Raise your food awareness

Shelly G. Keller

Photo credit: Alla Malley

No journalist has sparked America’s food revolution more than Michael Pollan. His runaway bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Group, $16), changed the way we think about the pleasures of eating. His latest bestseller, In Defense of Food (Penguin Group, $21.95), challenges us to learn where our food comes from and how it was raised. Pollan says he didn’t expect the impact his books are having on our food awareness. “Farmers tell me they can chart their sales according to my book release dates. When you arm people with information and they learn where food comes from, they make better choices. Making the food chain more transparent is going to have positive effects.” He says the challenge as a writer is finding a microcosm in a big issue. “I try to use ecology as a narrative principal. I don’t mind turning a plant into a hero.” Pollan notes that when In Defense of Food came out, he didn’t think he’d write another book about food, but things have changed. “We have a world-wide food crisis. There’s a very important social movement around food and I’m very devoted to that movement.” His book recommendations focus on two classics on food and the environment, while his third takes a global view of food today.
Here are his picks:

Pollan says Diet for a Small Planet (Ballentine Books, $16.95) by Frances Moore Lappé really got readers thinking about how food affects the world when it was first published in 1972. “People forget that we are picking up the thread of a conversation that was dropped during the Reagan years.” Besides promoting vegetarianism, Diet for a Small Planet emphasized responsible use of the earth’s resources. Pollan adds, “We’re coming to the realization that eating meat is environmentally hard to defend. Food that could be feeding people is being fed to cattle and water is being wasted. Lappé called our attention to eating lower on the food chain.”
He praises The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (Sierra Club Books, $13.95) by Wendell Berry. “In 1977 Berry wrote about the environmental crisis as a crisis of character. It’s about how we live—the sum total of all decisions we make every day about how we organize our lives.” Berry points out that because Americans are divorced from the land, we mistreat it; because we are divorced from each other, we mistreat those around us. He argues that if we are to heal our environmental wounds, we must renounce an economic system dedicated to the pursuit of products and profits. Pollan says, “Berry writes with alarm and a prophetic voice, but it’s not a bummer book.”
Pollan calls The End of Food (Houghton Mifflin, $26) by Paul Roberts indispensable because it makes a familiar plea for rethinking our food systems. “It’s probably the best analysis of the global food economy that you’re likely to find.” Roberts explains how the food industry is delivering an abundance of calories with less and less nutrition, while consuming about one-fifth of all U.S. energy. As Pollan says, The End of Food helps connect what’s happening in the energy markets with what’s happening in your supermarket and on your plate. And it’s a call for action to address a major food problem right now before it’s too late.