Maintenance Phase - Michael Pollan's ＂The Omnivore's Dilemma＂

00:00:00.000 should we should we go actually hold my microphone do it give us the old give us the old tagline

00:00:16.980 welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that thinks that you should eat food whatever you 0.98

00:00:22.140 see fit uh oh fuck i messed it up oh wait you lost it you lost hang on i'm gonna try it again 0.85

00:00:27.580 trying it again trying it again hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that 0.99

00:00:32.440 wants you to eat food as much as you want whatever you see fit god damn it why do i keep

00:00:39.600 what are you what are you going for are you trying to remember pollen no i'm doing like 0.97

00:00:44.920 our version of pollens his food not too much mostly plants okay okay so you know his but

00:00:50.240 you're doing the maintenance phase one right our version i would propose would be eat food

00:00:56.340 however much you need how about that oh whatever you see fit and cyber bully your local influencer

00:01:02.940 uh i'm opry gordon i'm michael hobbs if you would like to support the show

00:01:11.300 you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase or you can go to t public where we have

00:01:17.340 masks t-shirts mugs all kinds of things both of those are linked for you in the show notes

00:01:23.980 And today, Michael Hobbs, we are talking about a different Michael.

00:01:27.440 Yeah, I'm really curious what you know about this.

00:01:29.980 We are doing a diet book deep dive into The Omnivore's Dilemma, which came out in 2006,

00:01:37.640 and is by Michael Pollan, who is like quite an influential person when it comes to like

00:01:43.660 food and food policy and how to eat.

00:01:46.140 So my relationship to all of this is I live in Portland, Oregon, and I have a white upper

00:01:53.880 middle class family. And that means I never stop hearing about Michael Pollan.

00:01:57.600 Oh, yeah.

00:01:58.920 Never.

00:02:00.220 You've got a garden in the backyard.

00:02:02.620 I mean, I do.

00:02:03.540 You're going to farmer's markets.

00:02:05.160 Here's the thing that is challenging for me about all of this is I have not read Michael

00:02:10.480 Pollan's work myself. I have a number of family members and like former colleagues

00:02:16.000 and such who have. And the things that people are, like, quoting to me and telling me about

00:02:20.840 Michael Pollan's work are not, like, anti-fat things, but those people hold really deep anti-fat

00:02:26.220 beliefs. There's a correlation happening there, and I don't totally know what to do with that

00:02:30.380 correlation. It's actually an odd mirror version of Super Size Me. Oh, say more about that. I mean,

00:02:36.900 Super Size Me was, like, kind of an excuse to make fun of people who eat at McDonald's. And

00:02:42.300 And the Omnivore's Dilemma and what Michael Pollan's whole kind of career arc has been,

00:02:46.940 it's basically selling thinness back to people as virtue.

00:02:50.980 You're not shopping at a farmer's market because you like shopping at a farmer's market.

00:02:54.300 You're shopping at a farmer's market because like you're a good person and you care about

00:02:57.920 saving the earth and you're part of a food movement.

00:03:01.180 This like uprising of people who are trying to change the industrial sources of our food.

00:03:06.720 Oh, interesting.

00:03:07.180 If you do this, like if you eat these, quote unquote, healthy foods, you are performing

00:03:12.160 a civic act.

00:03:13.220 He's quite, he's quite explicit about that.

00:03:15.120 Oh, I have.

00:03:16.000 So he's, you're going to love this.

00:03:18.140 You're, you're already excited.

00:03:20.020 If we're going to get into the relationship between civic participation and what kind

00:03:25.920 of food you eat, then I am going to have things to say, Michael.

00:03:30.560 Luckily, you're sitting in front of a microphone and being recorded by a friend of yours who

00:03:35.480 you make a show with.

00:03:36.240 i just had breakfast i'm all tanked up ready to roll you got your carbs let's yell about some 0.99

00:03:41.820 shit michael you're loaded up i'm excited i am ready so i think it's important to like talk about 0.98

00:03:48.160 how influential michael pollan was in the mid-2000s yep michael pollan showed up everywhere 0.98

00:03:54.060 he was on late night talk shows he was on oprah eventually well he's kind of like npr royalty

00:03:59.700 the way that he framed food and the way that he framed the problem with the american food system

00:04:05.660 and the solution to it you know you know things things can age badly in like the vocabulary that

00:04:11.780 they use has changed or like there's a homophobic joke or something but there's things that age

00:04:15.860 badly in just like their ideology and their underpinning assumptions and so much about

00:04:21.500 this book has just aged really badly as far as like what we know now and what has happened

00:04:26.940 with the ideas that michael pollan was essentially like incepting into the population i don't think

00:04:32.260 that's a word, but it's like, it's just very 2006. It's so 2006 that it's wearing like

00:04:38.100 sandblasted bootcut jeans with those like bejeweled flat pockets. It's showing up at a

00:04:45.640 community meeting to fight against a skateboard park. It's wearing a Vonda chat. Yeah.

00:04:53.840 So the full title of the book is The Omnivore's Dilemma, A Natural History of Four Meals,

00:05:00.560 which drives me fucking nuts because there's only three meals describing the book i don't i i don't

00:05:06.420 know if i like missed something really obvious but the book is split into three parts what we're 0.96

00:05:11.080 going to do in this episode is we're going to kind of walk through the book and debunk as we go so

00:05:16.420 we're going to start with the introduction which is called our national eating disorder

00:05:20.960 just we're in good hands already nope and so he starts with the question what should you have for

00:05:28.160 dinner. And he says, this book is a long and fairly involved answer to the seemingly simple

00:05:32.920 question. Along the way, it also tries to figure out how such a simple question could ever have

00:05:37.420 gotten so complicated. He uses the rise and fall of the Atkins diet as a jumping off point to talk

00:05:43.400 about how America bounces from like fad diet to fad diet. Eating is so fundamental to the human

00:05:49.320 condition. And yet we don't seem to know how we're supposed to eat. And we're constantly getting

00:05:54.940 these weird whiplash messages about what we should and shouldn't eat. And the science isn't

00:06:00.220 all that helpful. And the marketing isn't all that helpful. It actually starts out sounding

00:06:03.480 a lot like this show. I was going to say, it sounds like a thing that you and I are also

00:06:06.900 trying to sort of navigate. Exactly. He says we don't have a culture of food. He says a country

00:06:13.040 with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for the quackery or common sense of a new

00:06:17.660 diet book every January. It would not be apt to confuse protein bars and food supplements with

00:06:22.160 meals or breakfast cereals with medicines it probably would not eat a fifth of its meals in 0.59

00:06:26.980 cars or feed fully a third of its children at a fast food outlet every day and it surely would 0.60

00:06:31.940 not be nearly so fat oh i don't care for this and then he does some like french people are skinnier

00:06:36.920 stuff like this opening just we're just setting the stakes and i don't care for it yes everyone's 0.76

00:06:43.100 too fat there need to be fewer fat people look at you feeding your kids in your car and he also

00:06:48.900 this is something i've learned making this show with you i think people in most modern countries

00:06:54.920 have like a deeply ambivalent feeling about modernity and especially about urbanization

00:06:59.960 he does a lot of stuff about how there was this traditional way of life you know these these food

00:07:05.220 rules later they'll say like if your great grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food you

00:07:09.320 shouldn't eat it sure a lot of his message even in the very very intro of this book is about how

00:07:14.620 Like we used to have these traditional farming societies.

