Sun.

Meanwhile, Newsday, citing the same John Hopkins report, notes today that poultry processors who handle "broiler chickens" are at risk of spreading a drug-resistant strain of E. coli.

"We are running out of antibiotics to treat human infections," Lance Price, one of the researchers, told Newsday, adding that, “Nine billion food animals are produced and slaughtered in the United States annually, and all of those animals are defecating and shedding bacteria, including drug-resistant bacteria.”

Consumer demand for chicken gave rise to the factory farms with their cramped pens and excessive reliance on hormones and antibiotics. Unfortunately, it’s becoming pretty clear that it’s also creating a rise in infectious organisms.

This is great news for all us animal rights activists, and environmentalists, and nutritionists. The factory farms have been making us sick for decades. Now it looks like the rest of the country’s starting to catch up. There’s a new consumer demand—for humanely raised food that’s not a vehicle for disease.

That ‘s why Compass Group—the world's largest food service provider with 7,500 clients in the United States—just announced that it’s implementing a cage-free shell egg policy, according to the Humane Society of the United States. The policy will be phased in over the next ninety days, “and it will affect about 48 million eggs annually,” the HSUS reports.

Cheryl Queen, Compass Group vice president of corporate communications, told HSUS, “This is a huge undertaking for our company, but we're proud to be making such a significant contribution to the welfare of farm animals."

Wayne Pacelle, HSUS president, lauded Compass Group's decision as “truly a major advance. It offers hope that one of the worst factory farming abuses is on its way out…”

Battery cage eggs have taken a beating in the press, lately, proving that consumers want a more humane food chain. We want a healthy food chain, too. Will the link between our mass-produced food and massive outbreaks of disease be the straw that breaks this corn-fed camel’s back? Finally, it’s not just us chickens who are saying that the sky is falling on the factory farms.

Guest Blogger Annie Myers

(Kat: This past Monday, I had to choose between attending a talk by No Impact Man and a panel at NYU on the farm bill. I opted for NIM—more on that later—but happily for us, one of NYU’s Real Food movement movers and shakers, Annie Myers, attended the panel, titled “The Farm Bill 2007: Understanding the Political, Agricultural, and Nutritional Impact” with guests Marion Nestle, Dan Barber, and Christina Grace. Here’s Annie’s oh-so-astute take, cross-posted from her blog, Thoughts on the Table):

Michael Pollan must have come up eleven times in the two-hour event. With all due respect for the author to whom I might as well dedicate most of my writing, I can’t help but wonder who the next hero will be. We need a new one.

First up of the three guests on the Monday night panel, Marion Nestle lowered a magnifying glass on one, minute proposal of the Farm Bill, that of Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), regarding nutrition standards for school lunches. The rather dysfunctional proposal has brought on excitement and anger from all sides, including both emotions from the very people who had advocated for just such a bill. The “its-better-than-nothing”s endorse the proposal, the “its-too-easy-for-corporations”s say no, and Nestle herself supports the bill with extreme hesitation, and a roll of the eyes. Her reason for speaking about the proposal at all was that “no issue is too small” for the Farm Bill. Even this one little provision attracted pages of published controversy, and it’s one of a gazillion clauses included in a monster legislation. Over a thousand pages long, the Farm Bill is accessible to no one, and understood by not a single member of the House of Congress. Clearly, Nestle concluded, there’s something wrong with how this legislation works.

Nestle was hinting at a perspective I’ve found particularly lacking in the movement for agriculture guided by sustainable, worker-supportive, fair trade principles. We who are up for it sludge through the Farm Bill, and the best of us – whether we’re organizations, institutions, or just crazy individuals - come up with proposals that cut subsidies, end subsidies, fund specialty crop research, or at least somehow cut down on this CORN production, that we’ve all learned from Michael Pollan is a major reason for why we’re stingy, fat, and hated.

What we DON’T consider, is scrapping the Farm Bill altogether. It’s demonstrably ridiculous, in and of itself. To address 3 million square miles of land with 1 Farm Bill simply doesn’t make sense. Agriculture is regional, for one thing. Not only are the culture and politics different in Iowa than in New York, but the land is too, and the climate. A bill with provisions for avocados in California should not be legislating the cows in Maine. Nutrition and Hunger and Agriculture and Trade may be much like adults playing Twister - mischievously intermingled, entirely inseparable, and always (somewhere) hurting – but these forces of the economy need not share the same budget and bed.

