Recent Lecture: Michael Pollan

We have been attending more lectures recently, and I'll try to post information about some of the more interesting talks.

On January 17th we listened to the amusing journalist Mr. Michael Pollan, who is doing a tour for his latest in a series of food oriented books. This one called An Eater's Manifesto , which is:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Which sounds sensible enough and is essentially the diet I follow, except that I would add "no mammals if you can manage it."

In fact most of Pollan's dietary commentary was fairly common-sense based, primarily because he feels that dietary science is too immature to provide useful guidelines, and it leads to an unreliable focus on nutritional components rather than whole-food goodness.
Perhaps so.

The portion of Pollan's schpeel that really caught my attention had to do with a pet peeve of mine, which is the decreasing availability of local food crops in restaurants and grocery shops.

Ever ask for an Idaho potato in an Idaho cafe? I have, and was told that the potatoes in the kitchen were from Argentina. The uptown Vons grocery store here in Santa Barbara sells avocados from Chile. From Chile! Southern California has a multitude of avocado orchards. Why doesn't every market in the area sell the fruit from our own trees? This makes no sense to me. It's like learning that the proverbial Eskimo imports his ice cubes.

What I learned from Pollan is that there are more wide-reaching and destructive consequences of this practice of shipping crops to where there is no need.

The example he gave is a consequence of sending cheap (government subsidized) US corn into Mexico, underselling Mexican corn farmers and putting them out of business. Many of these former farmers wind up crossing the border to work the fields in the US rather than contributing to the self-sufficiency of their own country's economy. Potentially worse, the practice has a destructive impact on the genetic diversity of the world's corn crop.

A few years ago, Pollan wrote a short article on the subject that you can read on his website.

link