Michael Pollan: Don't Buy Any Food You've Ever Seen Advertised

[Guest guest]

Michael Pollan: " Don't Buy Any Food You've Ever Seen Advertised "

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

Posted on May 15, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/

Amy Goodman: Energy, healthcare, agriculture, climate change, global outbreaks

like swine flu—what do all these topics have in common? Food. That's right, none

of these issues can really be tackled without addressing some of the fundamental

problems of the food system and the American diet.

Well, my next guest is one of the leading writers and thinkers in this country

on food. Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism

at University of California, Berkeley, author of several books about food,

including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma and his latest, In

Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, which just came out in paperback. ...

Let's start with the latest news over the last month, swine flu. How is that

connected to industrialized agriculture?

 

[Michael Pollan talks to Amy Goodman about swine flu outbreak traced to pig

confinement ( " If we could see into this industrial meat production, it would

change the way most of us eat. " ); genetically modified crops don't raise

productivity; " food industry's ingenuity in taking any critique of industrial

food and turning it into the next marketing strategy " (e.g., 5-ingredient ice

cream as " simple " , potato chips as " local " , soft drinks made of sugar instead of

high fructose corn syrup), etc.]

 

Goodman: Well, explain why you were going after high-fructose corn syrup.

Pollan: Well, my argument about high-fructose corn syrup and why you should

avoid it is it is a marker of a highly processed food. I'm just trying to help

people, when they're going through the supermarket—the main thing you want to

avoid is processing, you know, extreme processing. And high-fructose corn

syrup—I mean, think about it. Do you know anyone who cooks with high-fructose

corn syrup? It's not a home—it's not an ingredient you'll find in a home pantry.

It's a tool of food science.

My problem with it is its ubiquity through the food system. You have

high-fructose corn syrup showing up where sugar has never been—in bread, in

pickles, in mayonnaise, in relish, in all these products—that they basically

have found that if you sweeten anything, we will buy more of it. High-fructose

corn syrup is a very convenient, cheap ingredient, because we subsidize the corn

from which it's made.

But to boast about your product not having high-fructose corn syrup as being

some kind of virtue is really stretching it. And I think what we see here is

another example of the food industry's ingenuity in taking any critique of

industrial food and turning it into the next marketing strategy. It's a lot like

the low-fat campaign, you know, which began as a government critique of food,

you know, beginning with George McGovern in the '70s saying we should eat less

red meat because of heart disease. Whatever you think of the science of that,

which turns out not to have been that good, it was a well-meaning campaign to

improve the American diet. Industry came back and re-engineered the whole food

system to have less fat in it and no fat in it. And that campaign sold a lot

more food. And, in fact, since that campaign, we've been eating about 300 more

calories a day, and we're a lot fatter. So, you can't—you just can't

underestimate their ability turn any critique into a way to sell food.

So, I've had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on these

ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don't buy any

food you've ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go

to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don't have money for ad budgets.

So the real food is not being advertised. And that's really all you need to

know.

Goodman: Michael Pollan, the Food and Drug Administration is slapping General

Mills with a warning over its claim that Cheerios is clinically proven to help

lower cholesterol. They say it makes it a drug under federal law.

Pollan: Yeah. Well, good for them. I mean, you know, the FDA has been so lax,

and the reason you see this proliferation of bogus health claims all through the

supermarket has basically been the FDA has been hands-off for a decade. And to

see them tighten a little bit and make these companies prove these health

claims—

You know, another piece of advice from In Defense of Food is, don't eat any food

that comes with a health claim. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you're

worried about your health, that is not the healthy food. The healthy food is in

the produce section. It's sitting there very quietly, without budgets to do this

research, without budgets for marketing, without packages to print health claims

on. So just kind of tune that out.

 

Goodman: What do you make of the new Agricultural Secretary, Tom Vilsack?

Pollan: Well, it's interesting. When Vilsack was appointed, I was disappointed

initially. And I said something like, this was agribusiness as usual. He has

surprised me in various ways, and I have some reason, cautious, for hope. I

think he has a mandate from President Obama to begin reforming things.

He has appointed as his number two—the woman running the Department of

Agriculture, Kathleen Merrigan, is a proven reformer. She developed the organic

program in the department and as a staffer to Senator Leahy back in the '90s.

And she is really committed to sustainable agriculture. This woman will be

running the Department of Agriculture. I think that's wonderful. We'll see what

she can do. She's up against an incredible amount of opposition.

He made an initial move to go after subsidies that was not very well handled and

was rebuffed very easily by the agriculture committees in the House and Senate.

He, I think, will do a lot to support local agriculture. He's very committed to

farmers' markets and developing these local food chains, and I think that's very

encouraging.

But he has a mission to make " nutrition " the watchword of the nutrition programs

in the Department of Agriculture: School Lunch, Food Stamps, WIC. Now, that

sounds kind of " duh, " but, in fact, those programs have nothing to do with

nutrition right now. They're essentially ways to dispose of agricultural

surpluses. So if they actually raise the nutrition standards and make that the

focus—

Goodman: What do you mean, they're the way to—

Pollan: Well, the reason we have a School Lunch Program, you know, it began as

an effort really to get rid of this incredible overproduction of American

agriculture. I mean, we're using our children as a disposal for excess, you

know, cheap ground beef and cheese and all these corn products, and that the—you

know, under the School Lunch Program, we feed our kids chicken nuggets and tater

tots in school. We're using the School Lunch Program to teach them how to become

fast-food consumers. So, it's not about health, and it needs to be about health.

So, if he can move that program in that direction, I think that will be

wonderful.

Goodman: Michelle Obama's organic garden, that the pesticide industry had in a

memo that they shuddered when they heard her use the word?