Money to support agricultural research should not detract from Emergency Food Programs, and whomever pens provisions for popular exports should not simultaneously sign off on subsidies deemed illegal by the WTO. Not to mention that politicians hassled by agricultural lobbyists shouldn’t be forgiven for forgetting nutrition programs in the meantime! And New York City representatives who disregard something called a “Farm Bill” just because they’re city folk shouldn’t have to be told that the “ag” legislation is crucial to aid New York City’s nearly 1.3 million food insecure individuals. How can we blame politicians for siding with big industrial agribusiness, or settling for the status quo, when the alternative (of actually reading the Farm Bill, and figuring out what’s best for one’s state) is as daunting as Tolstoy! It’s much easier to let Monsanto, Archer Daniels, or Cargill explain the Farm Bill like a bedtime story.

Of course, the Farm Bill proposals of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Oxfam, and the National Family Farm Coalition, for example, are innovative and progressive, and are certainly steps in the right direction. But we need to think bigger than a Farm Bill proposal. We need to take the twister-playing issues in the Farm Bill and get them interacting through a different game: synchronized swimming, perhaps, or a maypole dance.

In response to my concerns, Nestle said that election funding really has to change. As long as we have the Iowa Caucus, she said, no presidential candidate is gonna stick their neck out for truly progressive agricultural policy. Maybe she’s right. I’m not sure what we need. But we can at least take the new, trendy interest in the Farm Bill further than the “Buy this! Buy that! Vote with your dollar!” mantra, and foster some truly innovative, political thought. If people did it in the ‘30s, and the ‘70s, we can sure as hell do it now.

Recommended Links:
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)
National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC)
Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group
Midwest Sustainable Agriculture Working Group
OXFAM
And for more coverage of the panel, visit the Wild Green Yonder.

Some Parties with Potential:
Nyeleni
Landless Workers Movement
Via Campesina

One of the more novel cookbooks in our collection is a little World War II vintage number called Cooking Without Meat. Published in 1943, it begins:

Back then, life during wartime meant enduring all kinds of shortages. Ironically, it was the post-World War II surplus of petro-chemicals that fueled the rise of industrial agriculture in America, as Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

So, thanks to our military-industrial-fueled food chain, food rationing is a thing of the past (although we’re reportedly running low on bullets.) America’s positively marinating in meat. A food shortage is inconceivable in a land that produces enough food to supply every man, woman and child with 3900 calories a day—nearly double what the average person actually needs.

Whether you regard this uber-efficient system of food production as a plus or a minus depends on whether you’re a multinational conglomerate that profits from this glut, or just a no-name glutton. What’s clear, though, is that the average American actually ate better during the supposed deprivations of World War II than most of us do now; between cutting back on meat, and harvesting all those fresh, homegrown veggies from their victory gardens, Americans had a far healthier diet then--and, not coincidentally, a lower incidence of disease.

Now we’re importing our meat-centric diet, and the diseases it breeds, to the rest of the world, resulting in what the World Health Organization has dubbed the “globesity” epidemic. Excessive meat consumption is exacerbating global warming, too, because livestock production turns out to be a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions.

And as global warming worsens weather conditions such as droughts and floods, food production all over the world is in jeopardy. But just as we’ve figured out that we affluent nations need to eat less meat, meat consumption is skyrocketing in newly prosperous developing nations, to the consternation of climate change experts. A recent article in the venerable British medical journal the Lancet makes “the case for restricting production and consumption of red meat:”

Of course, being a medical journal, the Lancet also emphasizes the many health benefits of eating less red meat. But it’s kind of a moot point, because if we can’t reign in our greenhouse gas emissions, our collective goose is cooked, anyway. Uncle Sam’s asleep at the wheel—and he wouldn’t dream of asking us to curb our carbon footprint, anyway, whether by carpooling, say, or skipping the steak. Because, you know, that would be un-American.

But that’s no excuse for the rest of us to remain in a carbon-induced coma. Nature is asking us, nicely, to change our wasteful ways before it’s too late. So you can choose to change now, or you can have change thrust upon you later, when we’ve reached the point of no return. To paraphrase a 70’s margarine mantra, it’s not nice to fuel Mother Nature.

Why are we treating our kids like cattle? We herd them into school cafeterias and pump them full of grain-based by-products, and confine them to classrooms to cram for all those No Child Left Behind tests. It’s like a federally mandated feedlot for tots, a government sanctioned program whose goal seems to be No Child Left Without a Big Behind.

And then we wonder Why Johnny Can’t See His Feet. “Eat more fruits and vegetables!” they tell him. “Get out and play!” they say.

Surely, nourishing our children well is a high priority for our government when it crafts a new farm bill every five years.

Except that it’s not. Our agricultural policies push “commodity” crops like corn and soybeans at the expense of so-called “specialty crops,” i.e. all those fruits and vegetables they tell us to feed our kids. So we fatten the bottom line of industrial agriculture, which in turn fattens our collective waistline and fosters an epidemic of obesity related illness.

