Interview with food writer Michael Pollan

posted by Geoff Andrews at Saturday, February 16, 2008

The dramatic resurgence of food to the top of the political agendas of many western countries has brought many new dilemmas. One is trying to decipher truth from fiction in the voluminous material on health, diet, and the environment that we are offered through the media. Another is whether the traditional ‘experts’ – food scientists, nutritionists and dieticians – can any longer be trusted, given the range of conflicting advice we receive. A third, increasingly important, dilemma is how can we, as citizens, intervene effectively ourselves on these urgent questions?

The American food writer Michael Pollan has attempted to confront these questions head on in his latest book, In Defence of Food. His message at one level is simple: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’. At another level, he offers a wide-ranging critique of the food industry, for its flawed experts, narrow interests and ideology.

In the UK to promote his book, we meet for coffee at the Covent Garden Hotel in central London. He has been surprised by the warm reception his book has received throughout the US, including in some unlikely places. Despite the strength of his critique of the current food industry, he remains optimistic that things will change and he reveals a ‘Vote With Your Fork’ T-shirt under his pullover.

He told me that his latest book is ‘less political’ than his last, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which provided a thorough interrogation of the whole cycle of food, from the time of its production to its arrival on our plate. His current book, which starts with an ‘eater’s manifesto’, is a shorter, more practical guide to action. ‘I’m really trying to reach beyond the foodies who recognise the issue and draw some new people in’, he says. The US sales confirm this wider appeal of the book and it has now reached the top of the bestseller’s list. In Britain, the publication of his book closely followed Jamie Oliver’s latest public intervention on battery chickens (Jamie’s Fowl Dinners) and Pollan is due at the Newsnight studios that evening.

In Defence of Food is, however, a profoundly political book. It offers a critique of what Pollan calls the ‘ideology of nutritionism’ and situates the origins of the crisis over food in a systemic and historical context. In the book, he discusses the power of the food industry, notably how the nutritionists established hegemony over our understanding of food. This was done by discarding more traditional sources of food knowledge in the process, and has resulted in the pleasures of eating being denigrated by flawed health experts.

In his book Pollan argues that:

‘as eaters we find ourselves in the grip of a Nutritional Industrial Complex comprised of well-meaning, if error-prone, scientists and food marketers only too eager to exploit every shift in the nutritional consensus. Together, and with some crucial help from the government, they have constructed an ideology of nutritionism that, among other things, has convinced us of three pernicious myths; that what matters most is not the food but the “nutrient”; that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; and that the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health’.

Nutritionism has its roots in the 1960s with the onset of what he calls ‘industrial eating’ and the impact this brought for governments’ concern for the diets of their citizens. In the US this resulted in the Senate Select Commission on Nutrition and Human Needs that was set up in 1968 and reported in 1977. According to Pollan, after lobbying from red meat and dairy producers who had much to lose from reduced intake of these foods, the committee shifted its attention from food itself and paved the way for the new age of nutritionism.

Nutritionism, like all other ideologies, imposes a particular way of living – in this case eating - through its widely shared beliefs and assumptions. This ideology includes a whole new vocabulary of eating well, based on the intake of nutrients, and products defined by their share of ‘polyunsaturated’, ‘low-fat’, ‘antioxidants’, ‘probiotics’, ‘amino acids’, ‘no-cholesterol’, ‘high fibre’, and copious lists of additives, chemicals and compounds. The ideology of nutritionism, driven by the food marketing industry, has also delineated ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nutrients, which add up to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ eating and living habits. Pollan argues that, as a consequence, from the 1980s onwards it became increasingly difficult to see through this façade. He told me that ‘for too long nutrition has dominated the way we look at the food issue’.

Yet he remains optimistic and talks encouragingly of the lively food movement which has grown in the USA and elsewhere. Here the emphasis has been on cultivating, distributing and eating real food. He sees food as a profoundly political issue drawing in a whole range of questions about culture, personal choices and the global economy. ‘Food can reach so many other areas’. He thinks the politicians ‘do not recognise the power of the food issue’, though at times in the current US primary elections, for example, they have been ‘afraid to play’ the food politics card. However he has been encouraged by some of Barack Obama’s speeches, though most of his optimism has been from the movements on the ground amongst the vibrant farmers’ markets, or from the campaigns by activists and parents to change school lunches.

He suggests that the origins of the contemporary movements around food lie in the counter culture of the 1960s. This was the time of the ‘back to the land’ campaign and the start of the organic movement (even though the term itself wasn’t used then). It was the era of free speech and dreamy idealism which politicised people like Alice Waters, who set up her Chez Panisse restaurant in 1971 as a celebration of the simple pleasures of food, and has subsequently been involved in counter cultural educational initiatives around food. Pollan argues that the sixties’ idea that the ‘personal is political’ has profound consequences for current debates around food, with personal choices on what to buy and how to eat now the crucial terrain of politics. ‘There is a profound political point about eating; you make the decision’.

Of course the politics of food is not confined to personal choice but depends on big educational campaigns and changes in the food system. He doubts whether we can change the food culture without changing the culture as a whole. Much depends on people rediscovering the pleasures of eating and Pollan talks admiringly of the Slow Food movement in bringing together politics and pleasure. In late August 2008 Pollan will join other food writers, activists, critical consumers and producers at ‘Slow Food Nation’ in San Francisco, the biggest event Slow Food has organised to-date in the US. This will be a mixture of meetings promoting ‘virtuous globalisation’ and tastings of local produce. For Pollan it will be another opportunity to ‘vote with your fork’.

A version of this interview will appear in the UK Slow Food magazine.

For more on Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, published by Allen Lane, click here.

For details of Slow Food Nation click here.