Pollan: Yes. You know, I think her garden is actually a significant development.

I mean, you can dismiss it as symbolic politics, but in fact symbols are

important. And the word " organic " are fighting words in this—is a fighting word

in this world. And she did not have to say it was an organic garden; she could

have simply said it's a garden. And that she did was noticed.

And the Crop Life Association, the trade group of the pesticide makers, wrote

her a letter, being as cordial as you must be to a First Lady, saying, you know,

" You're really casting aspersions on industrial agriculture, and we really hope

you will use our crop protection products. " In other words, " Buy our poisons,

whether you need them or not. "

Goodman: We're talking to Michael Pollan. His latest book, now out in paperback,

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Your words of wisdom? Your food for

thought? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants?

Pollan: Yeah, it's very simple. It really is. I mean, you know, as a journalist,

you know this, that usually when you drill down into a subject, you find things

are more complicated than you thought, and the blacks and whites don't quite

work anymore. When it came to nutrition science, the deeper I went, the simpler

it got. And by the time I had spent two years studying what we know about

nutrition and health, I realized that, you know, all the—that you could dismiss

so much of this sketchy science, and as long as you ate real food, and not too

much of it, and emphasized plants more than meat in your diet, you would be

fine, and that the over-complication of food by industry, by government, is

something really to be avoided.

And so, the challenge is, though, how do you identify food? Because now the

market is full of these edible food-like substances, the ones that carry the

health claims, the—

Goodman: What do you mean, " edible food-like substances " ?

Pollan: Well, these are products of food science. These are the stuff in the

middle of the supermarket, the stuff that doesn't go bad for a year, deathless

food, immortal food. You have to think, well, what does it mean to say a food

has got a shelf life of six months or a year? It means it has been engineered to

resist bacteria, pests of all kinds, fungi, mold. And what does that mean? Well,

it has no nutritional value for those things. The insects, the bacteria, they're

not interested in the Twinkie, because there's nothing of nutritional value in

it.

Goodman: Can you talk about how the food system affects healthcare and the whole

issue of healthcare reform?

Pollan: Well, I think that we are soon to recognize that we are not going to be

able to reform healthcare, which depends on getting the cost of healthcare down,

without addressing the American diet, the catastrophe of the American diet.

The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, estimates that of the $2 trillion we're

spending on healthcare in this country, $1.5 trillion is for the treatment of

preventable chronic disease. Now, that's not all food, because you have smoking

in there, too, and alcoholism. But the bulk of it is food. Food is implicated in

heart disease, which we spend, you know, billions and billions on. It's

implicated in type 2 diabetes. It's implicated in about 40 percent of cancers.

It's implicated in stroke, all sorts of cardiovascular problems.

And, you know, in a sense, the healthcare crisis is a euphemism for the food

crisis, I mean, that they are identical. And I do think that President Obama

recognizes this. And I think that you will see programs to address this, because

that is how you could—you know, a better School Lunch Program would be a down

payment on the healthcare reform, because you would reduce long-term the costs

of the system. Treating a case of type 2 diabetes costs the City of New York,

every new case, $500,000. It is bankrupting the system. And it's preventable.

Goodman: How is it treated?

Pollan: Well, type 2 diabetes is, once you contract it, it's $13,000 a year in

additional medical costs. It takes something like ten years off of your life

span. It means an 80 percent chance of heart disease in your life, a possibility

of amputation and blindness, you know, being tethered to machines and drugs your

whole life. It's a very serious sentence, and it's entirely preventable with a

change in lifestyle.

The interesting thing is, why don't we have really powerful public interest ad

campaigns to inform people about this? I mean, the way the government could save

the most money the most easily would be having a public advertising campaign

about the dangers of soda. There are a great many children that, simply by

getting off soda, avert this whole course.

Goodman: What do you think of taxing soft drinks, that they're talking about

now?

Pollan: You know, I'm not sure, frankly. I haven't really thought that through.

It's probably not a bad idea. I think that the cheapness of high-fructose corn

syrup and sugars in our economy is part of the problem and that when we started

subsidizing—I guess I would attack it on the other side. We should not be making

these corn-based products so cheap with our tax dollars. I think we have to

change the subsidies. The reason that soda is so cheap is that we subsidize corn

in huge amounts, and I think we have to change the incentives down on the farm.

I think that's really where I would put my emphasis.

Goodman: What about large corporations buying up the farmland of poorer

countries?

Pollan: Well, this is going on. There is a growing recognition that the great

unrenewable resource is arable soil in this world and that countries like China

realize that they will not be able to feed their population on their soil base,

because of their numbers, but also because they poison so much of their soil.

Their soil is polluted, and they have a serious problem with that. So they are

buying up huge swaths of land in Africa.

This is a political disaster, you know, waiting to happen. I mean, Africans

are going to stand by while their best farmland is being used to feed Chinese? I

mean, I don't see this as a sustainable solution for anybody. But this is what's

happening.

And we should take note and realize that our farmland is so precious, and we

should be very careful about developing it, and we should certainly be careful

about letting it run off into the Mississippi River because we're failing to put

in cover crops and things like that.

Goodman: [Y]ou wrote a long letter to President Obama, to the " Farmer-in-Chief, "

as you put it. What's the most salient point in it?

Pollan: The most salient point is simply, you are not going to be able to tackle

either the healthcare crisis or climate change unless you look at our food

system. In the case of climate change, food is responsible for about a third of

greenhouse gases, the way we're growing food, the way we're processing it and

the way we're eating. And the healthcare crisis, as I've talked about. So we

need to address it. It's really the shadow issue over these other two issues.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program,

Democracy Now!

© 2009 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/