As a bonus, industrial agriculture also poisons our environment, pollutes our waterways, depletes our soil, abuses animals, squanders fossil fuels, and exploits workers. Your tax dollars at work.

And yet you’ve probably never even thought about our nation’s farm bill. It sounds both too bureaucratic and too bucolic to have any real relevance to your life.

Well, wake up and smell the CAFOS. Michael Pollan, on the frontlines of the “real food” revolution, tells us why the farm bill matters to every American in a NY Times Magazine article entitled “You Are What You Grow:”

But Pollan’s optimistic that this year’s farm bill will be different, because the good food movement is gaining steam, giving even perennial pessimists like me reason to hope. Much of my newfound optimism comes courtesy of my colleagues in the New York City Food Systems Network, a coalition of nutritionists, anti-hunger activists, farmers’ market advocates, sustainability scholars, and other fine folks dedicated to changing the way we grow our food and feed our families.

One of the driving forces behind the NYCFSN, Hilary Baum, also founded the Baum Forum, a non-profit dedicated to promoting local agriculture, better food in schools and a healthier food system for everyone.

Her Baum Forum regularly hosts stellar-paneled conferences that feature the finest foot soldiers in the battle for better food, and she’s got another amazing conference lined up for this Saturday, April 21st: “Schools, Food and Gardening: Cultivating a Healthy Future,” a day-long conference at Columbia University co-sponsored by the Nutrition Program at Columbia’s Teachers College.

We’ll get the sustainable scoop from organic pioneer Joan Dye Gussow, whose memoir This Organic Life persuaded me to plant paw paws, and a dose of post-Katrina progress from Anthony Recasner, who heads the charter school that’s home to the New Orleans Edible Schoolyard.

And I can’t wait to see the demonstration of those self-watering Earth Box planters, so efficient at growing produce that the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has adopted them as part of The Growing Connection campaign to help communities all over the world grow their own food.

If you’re in our neck of the woods, we hope you’ll join us, but you can board the real food bandwagon wherever you are. Get up to speed by reading Daniel Imhoff’s Foodfight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, with a forward by Michael Pollan. Imhoff’s taken a dry topic and made it wry with his well-illustrated and entertaining compendium of all the collateral damage our misguided agricultural policies have wreaked on ourselves and our environment.

But Imhoff doesn’t just diagnose the many sicknesses of our food system, he offers the antidote, which, not surprisingly, calls for a massive dose of citizen activism:

And who wouldn’t be in favor of all that? I mean, aside from Archer Daniels Midlands, Cargill, Monsanto, and all their Big Food buddies. Do we live in a democracy, or a cornarchy?

From a story in yesterday’s NY Times entitled “Adolescents Aren’t Eating Their Vegetables:”

More research, my ass. Reaching out? Please. From Madison Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue, from K Street to Wall Street, our government and global food conglomerates have created a food system that pretty much bypasses fresh fruits and vegetables.

Consider our agricultural policies, which categorize fruits and vegetables as “specialty crops.” So, fruits and vegetables themselves must be “specialty foods,” right? Great way to marginalize the very foods that the USDA keeps telling us form the foundation of a healthy diet.

Fruits and vegetables may be high in nutrients, but they couldn’t be lower in clout with consumers. Michael Pollan calls it “the silence of the yams:”

There’s no level playing field for fruits and vegetables in a country where corn is king, and the ethanol boondoggle seems set to ensure that corn remains the cornerstone of American agriculture for the foreseeable future. In fact, we’re about to start planting even more corn, according to a report from the AP today:

Climbing corn prices are already causing angst for agribiz. Cheap corn, after all, has been “the very foundation of America’s historically (and unrealistically) low food prices,” as an editorial in the NY times noted yesterday.

Wouldn’t it be delicious if the high cost of corn ended up cannibalizing Big Food? Then maybe fruits and veggies could stand a fighting chance.

I’ve finally figured out what’s really fueling the obesity epidemic: energy conservation.

A little light bulb—fluorescent, of course—went on over my head the other day while I was mulling over the ever-expanding girth of our nation. Our climate controlled, carbon-based consumer culture squanders prodigious amounts of energy, but there’s one form of energy we are truly stellar at conserving: our own.

A calorie is a unit of measurement for energy, after all. And it’s the one form of energy we hoard. We’ve come to believe that exertion is an evil to be avoided at all costs.

All you You Tube young ‘uns can’t conceive of the hardships we once endured in this country: rotary telephones that forced our fingers to dial; televisions whose channels had to be manually changed; long-playing records we had to flip over to get to the B side; garage doors we got out of our cars to open; lawn mowers we pushed across the grass without benefit of gas.