00:07:17.280 People lived on farms, you know, ma and pa raising the goats, whatever.

00:07:21.520 And we've lost that.

00:07:22.980 And now it's like it's all fast food and we're eating in our cars.

00:07:25.740 And there's really this sense of like a fallen society. 0.83

00:07:30.500 So like the other thing that follows from this point is like this is also when we get a big weird wave of like white people roots stuff. 0.70

00:07:39.200 We start to get Mumford and Sons after this. 0.61

00:07:42.560 We start to get – do you know what I mean?

00:07:44.280 You're blaming him for Mumford and Sons?

00:07:46.260 I'm not blaming him for Mumford and Sons.

00:07:48.440 I'm just saying, like, there is this wave of, like, white people interested in doing things, quote-unquote, how they used to be done, or sort of hearkening back to, quote-unquote, simpler times, which is always fraught.

00:08:01.580 Yeah.

00:08:01.920 Right?

00:08:02.200 Like, that's always a fraught thing for white people to do.

00:08:05.200 Yeah.

00:08:05.420 And also, like, when is he talking about?

00:08:08.040 Where is he talking about?

00:08:09.460 Yeah.

00:08:09.740 It complicates us so much in the show because almost all of these nostalgia arguments break down the second you start to think about them.

00:08:17.780 So Rachel Lawden is a historian who is like a historian of food, like how people used to eat.

00:08:22.900 She wrote a really good book called Cuisine and Empire Cooking in World History.

00:08:27.020 And she has written a number of responses to Michael Pollan over the years.

00:08:30.480 In an article that she wrote right after this book came out, she says,

00:08:33.660 Michael Pollan's fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives.

00:08:39.740 Hmm. She basically goes through the idea that like we were all, you know, eating these pure foods, living on farms, growing our own foods, you know, tending to the cattle. That just isn't true. First of all, life expectancies are now longer than they've ever been in human history. So like you sort of have to reckon with that.

00:08:56.340 food like the life of a person who ate food was not good for most of human history so she talks

00:09:03.320 about how if you lived on a farm you know you have this harvest and there's all this abundance

00:09:06.980 but then for three or four months of the year typically you're eating like canned or jarred

00:09:11.900 foods because there isn't there's no crops growing in like january february march so you're literally

00:09:17.260 you're eating like this kind of gruel porridge for breakfast and then the other two meals of

00:09:22.120 a day are like an ear of corn that you canned nine months ago yum yum she has colleagues from

00:09:27.820 italy who talk about like super high rates of pellagra in italy because people were eating

00:09:32.260 polenta three meals a day these like peasant farmers wait what's pellagra i don't even know 0.63

00:09:37.180 it's a b vitamin deficiency oh shit okay and a lot of what we think of as like traditional foods 0.93

00:09:42.980 traditional practices are actually the tiny percentage of the population that had servants 0.96

00:09:48.580 who could afford to like make them food all day she talks about how in mexico in the 1800s

00:09:54.220 people who didn't have servants like women it was always women who were doing this kind of work 1.00

00:09:57.720 would spend up to five hours a day grinding the maze for tortillas for like dinner but when you're 1.00

00:10:06.280 talking about like the golden age of like farms who was picking those crops yeah sharecroppers

00:10:12.380 like who owned that land the minute you start doing this stuff about like we need to tell the

00:10:16.620 story of our food it's like the his the actual history of this stuff gets like pretty ugly pretty 0.99

00:10:21.740 fast well and also like even if you were like a white farmer there's also still the fucking dust 0.95

00:10:27.360 bowl and right potato famine right being a farmer in itself is also not a picnic it just isn't like 0.91

00:10:34.400 a sophisticated analysis of what has gone wrong with the american food system to just be like it

00:10:39.900 used to be good and now it's bad it's worse now than it used to be in some ways and it's better

00:10:44.900 in some ways yeah so that was the intro a lot of this like false nostalgia and the problem with

00:10:50.620 america is that we don't have a culture of food so part one the first meal that he's going to walk

00:10:56.140 us through is like the industrial meal so we're eventually going to work our way up to a mcdonald's

00:11:00.940 meal and he's going to walk us through the way that like the industrial factory farm system in

00:11:06.140 america works this is by far the best part of the book a lot of his diagnosis of what is wrong with

00:11:12.780 the American food system, especially like large scale industrial farms, is like basically accurate.

00:11:19.240 So he basically starts out with this thing that, you know, corn is in everything, right? You go

00:11:24.240 into the grocery store and there's like high fructose corn syrup in bread, in tomato sauce,

00:11:29.840 you know, pick up any product from the shelf and it will have some derivative of corn in it,

00:11:34.140 right? Most of what we grow in America is corn and soybeans because corn is the most efficient

00:11:39.400 way to get carbohydrates and soy is the most efficient way to get protein.

00:11:42.780 These are two crops that you can grow in like massive quantities and then you can break

00:11:46.700 them down into all these constituent parts and then you can use them, like you can put

00:11:49.920 them in everything.

00:11:51.060 There's three reasons how corn took over the American food supply.

00:11:54.400 The first is in the 1920s, they started developing seeds that are higher yields.

00:11:59.400 Basically, you can now plant stocks of corn like mere inches away from each other and

00:12:04.440 it used to be like two feet because they've been bred to have much stronger stock so they

00:12:08.920 grow straight up.

00:12:09.960 and it used to be that they would sort of like bend over in the sun and they would flop over

00:12:13.840 on each other and pretty soon they're like tangled up and like nobody gets the sunlight that they need

00:12:17.780 whereas now they just grow ramrod straights you can just plant them every couple inches and you

00:12:22.520 can harvest them with a tractor sure and like significant change yeah so in 1920 you would

00:12:28.420 get about 20 bushels of corn per acre and now you get 180 bushels of corn per acre that's big

00:12:34.780 honestly again you don't want to discount this stuff like this is part of how we feed the world

00:12:39.460 Like this is why starvation is a much smaller problem at the world scale than it used to

00:12:43.920 be.

00:12:44.440 The second big turning point was synthetic fertilizers.

00:12:48.260 This is nuts.

00:12:49.560 After World War II, they were making a bunch of ammonium nitrate, which is an ingredient

00:12:53.300 in explosives for the war.

00:12:56.160 And you know, with crops, you have to rotate crops to put nitrogen back in the soil.

00:13:00.680 So ammonium nitrate is a great source of nitrogen.

00:13:03.660 This is like why you put fertilizer into soil.

00:13:06.000 So there's all these munitions plants that are making ammonium nitrate.

00:13:10.520 And at the end of the war, the government is like, why don't you guys just like keep making it?

