Paper Palate

I haven’t had a chance to check out “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” by journalist Michael Pollan yet, but I found his answers to an interview by the Boston Globe to be pretty interesting. In the recently released book Pollan devotes his attention to the question, “When we can eat anything we want, what should we have for dinner?”. He traces three food chains - industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer as he calls them - from source to table.

Read on for excerpts of the Boston Globe interview with Michael Pollan:

Q. Did the project have an effect on you?
It had a profound effect on my own eating. And not all negative. There’s a list of things I really can’t eat anymore. I really can’t eat industrial meat. I try to eat whole foods…I try to avoid food that my great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
I’m not going to eat any food that needs to make a health claim. If you think about it, the really healthy food doesn’t have any writing on it.
Q. Except for those stickers on the produce.
Yeah, but mostly it’s the whole-grain Cocoa Puffs making the claims. More philosophically, though, this has made me more conscious about eating. We’ve been brainwashed to think that thinking about your food and spending time preparing it is this unbearable weight of work. It’s one of the great pleasures of your life. So even though I have this burden of knowing too much, it’s only increased my enjoyment of eating.
Q. No guilt?
I’m not Taliban about this. We all make compromises. I still like my occasional hit of junk food. I think some people throw up their hands at the complexity and say, “If I can’t eat right or buy right all the time, then what’s the point?,” and give up. But you get three food votes a day, and if you cast one of them in the right way, that’s great.
Q. You write about organic factory farms, the very idea of which some people might find surprising.
These are words we never expected to link. Organic, which was designed as an alternative to industrial processes, has itself been industrialized. That’s not a completely negative thing. It’s better than conventional in various ways - less pesticides, more land protected - but it’s not what people think. Given a choice, yeah if I can buy local, I will.
Q. The book jacket lists two definitions of omnivore: one, an animal that feeds on any kind of food, and two, someone who will read, study, or absorb anything. Are you referring to yourself?
It’s the editor’s reference to me. I’m interested in food because food connects to everything. We’re defined by what we eat, not just biologically but culturally. It’s a doorway to so many other aspects of life. It seems like a narrow door, but you pass through it, and you can go anywhere.