We’re long since liberated from that Luddite era, and we’re saving calories left and right. In fact, we’ve made ourselves stocky by stockpiling them. Add our ever-increasing caloric intake to the equation and you’ve got an unprecedented energy surplus.

Our bodies, alas, are still stuck in “hunter-gatherer” mode. Our reptilian brain assumes that all this sitting around and stuffing our faces means we’re preparing for a famine, or maybe hibernation. So our metabolism shuts down and our body braces for starvation.

“In twenty years, failure to exercise six days a week will seem as self-destructive as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day,” according to Dr. Henry S. Lodge. Lodge, an internist, is the co-author of Younger Next Year, a guide to avoiding the decrepitude we’ve come to accept as a natural part of aging:

Michael Pollan tackled this topic in Sunday’s NY Times:

Pollan’s prescription for what ails America: don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food; skip the supermarkets and processed food products; buy fresh produce at the farmers’ market if possible; eat less meat, more leafy greens; be willing to spend more money for less food; eat a diverse diet based on the traditional food cultures of other countries; and my favorite:

Unfortunately, an awful lot of Americans regard chopping vegetables and digging in the dirt as dreary, demeaning tasks that should be delegated to poorly paid immigrants. And then there are those who’d love to putter around in the kitchen or the yard, but they’re too busy working two jobs to pay the bills or keep their health insurance.

The “blessed” American way of life, as Ari Fleischer famously termed it, sometimes seems like more of a curse. Our soldiers are getting slaughtered and innocent civilians are dying in the Middle East for the sake of a fossil fueled culture that causes its own kind of collateral damage. How do we convince people that the path of least resistance is leading us into an abyss of illness and inertia, not to mention an international morass?

Michael Pollan’s been running around the country scribbling “Vote With Your Fork!” at book signings for his bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The idea is to boycott the industrial food chain by, say, shopping at farmers’ markets or joining a CSA.

But as Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle and Pollan himself noted at the Princeton conference last week, we can’t just shop our way out of the problems plaguing our food system. We have to change our nation’s agricultural policies.

A slide in Nestle’s power point presentation summed the problem up nicely; for $5, McDonald’s will sell you five burgers or one salad. While the FDA dutifully chants the “more fruits and vegetables” mantra, our government manages to make beef cost less than lettuce thanks to the agricultural subsidies that make fast food so “cheap.”

Fresh produce, by contrast, is for the privileged, or at least that’s the perception. A faint aura of elitism hangs over the stalls at the Greenmarket, with its artisanal cheeses and biodynamic purple broccoli. Foodies find all kinds of exotic--and expensive--epicurean oddities and delights.

But farmers’ markets are actually a pretty egalitarian enterprise; where else do shoppers rub shoulders with world-class chefs vying for the finest and freshest from our local farmers? And most of the produce isn’t pricey at all—there’s no middleman, so your dollar goes farther, and it all goes to the farmer.

The problem is that farmers’ markets are generally located in more affluent neighborhoods, while many poor communities are a virtual wasteland of bodegas and fast food joints. This sad phenomenon even has a name, now; such neighborhoods are known as “food deserts,” i.e., “areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food.”

We’ve come a long way since that historic day on February 1st, 1960, when four young black men launched a sit-in at a “whites only” lunch counter in a Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“I wanted a cheeseburger with french fries,” recalled Jibreel Khazan, whose name at the time was Ezell Blair Jr. Woolworth’s refused to serve him.

Now, of course, there’s no shortage of fast food joints flooding the inner cities with all the cheeseburgers and fries they can stomach—and then some. What’s lacking is access to healthy foods. The end result has been an explosion of obesity and diabetes among the poor; it’s a terrible cost to pay for all those cheap calories.

There’s a movement to fight the food deserts, with programs to bring more farmers’ markets to poor communities and school cafeterias that serve food from local farms. We need to encourage these efforts, but we’ve also got to lean on our government to scale back the subsidies that promote agribusiness monoculture, and ramp up support for the small and medium-sized farms that grow all those fruits and vegetables the FDA keeps telling us we need to eat more of.

Let’s see them put their money where their mouth is, because this “eat what we say, not what we subsidize” routine is getting really old. The message from Marion Nestle and her “food cop” colleagues? Get political. Fight the food system that makes beets cost more than beef.

Update: Submitted by kat on November 22, 2006 - 03:01pm.

From my lips to God’s ears: Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn have just announced that New York City will name a food policy czar who will be charged with raising the amount of healthy food sold in low-income neighborhoods. Here’s hoping other cities will follow suit.