00:13:14.840 And we're just going to give it to all the farmers.

00:13:17.300 But the problem with these fertilizers is that they're essentially fossil fuel products.

00:13:23.160 Oh, yikes.

00:13:23.960 Because the way to make them is you take hydrogen gas and nitrogen gas and you crush them together under really high pressure and under really high heat.

00:13:32.080 And the only way to do that is with fossil fuels, right?

00:13:34.520 You just like burn fucking coal and you get these things really hot and then that's how you make the fertilizers. 0.95

00:13:38.940 So what Michael Pollan says in his book is that like for every calorie of corn, you're burning like nine calories of oil. 0.98

00:13:46.540 And then the third thing that put corn into our entire food supply is, of course, subsidies, which is like the story that everybody kind of knows.

00:13:52.860 The way that Michael Pollan describes it is that agriculture has never operated on any basic capitalist principles of like supply and demand because farmers are responsible for feeding the country.

00:14:04.060 right so it's like in low yield years you have a risk of like your population not having enough

00:14:10.040 food or you have to import food it's like it's like an actual government project that needs to

00:14:13.900 happen but then also if they have a really good year and they grow too much or they have like a

00:14:19.180 ton of corn that's coming out of the fields the price of it crashes whoa and then farmers are

00:14:24.020 basically destitute because all of a sudden they're not making as much from their harvest

00:14:26.860 as they had expected and then it fucks with the prices next year and they can't pay off their

00:14:30.680 seeds blah blah blah so it's like you can't just like have the free market do agriculture yeah so

00:14:37.380 essentially as early as we've had like government agriculture policy we've always been subsidizing

00:14:42.600 to try to like smooth these things out to try to give people some sort of expected return so that

00:14:48.920 they have a reason to grow crops and they're not just in this like horrific cycle of poverty or

00:14:52.980 they stop growing crops altogether and like we don't have enough food yeah and it is bone crushingly

00:14:58.820 hard work it's so hard work i know i have a good friend who's a farmer and like tells me about his

00:15:03.420 day and i get tired every time he's a farmer and he has three kids and i'm like i don't have any

00:15:09.160 of those things and i'm already tired i don't understand but then i mean this is also like

00:15:15.160 this is also a version of this argument that i'm sure you've heard too that basically because

00:15:18.820 we're growing so much corn in the 70s 80s we started putting corn in everything so this is

00:15:24.000 when we started getting corn and pop tarts corn and bread they developed high fructose corn syrup

00:15:28.660 as this cheaper form of sweetening.

00:15:30.360 So now we're sweetening everything with corn.

00:15:32.200 So basically we became like a monocrop country.

00:15:35.100 Then it's like, well, the corn has to go somewhere.

00:15:37.440 And that's where we started getting

00:15:38.340 this like avalanche of processed foods.

00:15:40.520 That's essentially the argument.

00:15:41.860 Okay, is that true?

00:15:43.220 It is actually true and quite easy to measure

00:15:45.440 that we're producing more corn

00:15:47.220 because there's like agricultural statistics.

00:15:49.200 But then 60% of America's corn is fed to livestock,

00:15:53.060 which Michael Pollan describes in great detail.

00:15:55.960 So it's not necessarily that all of the corn

00:15:58.020 like went to human consumption a lot of that corn went to like we're now eating more meat than we

00:16:01.920 used to and we also export a ton of corn and we also like corn goes into like biofuels and stuff

00:16:07.840 that is not food i listen to a really good talk by julie guffman who's an academic who has written

00:16:14.440 various critiques of michael pollan what she says is you can't say with any certainty that americans

00:16:18.700 are eating more now than they used to simply because it's all based on this like self-report

00:16:23.020 data yeah totally we've talked on the show before about how there's only really two ways

00:16:27.220 to measure people's food consumption. You do these 24 hour diaries, or you ask people what

00:16:31.740 they're eating in general. And they're both like fundamentally very flawed. It's really hard to

00:16:36.900 figure out how many calories people are eating. And so her thing is like, well, maybe it sounds

00:16:43.200 fairly plausible, like in a common sense way that we're eating more, like, I don't know. But like,

00:16:48.040 you really can't actually say with any certainty that we're eating more than we used to.

00:16:51.960 I would like to submit this as a new entry for that's what I call maintenance phase,

00:16:55.420 is this sort of like assumes facts not an evidence narrative that's a good way to put it the way that

00:17:01.840 you sort of identify a moral panic as you look at what we don't need evidence to believe right or

00:17:06.220 that's at least part of it you can just sort of say we eat more now than we used to and people

00:17:11.240 will be like that seems right and folks won't necessarily like fact check it and be like wait

00:17:15.960 how are you measuring that because it seems really pedantic and it seems sort of like nitpicky

00:17:20.860 but like it really matters like if that's a foundational assumption of your work

00:17:25.220 exactly and you know julie guffman points out other things that he he often focuses on like

00:17:30.320 the domestic reasons why we're all eating more and corn has become the central thing but what

00:17:35.960 she says is like the market of food is so global now right like we're getting blueberries from

00:17:42.180 chile and the idea that like america is overproducing corn therefore americans are

00:17:47.260 eating more corn doesn't really take into account the fact that like we're shipping that stuff

00:17:52.540 overseas for then it to get processed and then shipped back to us. And we're also importing a

00:17:57.260 ton of food or exporting a ton of food. The changes that have brought us to the problems

00:18:01.820 with our food system are much more global than they are domestic. Another thing that Julie

00:18:06.400 Guthman points out in her book, the fact that corn is subsidized is not actually the reason why

00:18:12.340 it's like cheaper in the stores, like fruits and vegetables are more expensive. And Julie Guthman

00:18:17.160 points out that corn is very easy to dry and very easy to store and ship. Whereas if you're talking

00:18:22.240 about like peaches, you have to pick the peaches off of trees. You can't do it with any kind of

00:18:28.400 machine. And then you have to get it to wherever it's going to be. I think they have to be

00:18:32.420 refrigerated or some other crops have to be refrigerated. Many crops you have to wash before

00:18:36.720 you sell them. It's just more expensive to produce a lot of fruits and vegetables. Pollen kind of

00:18:43.100 implies that it's like, if we can just get rid of the corn subsidies, all the fruits and vegetables

00:18:47.540 will be cheaper or whatever. And it's like, it's actually just a lot more complicated than that.

00:18:51.980 That makes a ton of sense to me. That's not a critique that I had heard. And it totally

00:18:55.120 makes sense to me. Well, also, another thing that has always bugged me about the subsidies thing

00:18:58.880 is that it's true that like the corn subsidies, like I agree with Michael Pollan's like diagnosis

00:19:04.880 of part of the problem. But then if you started heavily subsidizing, say broccoli, they would

00:19:11.200 just start growing broccoli in massive quantities and they do high fructose broccoli syrup.

00:19:17.400 Yeah, I just want to I want to bookmark a thing. I'm going to predict a thing.

