Michael Pollan is perhaps best known for the seven simple pieces of diet advice he used to open a 2007 New York Times essay. This later became the backbone of a best-selling book.
“Eat your food. Don’t eat too much. Mainly plants.”
He knows it’s not really that simple.
“We’re all making compromises,” Pollan told Business Insider ahead of the April 12 release of his latest documentary, “Food Inc. 2.” “We’ll do our best and people can pick and choose the issues they want to address and address them.”
At home, Pollan does her best to avoid eating industrial meat, eggs, or other products produced in large-scale factory farms.
He and his wife started their life with the goal of making healthy eating easy and affordable. They have a stash of sharpened knives that they can use to chop and cook a variety of vegetables for dinner most nights. Lately, his tables have been filled with stir-fries and pasta dishes, as well as wild salmon, which happens to be caught this time of year in Alaska. Pollan also enjoys cooking a firmer, protein-rich tofu called yuba, which I had never heard of. This is essentially a soy milk skin. Hearty stews, perhaps with Indian or Moroccan spices, are also part of the fan-favorite menu simmering on his kitchen island in Berkeley, California.
It’s so healthy, it looks so delicious, it’s so ambitious, but it seems pretty impossible. The reason is.
reality is pollan do Participate in America’s industrialized food system. He has spent the better part of his 20 years investigating how food companies combine chemicals, plants, and animals in extremely harmful ways, and has found that “not only animals, but there For the workers who are working,” he told BI. But ultimately, he knows that some amount of toxic and unethical food is inevitable if he wants to participate in American society.
“If you invite me over to your house and cook me some pork shoulder, I won’t be rude, I’ll eat it,” he said. “I’m not that enthusiastic.”
Still, he may have some intrusive thoughts while eating commercially sliced white bread or fruit salad. He worries about glyphosate, which is sprayed on industrial wheat just before harvest, and the powerful pesticides often sprayed on thin-skinned fruits like strawberries (he chooses organic whenever possible). However, this does not guarantee safety.) “I think the more you know about food, the more it shapes your eating habits,” he says.
“Plant-based” is just a marketing tactic for Big Food
The Impossible Burger is made using wood pulp to help it stick together. Strictly speaking, it’s a plant, but it looks a little strange. Joey Hadden/Business Insider
Pollan’s new documentary (now in select theaters and streaming on Amazon Prime) is a sequel to his Academy Award-nominated 2008 film, Food, Inc. “Food, Inc. 2” focuses on a few giant corporations that control our grocery stores and end up deciding what we put in our mouths.
The film explores what happened at the Tyson Meat Processing Plant in Waterloo, Iowa, during the first days of the coronavirus outbreak (spoiler alert: it wasn’t great) . Also featured are the voices of Florida’s tomato pickers fighting for justice. Taco Bell employees want similar pay, some inventive farmers are bringing regenerative devices called “cluster cracks” to their corn fields, and (when they’re not in Washington) they run organic farms in Montana. and Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.
At over 90 minutes, this documentary takes you on a journey through some pretty dark times, highlighting how our food system has really changed. bad Since releasing the first Food Inc. 16 years ago.
Nevertheless, it ends on a heady and optimistic note. The change is so drastic that it’s almost laughable. Just before the end credits roll, the film invites viewers to join a “movement” on its website. This movement has encouraged us (surprise, surprise) to reduce our intake of ultra-processed foods, support local farmers by shopping at markets whenever possible, and reduce our meat and dairy consumption. Cut back and spend your free time lobbying for stronger antitrust enforcement against the few large food companies that control the market for infant formula, meat, cereal, and other staple foods. Simple.
“The industry has a vested interest in complicating our relationship with food and creating problems that can be solved, but it’s much simpler than people think,” Pollan says.
is that so? As I talked to Pollan, I realized that even in the best-case scenario, for the few Americans who have the time, money, and even institutional and cultural support to adopt all of these grand ideas, I feel it even more strongly than before. We can’t avoid the worst parts of our huge and poor food system. Emulsifiers, which can disrupt our gut bacteria in strange and poorly understood ways, are extremely necessary to keep food shelf-stable. And even if we stick to organic matter, soil quality isn’t what it used to be around here, meaning we’re getting less nutrients from the food we eat.
“As long as you’re eating food, mostly plants, you’ll be fine,” Pollan told me, doubling down on the old saying.
But even he admits there are some caveats to his next breath. He is frustrated by the misleading “aura of health” that grows around all things plant-based. This is a brand new game of whack-a-mole that you have to play in the grocery store aisles. After all, sugar cane is a plant, and so is corn, the source of many of our stabilizers, artificial sweeteners, flavors and additives. A plant-based diet is not necessarily an indicator of health.
“I don’t consider a lot of things in the supermarket to be food,” he tells me.
But that’s what we have.