00:19:21.780 Oh, okay. I'm going to predict a response that I'm going to have to whatever his prescriptions

00:19:26.700 are. My response is going to be that's an individual proposed solution to a systemic

00:19:32.120 problem. We found it. We're doing it. That's what I call maintenance phase.

00:19:37.220 Is it just you just need to buy and eat the right kinds of foods, not we need to reorganize

00:19:42.920 our food system?

00:19:43.680 You're spoiling the episode already.

00:19:45.080 Cool fun.

00:19:45.500 You found it.

00:19:46.200 Yes.

00:19:46.700 I'm saving all the little sounds I want to make.

00:19:49.200 I have joy that you're predicting this.

00:19:51.540 I'm not doing it.

00:19:52.720 I'm very into this like I want to predict it thing.

00:19:55.840 It's very satisfying.

00:19:57.200 I find it very satisfying.

00:19:58.580 You love ruining my episodes.

00:20:00.440 Like this is where Mike is taking me.

00:20:03.040 Commence ruination.

00:20:04.060 but then okay but before we get to the prescriptions which we will obviously get

00:20:10.260 to in great detail we have to talk about his fast food safari to mcdonald's oh i feel like this was

00:20:17.160 also a genre of journalism in the early 2000s where like a wealthy writer from new york or dc

00:20:25.260 or wherever would go to some like iowa mcdonald's and they would like describe it you know in this

00:20:31.260 like zoo kind of way it's so gross it's so gross in his defense michael pollin's mcdonald's safari

00:20:38.420 is like not as bad as others i have read sure the description is you know he he's all building this

00:20:43.280 around like a meal right so like he and his family go into a mcdonald's in the midwest somewhere and

00:20:48.700 his son gets an order of mcnuggets so he describes like all the weird ingredients in the mcnuggets

00:20:53.300 which like fine fair enough and then he himself orders a cheeseburger and the problem with a

00:21:00.980 cheeseburger for the argument that he's making is that if you go on the mcdonald's website

00:21:04.440 a mcdonald's cheeseburger is 100 beef and he has to sort of almost begrudgingly in the text

00:21:10.280 mention that a mcdonald's cheeseburger only has six ingredients if you don't count like all the

00:21:14.620 ingredients in the bun right so he can't level the also very popular at this time argument that

00:21:19.120 it's like a frankenfood exactly it's like it's like just a really straightforward food it's like

00:21:23.600 pickles and onions and cheese and beef and a bun it's like really basic but then he says in truth

00:21:30.700 my cheeseburger's relationship to beef seemed nearly as metaphorical as the nugget's relationship

00:21:36.660 to a chicken. Nope. I'm like, how? It's ground beef. It's a beef patty. They took beef and then

00:21:41.960 they ground it up. It's identical to something that you would get at the grocery store. And

00:21:46.340 frankly, it's identical to something you'd get if you went to like a fancy restaurant. They're

00:21:49.500 getting their beef from the same place. Right. So I'm going to send you a little excerpt from

00:21:54.020 this part. All right, here we go. What is it about fast food? Not only is it served in a flash,

00:22:00.700 But more often than not, it's eaten that way, too.

00:22:03.500 We finished our meal in under 10 minutes.

00:22:06.280 Since we were in the convertible and the sun was shining, I can't blame the McDonald's

00:22:09.940 ambiance.

00:22:11.400 Perhaps the reason you eat this food quickly is because it doesn't bear savoring.

00:22:16.240 Bookmark disagree. 0.99

00:22:17.420 It tastes fucking good, Michael. 0.98

00:22:18.860 It's fine. 0.99

00:22:19.580 I didn't even like it.

00:22:20.700 This is, you know what this is?

00:22:22.000 This is the food equivalent of like, I don't even own a TV.

00:22:25.240 I don't even, McDonald's doesn't even taste good to me.

00:22:28.100 What do you mean, TV?

00:22:29.720 Okay.

00:22:30.700 Okay, sorry. I'll get back to the quote. Quote, the more you concentrate on how it tastes,

00:22:37.960 the less like anything it tastes. I said before that McDonald's serves a kind of comfort food,

00:22:44.040 but after a few bites, I'm more inclined to think that they're selling something more schematic than

00:22:47.780 that. Something more like a signifier of comfort food. So you eat more and more quickly, hoping

00:22:54.260 somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or french fry as it retreats over

00:22:58.720 the horizon. And so it goes bite after bite until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply

00:23:05.080 regrettably full. You're eating, you're just eating food, Michael. You're describing eating

00:23:10.860 food. But he's describing the ennui of eating industrialized food, Michael. You're having a

00:23:16.280 perfectly pleasant meal with your family and you're like trying to pull something shitty out 0.96

00:23:20.660 of it. Well, and also like, listen, man, not every meal is a satisfying experience. There are times

00:23:27.380 when you're just hungry and you just need to eat some food and that's also okay yes i've also had

00:23:32.060 fancy meals that i've eaten quickly yeah and that don't bear savoring exactly i've also had like

00:23:37.760 really good subs from quiznos that i've absolutely savored are you going to talk about the honey

00:23:43.360 mustard chicken because that's what i want to talk about that sandwich is great i think it's so good

00:23:47.980 just this just this idea that it's like it's fundamentally an industrial experience to eat

00:23:54.140 at McDonald's and you can't eat slowly and you can't sit for an hour with your family at McDonald's

00:23:59.460 and like have a nice talk as you're all eating your McDonald's food. It's like, that's just

00:24:03.360 straight up bullshit. Yeah. We were not a McDonald's family growing up, but when we did 1.00

00:24:08.220 fast food, we would go to Dairy Queen. And I will say I have like a plenty of fond memories.

00:24:14.160 Yeah. Like good quality family time, getting a dipped cone at Dairy Queen. Like it's fine.

00:24:19.560 It's fine. To be fair, you know, my whole thing that like, I think it's really important to be

00:24:23.020 fair to people so far this book is like mostly fine right we're like 200 pages into it most of

00:24:29.060 it has been about the history of corn and corn subsidies which is actually really interesting

00:24:32.940 and really cool and like maybe he didn't represent the full picture there's quibbles to be had

00:24:37.380 but if the whole book was like this there would there wouldn't be a whole lot of like dunk festing

00:24:42.380 but then part two is called pastoral grass and this is him having like a grass-fed meal okay

00:24:52.220 This is the section where we get to the first big twist of the book 0.99

00:24:57.140 that Michael Pollan fucking hates organic farms. 0.99

00:25:01.880 What? 1.00

00:25:02.320 And he hates Whole Foods.

00:25:04.120 Like the store Whole Foods? 1.00

00:25:06.420 He fucking hates it. 0.99

00:25:07.660 Listen, okay. 1.00

00:25:08.560 We've talked a lot so far about Fuck McDonald's. 1.00

00:25:11.300 For real, fuck Whole Foods. 1.00

00:25:13.240 Truly fuck Whole Foods. 1.00

00:25:14.280 Go look up the views of that CEO. 1.00

00:25:17.000 go look up their responses to employees speaking Spanish in their stores to customers who speak

00:25:23.740 Spanish. Go look up their labor laws. Go look up their BMI bonus. God, they're terrible.

00:25:29.700 So the next thing that I'm going to send you is an excerpt from this section.

00:25:35.380 Well, I'm excited to rip into Whole Foods.

00:25:37.400 He hates it so much. Quote, with the growth of organics and mounting concerns about the

00:25:43.160 wholesomeness of industrial food, storied food is showing up in supermarkets everywhere these days,

00:25:49.020 but it is Whole Foods that consistently delivers the most cutting-edge grocery lit.

00:25:54.340 On a recent visit, I filled my shopping cart with eggs, quote, from cage-free vegetarian hens,

00:26:00.420 milk from cows that live, quote, free from unnecessary fear and distress, wild salmon

00:26:06.000 caught by Native Americans in Yakutat, Alaska, population 833, and heirloom tomatoes from

00:26:12.980 Capay Farm, quote, one of the early pioneers of the organic movement. The organic broiler I picked

00:26:19.700 up even had a name, Rosie, who turned out to be a sustainably farmed free-range chicken from

00:26:25.500 Petaluma Poultry, a company whose, quote, farming methods strive to create harmonious relationships

00:26:31.400 in nature sustaining the health of all creatures and the natural world this is what bugs me about

00:26:37.300 whole foods too is that everything has like a little label on the back where it's like a story

00:26:41.660 sure it's like stony mansions farms was founded in 1802 and then you go to the front it's like a

00:26:47.200 nine dollar thing of yogurt it's a place that i really try hard not to shop because every time i

00:26:53.080 get a glimpse into like what their actual business model is it's like a horror show it's funny how

00:26:58.020 we're going harder on Whole Foods than McDonald's. I feel harder about Whole Foods than I do about

00:27:04.000 McDonald's. Absolutely. Absolutely. So basically, Michael Pollan feels about Whole Foods the same

00:27:09.420 way that we do, which is like very roasty. Yeah. This leads into his critique of the organic

00:27:15.240 farming movement, that organic farms are basically just another way of saying industrial farms. So

00:27:22.520 So he then, after his Whole Foods safari, he goes to an actual working organic farm in California, and he describes it with like so much contempt.

00:27:32.380 It's fascinating.

00:27:33.620 Here, this is, I'm going to send you another excerpt.

00:27:36.140 Quote,

00:27:36.660 In many respects, the same factory model is at work in both fields, but for every chemical input used in the farm's conventional methods, a more benign organic input has been substituted in the organic ones.

00:27:49.140 So in place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenway's organic acres are nourished by compost made by the ton at a horse farm nearby and by poultry manure.

00:28:00.180 Instead of toxic pesticides, insects are controlled by spraying approved organic agents,

00:28:05.200 most of them derived from plants, and by introducing beneficial insects like lacewings.

00:28:11.340 Perhaps the greatest challenge to farming organically on an industrial scale is controlling

00:28:15.480 weeds without the use of chemical herbicides. Greenways tackles its weeds with frequent and

00:28:20.940 carefully timed tilling. Even before the crops are planted, the fields are irrigated to germinate

00:28:27.020 the weed seeds present in the soil. A tractor then tills the field to kill them, the first of

00:28:32.600 several passes it will make over the course of the growing season. When the crops stand too high

00:28:37.420 to drive a tractor over, farm workers wielding propane torches will spot kill the biggest weeds

00:28:42.820 by hand. What do you think? I mean, I think he's describing like a big farm. Yeah. This doesn't

00:28:48.200 feel like a smoking gun to me. Exactly. At all. This whole section of the book, he is presenting

00:28:54.060 exactly what you just read as a smoking gun weird he wants us to like marvel at like oh

00:29:00.340 look how industrial it is but i'm like dude you just spent 150 pages complaining about all the

00:29:06.620 fossil fuels that are going into corn production you're now describing a farm that is using

00:29:12.000 significantly less fossil fuels and is actually growing something in a way that sounds to me

00:29:17.100 a lot more sustainable but it's like he describes all of this stuff as if we're supposed to be

00:29:22.860 disgusted by it. And it's like, no, man, they're not using pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

00:29:27.560 And this whole section is like, what do you want, Michael? This sounds like they're doing

00:29:32.120 the thing that you're asking them to do. Yeah, I was going to say, it feels like

00:29:35.840 this is not out of line with the expectations that I would think that most organic shoppers

00:29:42.300 would have. Yeah. This is also like a thing that rankles me about this era of food system critiques

00:29:49.300 is that all of them seem to be organized around this idea that like, you don't even know what

00:29:55.140 you're putting in your body. I know the worst thing that's happening here is you're eating

00:29:59.400 foods that you don't know what they are. Not the worst thing that's happening here is that we're

00:30:04.280 paying people less than minimum wage to pick the foods that you eat. My main concern about

00:30:10.500 this sort of stuff is less about like, what are the unknown chemicals that are coming into my body

00:30:15.620 And who needs to be around those chemicals all day?

00:30:19.760 There are real critiques to be had here that transcend just the idea of like, there's a

00:30:26.240 chemical on your food and you don't know what it is.

00:30:28.580 This is the only place in the book where he mentions farm workers.

00:30:31.820 What?

00:30:32.520 This is like the only, the only mention.

00:30:35.300 Even in the industrial farm stuff, he barely mentions it, which is fascinating to me.

00:30:39.740 But then, but this is kind of where he's leading us to because he's trying to make

00:30:44.600 organic look as bad as possible and then he says you know the time for organic is over we tried

00:30:50.240 organic it's clearly it's become this industrial monster just like the other factory farms and

00:30:56.360 it's now time to he says move beyond organic this is like where he's leading us here's what farms

00:31:03.600 should look like so a huge chunk of the book for the next like 150 pages he spends on polyface

00:31:10.680 farm which is in virginia and it's run by a guy named joel salatin and a lot of this book is like

00:31:18.180 a profile of this like single farmer guy who's running like a local sustainable artisanal farm

00:31:25.820 like a farmer's market farm there's a lot of like metaphorical stuff in this section we like meet

00:31:29.980 michael pollan as he's like standing in a meadow and like looking at the cows and it's like sunset

00:31:36.020 that there's a lot of just like weird aesthetic stuff going on where he's describing this like

00:31:40.260 small family farm do you know what it is he's describing the olestra ad about a farmer

00:31:45.780 it's 100 the olestra ad right this this is like a republican campaign ad in like pennsylvania

00:31:54.640 listen listen to this this is insufferable this is this is joel salatin's entrance he talks about

00:32:02.180 like Joel Salatin like walking toward him from across a meadow or something and he's wearing

00:32:06.800 like overalls and like a hat or whatever and then Michael Pollan describes the hat so he says

00:32:12.220 Salatin's broad brim straw hat did more than protect his neck and face from the Virginia sun

00:32:18.420 it declared a political and aesthetic stance one descended from Virgil through Jefferson

00:32:23.460 with a detour through the 60s counterculture whereas a feed company cap blazoned with the

00:32:29.080 logo of an agribusiness giant would have said labor would have implied in more ways than one

00:32:33.880 a debt to the industrial salatin's jaunty chapeau no grass rather than plastic bespoke independence

00:32:41.800 sufficiency even ease the cartoon version of me is named jaunty chapeau 0.97

00:32:47.920 i would just like to say that oh god so he's describing this guy like fucking gaston from 0.95

00:32:56.640 beauty and the beast right he's just like man of the people salt of the earth sure it's part of 0.97

00:33:02.900 this romanticism and he loves the fact that this guy describes himself as a grass farmer

00:33:07.280 so he doesn't grow crops he grows grass and then his cattle and his chickens graze on the grass

00:33:13.120 all he's doing is reproducing the conditions of the planet naturally and like this is how cows

00:33:18.520 and chickens are supposed to live and so this produces like a much more like an ecosystem

00:33:23.000 approach, rather than this horrific monoculture approach where it's like you're blasting the

00:33:27.420 chemicals and you're spraying it and you're tractoring it. This is just like a dude out in

00:33:33.280 nature, cows eating grass. So I'm going to send you another excerpt.

00:33:39.920 He unleashes portable chicken yards, known among small scale farmers as chicken tractors,

00:33:45.920 on fields after cows have finished grazing there. The chickens peck at the remaining grass,

00:33:51.920 sterilize the cow manure of worms, and leave their own manure behind. All of this prepares

00:33:57.780 the pasture for the next planting of grass without a bit of off-farm fertilizer. Cows eating grasses

00:34:04.760 that had themselves eaten the sun, the food chain at work in this pasture could not be any shorter

00:34:10.400 or simpler. The farm and the family comprised a remarkably self-contained world in the way

00:34:16.600 I imagined all American farm life once did. Well, I imagined doing some heavy lifting there.

00:34:22.260 But the agrarian self-sufficiency that Thomas Jefferson celebrated used to be a matter of

00:34:30.100 course and a product of necessity. Nowadays, that sort of independence constitutes a way of life,

00:34:35.680 both deliberate and hard won, an achievement. Were Jefferson to return today, he would no doubt be

00:34:43.540 gratified to learn that there were still farmers down the road from monticello as jeffersonian as

00:34:49.740 joel salatin i hate this you see what he's doing here boy oh boy lifting up thomas jefferson as

00:34:57.200 your example i know it feels reminiscent to me of jared being the like weight loss success story 0.97

00:35:04.920 where i'm like we are not lifting up thomas jefferson like a famed sexual assaulter

00:35:12.160 thomas like what also are we lionizing like the farming practices of someone who owned slaves

00:35:19.340 right like every part of this you can't just evoke like the farm of thomas jefferson

00:35:25.960 without like unpacking or at least acknowledging like some stuff we probably wouldn't want to do

00:35:32.280 today but i mean pick a different white dude i know there's a lot of farmers out there find one 0.98

00:35:39.160 The one that didn't own people.

00:35:40.860 I know. 0.98

00:35:41.260 And then sexually assault those people.

00:35:43.520 So, I mean, maybe this is foreshadowing, but he spends a lot of time with this Joel Salatin guy who describes himself as a Christian libertarian environmentalist. 0.66

00:35:56.100 What?

00:35:56.600 Which is like should give you a sense of like the kinds of beliefs he has.

00:36:01.520 so michael pollan regularly just parrots this guy saying the most deranged anti-government

00:36:09.580 like people don't want to work anymore the problem in america is that like the government

00:36:14.960 is tyranny good that's true pollen presents it over and over again as this like kind of quirk

00:36:20.860 of his character he'll be like oh he loves talking about anti-government stuff at the

00:36:25.000 breakfast table like i guess i'm gonna get one of his lectures he wants me to come to a meeting of

00:36:29.660 the three percenters with him that seems good we now understand this as like a huge red flag and i

00:36:35.600 realize that like political everything was different back then but it's like you do get

00:36:40.580 the sense that he's kind of soft peddling some of this guy's actual beliefs and what we later find

00:36:48.760 out so joel salatin is still around he kind of became a celebrity after this book came out he

00:36:53.740 became like an influencer because he owns his farm and he would give advice to people he's now

00:36:58.880 in like the least twisty twist ever he's now like a covid denier guy he held a bunch of meetings

00:37:05.520 during the pandemic where he like wouldn't let people wear masks and he made people turn off 0.76

00:37:12.020 their cell phones because covid is caused by 5g oh boy he's written all these like how-to guides 1.00

00:37:18.900 to being the kind of farmer that he is and like i guess one of them in 2005 had like a long screed 1.00

00:37:25.200 against abortion doctors okay i don't know how you get this in like a book about farming but it's

00:37:31.260 like it's really obvious this guy has some like really ugly beliefs and not like cute robert

00:37:37.280 nozick night watchman state libertarian beliefs but like weird conspiratorial beliefs and like

00:37:43.220 michael pauland just like doesn't touch it at all it's very fun to me that you described

00:37:47.960 libertarianism as cute like oh look at them look at those guys but then what drives me

00:37:54.980 so nuts about this is that even as he presents Joel Salatin's beliefs as like kind of kooky,

00:38:00.560 like another one of his anti-government rants, he kind of like half endorses a lot of these

00:38:06.020 completely bananas ideas that this guy has that end up in Michael Pollan's best-selling book.

00:38:13.420 So this is a section where Joel Salatin like lays out his like theory of change.

00:38:19.940 Quote, you can't regulate integrity, Joel is fond of saying.

00:38:23.840 The only genuine accountability comes from a producer's relationship with his or her customers

00:38:28.200 and their freedom to, quote, come out to the farm, poke around, sniff around.

00:38:33.460 If after seeing how we do things, they want to buy food from us,

00:38:36.400 that should be none of the government's business.

00:38:38.700 Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant

00:38:43.900 than any regulation or technology.

00:38:46.520 I bet he does.

00:38:48.380 It is a compelling idea.

00:38:50.780 Is it?

00:38:51.520 imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as poly faces 0.93

00:38:57.860 so much of what happens behind those walls the cruelty the carelessness the filth would simply 0.97

00:39:03.700 have to stop we don't need a law against mcdonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse

00:39:09.620 salatin says we ask for too much salvation by legislation all we need to do is empower

00:39:15.160 individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse what do

00:39:20.340 you think? I mean, so listen, one of the things that I would sometimes do in my old line of work,

00:39:29.940 which was organizing, like I'm a white lady, I could cover up tattoos. My hair was long enough

00:39:35.280 that I didn't read as queer necessarily to folks. I'd be the person who would go to like far right

00:39:42.320 garbage meetings. And this sounds like really not different from what I would hear at those 0.84

00:39:46.940 far-right opposition meetings. Oh, really? Absolutely. Like, we're just waiting on the

00:39:52.040 government to save us. We just need to empower. There are good people who want to do good work.

00:39:55.500 We just need to empower them to do that work. And it's wild to read him be swayed by it.

00:40:02.540 That's what's so weird to me, to present it without comment and kind of like,

00:40:08.000 well, it's an interesting idea. Like, transparency. We can all... He has this long

00:40:12.840 section about his techniques for slaughtering animals and how like the customers of his farm

00:40:17.720 can like come and see their chicken get slaughtered and like then buy the chicken afterwards and how

00:40:22.060 that's the only way to ensure like good hygiene or whatever and it's like this farm is a three

00:40:28.300 hour drive from washington dc where like most of his customers are so like am i supposed to spend 0.74

00:40:34.080 a whole fucking day driving out to a farm and like with my with my zero experience in inspections 0.85

00:40:41.080 and my zero knowledge about what a farm is supposed to look like yeah this is not a solution it's it's 0.99

00:40:47.240 nuts that he even presents this as like imagine this it's like yeah it fucking sucks yeah and 0.95

00:40:52.660 also like hey you know what you need in order to like go out and see a farm is a car or someone 0.98

00:40:58.380 who can drive you exactly time in the day when the farm is open and accepting visitors and staff

00:41:05.380 is working but you're not working yes you need disposable income and so much time to do what he's

00:41:12.380 describing here yes like oh this might not be a thing that everyone can or even just wants to do

00:41:17.640 i actually think that like going out and visiting a farm would be really cool it's fun if i had kids

00:41:21.800 and if that was available i would like absolutely take them on like a farm weekend or whatever

00:41:26.080 and see what it's like see what the conditions are like like meet the animals sure on the most

00:41:29.920 surface level i think the idea of like understanding where our food comes from is like yeah great

00:41:33.940 totally but also like it's not it's not a substitute for like government inspectors

00:41:39.100 who know what they're doing as i've mentioned on the show so many times i worked in human rights

00:41:43.360 for 11 years i worked on almost all my career was dedicated to the human rights impacts of

00:41:47.520 businesses so i know people who inspect factories they have checklists of like 140 items they spend

00:41:54.260 days doing this they know how to spot a fake id in like guatemala because people will oftentimes

00:42:00.880 get fake IDs so they can work when they're not 18 yet. It's like you need technical skills

00:42:05.840 to inspect a farm or a workplace for like hygiene violations. Like, okay, what temperature are they

00:42:13.500 like keeping the meat storage at? It's like, this is a really hard job and like a technical skill

00:42:18.700 to inspect things. I don't want to do that. Yeah. It feels like the advice that he's giving here

00:42:24.840 is like, when you have a lot of wealth and time and ability to dig into this, here's how you

00:42:30.680 navigate a fucked up food system yeah not here's how we fix the food system right like that's not

00:42:38.540 actually it seems what he's arguing here it seems like what he's arguing is like you just need to 0.99

00:42:43.540 make better choices within the sea of garbage choices that i think we have do you know what i 0.95

00:42:47.900 mean like god damn it's this weird fetishization of small farms too there's nothing constitutionally 0.96

00:42:55.340 that says that a smaller farm would have better working practices there's nothing that says 0.96

00:42:59.900 they actually might be worse because small farms are exempt from a lot of the labor laws that 0.95

00:43:04.280 govern farm workers i mean nobody follows the fucking labor laws for farm workers anyway so

00:43:08.340 it's kind of a moot point there's different animal welfare rules the idea that small farms just 0.92

00:43:13.520 inherently have better production is like why no like this is what i just don't get about michael

00:43:20.960 pollin's thing he he explicitly says that like he hates organic certification right he hates like

00:43:26.600 the sticker but it's like at least the sticker has like an actual set of like clearly defined

00:43:31.840 rules right he says that like you know what what joel salatin is doing is like beyond organic and

00:43:36.700 it's so much more sophisticated than organic okay i mean maybe that's true in joel salatin's case

00:43:41.540 but considering you can charge two to three times more for meat and produce that is produced under 0.88

00:43:46.860 conditions like this why wouldn't people just fucking lie about it without a mechanism of 0.97

00:43:51.940 accountability. This is not a real alternative to factory farming. It's just producing the same 0.98

00:43:57.220 problems, potentially. I do think that there's value in smaller farmers. It gives us more

00:44:02.040 diversity. You know what I mean? Like, I do think that there's like a thing here about balance of

00:44:05.760 power between major farming entities and smaller farmers. Totally agreed. Smaller farmers can still

00:44:12.020 lie about their conditions and that sort of stuff. Like, I think there are benefits to that. It

00:44:15.260 doesn't sound like those are the benefits that he's talking about. Like, it seems like part of

00:44:18.760 what he's arguing here is that smaller farmers are producing better food. I would believe you

00:44:23.300 if you told me that was true. And I would believe you if you told me that it wasn't. My guess is

00:44:26.180 that it's somewhere in between. What's frustrating is he keeps mixing up like the potential to make

00:44:30.660 better food and like they are producing better food. Because again, without any certification

00:44:35.380 system or any system of inspections, well, how do I know that the local farmer isn't using pesticides

00:44:40.200 and like synthetic fertilizers? Sure, sure, sure. The worst boss I've ever had was like a mom and

00:44:45.440 pop video store owner who's just like a total fucking dirtbag and like the worst landlord i've 0.99

00:44:51.400 ever had was like a mom and pop landlord i don't actually think that like small is worse than big 0.99

00:44:56.100 i think that it's really silly to make that argument that like oh we should have more big 0.78

00:45:00.000 corporations in america that would fix our problem like that's fucking deranged but also like there's 0.85

00:45:03.740 nothing inherent about small businesses that makes them better you do in a large country with like 0.96

00:45:09.540 millions of people you need to have like control mechanisms especially when there's huge economic

00:45:14.300 incentives involved yeah i mean again this all feels like it's like one step above an individual

00:45:20.140 solution to a systemic problem yes if you want to establish a floor for a set of practices

00:45:26.800 or if you want to raise that floor the mechanism that we have for that is regulation yeah feel

00:45:33.400 however you want to feel about that but that's the pathway that we have currently so like i don't

00:45:38.960 know what to tell you i'm not going out to a farm yeah i'm not going to visit joel salatin and hear

00:45:44.800 him tell me about you know people really misunderstand the oath keepers like i don't

00:45:48.940 need that but then what's what's also what's so interesting to me too is that this vision of like

00:45:55.020 overregulation like joel salatin complains about overregulation and like the tyranny of government

00:45:58.940 control constantly and michael pollan kind of parrots this but then actual small hold farmers

00:46:04.580 have written quite a bit in the ensuing years since this book came out about how overregulation

00:46:09.100 is not really the problem. It is actually true that a lot of rules for the USDA are geared toward

00:46:14.220 large slaughterhouses. It can be a little bit too stringent for smaller producers. That's an

00:46:19.120 actual problem and the regulations need to be better on that. The real issue is that Joel

00:46:23.820 Salatin is selling people this vision of if the regulators would get out of the way,

00:46:28.760 all of these small farms would flourish and like it's just not true partially because

00:46:35.580 joel salatin inherited his farm from his father so plenty of other people have written about like

00:46:41.520 yeah this stuff works and is profitable if you don't have like any land mortgage rents to pay

00:46:47.440 and he also uses free labor on his farm michael pollan talks about his interns what he has interns

00:46:55.960 like doing chores okay that just sounds like free labor to me it does to me too and i will say

00:47:01.960 hot take i feel that way about every single unpaid internship in yeah it's not yes and like

00:47:07.800 a farm work internship is like that's i know that is dark and there's websites where like

00:47:13.880 former interns have posted about like bad living conditions and like getting weird food poisoning

00:47:18.100 and stuff like sure people have actually kind of come forward about this stuff yeah but then

00:47:23.100 There's been some really interesting pushback to this. There's a guy named Chris Newman who is like a person of color who like did this. He like left the rat race and like bought a farm and tried to make it work. And he is a medium. It's like really good. And he's pushed back on this, like all of Joel Salatin's like weird right wing libertarian bullshit about like getting government regulators out of the way. So I'm going to send you an excerpt from a blog post by Chris Newman.

00:47:51.840 I recently found myself with the free time to do some simple math. One of the larger farmer's

00:47:57.220 markets I participate in has about 100 vendors. I'm one of the mid-sized operations that sells

00:48:02.180 there, and I'm paying about $1,000 a year in fees to participate. I'm also devoting about 250 hours

00:48:08.360 a year in staffing and prep time, and about $650 in fuel getting to and from the market.

00:48:15.000 Altogether then, I'm paying roughly $5,000 to participate in a large farmer's market.

00:48:20.000 It's pretty safe to assume that the costs of the other 99 vendors are similar.

00:48:24.400 We're shelling out a combined $500,000 to participate in just one market.

00:48:29.920 Most of us participate in at least two markets, so let's double the figure to a million.

00:48:34.600 A million dollars annual operating budget could comfortably lease, service, and staff

00:48:39.100 a large urban brick-and-mortar market that's open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, year-round.

00:48:44.940 Instead, we spend it on a pop-up market that's open just half the year for two days a week,

00:48:49.980 four hours at a time.

00:48:51.120 And it's probably outdoors where rain, excessive heat, or a cold snap will effectively ruin

00:48:55.760 the day.

00:48:57.680 Yeah, this is a thing that I have talked to a farmer friend about, that he's like,

00:49:01.760 farmer's markets are so deeply not worth it.

00:49:03.840 This whole vision of local farms are the way out of factory farming, and they're the way

00:49:09.740 to break America's addiction to corn and fossil fuels, blah, blah, blah.

00:49:12.920 it doesn't really make sense for consumers and it doesn't really make sense for farmers either

00:49:17.600 like you don't really make a lot of money doing this it's wildly inefficient and like no one's

00:49:23.780 really benefiting from this like what you actually need is like government subsidies for these people

00:49:29.060 to like get their produce into supermarkets or restaurants or whatever yeah yeah yes and you

00:49:35.700 need like community supports and something chris newman has written a lot about is that we have

00:49:39.120 this idea of like the the sort of the family farm and it's based on this idea of like the nuclear

00:49:43.940 family and that you like own your own land it's all wrapped up in this like weird white 1950s

00:49:51.040 picket fence bullshit yeah and if that's not your model then like there isn't really any help for

00:49:56.080 you and you're like not part of the national conversation about farmers yeah it's not that 0.95

00:50:00.880 government regulation is like choking farmers it's that like there aren't enough government

00:50:05.640 supports to incentivize people to do this there are ways to just like get the outcomes that we

00:50:10.660 want without these weird workarounds yeah i mean i think like the hard thing here the thing that

00:50:16.640 i'm struggling with the tension that i'm struggling with in response to all of this is like it feels

00:50:21.800 like what we need is like a wholesale like audit of the food system and then like a reconfiguring

00:50:28.660 of how a bunch of things work. But the challenge is, if and when we do that, we have to be able

00:50:35.800 to do it in a way that centers the needs and experiences of like poor people and disabled

00:50:40.260 people and people who are working multiple jobs and people who are on food stamps and other sort

00:50:44.700 of like assistance programs and like, make sure that it actually works for more than like me and

00:50:50.920 Michael Pollan. Yeah, exactly. It is aimed squarely at us. And what it feels like none of

00:50:57.260 these critiques particularly from this era really tangle with is just like what does that mean for

00:51:02.240 anybody else and like there's nothing there's nothing in michael pollan's book like for those

00:51:07.460 people at all like there's no message to like poor people at all there's no message to anyone who's

00:51:13.260 not also basically michael pollan exactly yes also a little epilogue to this story this guy

00:51:19.560 chris newman after he writes his blog post being like uh i'm doing all this local farming stuff

00:51:24.360 and it's like really not working for me in which he doesn't mention joel salatin at all joel salatin

00:51:30.120 then writes a blog post where he's like i disagree with chris but i can't even talk about that because

00:51:36.460 then you'd call me racist what i don't know why you're saying that and then there's like a whole

00:51:41.760 back and forth ensues and this like culminates with him saying i would suggest the black indigenous

00:51:47.200 and people of color who feel america offers them no opportunity should give up all modern

00:51:52.080 conveniences and return to their tribal locations and domicile fully go back to africa and then he

00:51:58.620 also said that 75 of black boys grow up without a father which is not true and i was like that's 0.89

00:52:07.380 that sounds fucked up and then i looked it up and it's like i guess this is like a thing that goes 0.77

00:52:11.560 around like right wing internet oh yeah it absolutely does yes i mean that's obviously 0.89

00:52:15.260 where all this stuff was gonna go right this feels it feels unsurprising yeah it's never like

00:52:19.680 this libertarian covid denier 5g guy also has really good racial politics you know what he's 0.58

00:52:26.760 really thoughtful on immigration you'd be surprised actually nuanced stuff yeah so okay 0.92

00:52:34.400 that was that was meal two he then has like a grass-fed meal but like it's not that interesting

00:52:39.320 just like he eats he eats grass-fed beef and it's good and then we get to part three the forest

00:52:45.760 the whole conceit of this section is he wants to make a meal where everything is like hunted or

00:52:51.740 gathered by michael pollan there's not that much to say here i mean this this section is like kind

00:52:56.540 of fine it's him learning how to hunt and he kills a wild boar and there's this like pretty

00:53:02.960 cool sounding dude who shows him how to forage and he looks around he finds like weird mushrooms

00:53:08.160 and he has them like analyzed before he eats them and it's all kind of fine like it doesn't

00:53:13.480 really say anything about the American food system, and it like doesn't really try to.

00:53:17.420 I'm going to send you the final paragraph.

00:53:20.080 Whoa, of the entire book?

00:53:22.260 Of the entire book, where he kind of lays out his like theory of change.

00:53:26.140 Right on.

00:53:26.580 So he's like sitting there at the end of this like beautiful, wonderful meal that he spent

00:53:30.460 like months preparing, basically. And he's like sitting there and contemplating.

00:53:33.600 This is not the way I want to eat every day. I like to be able to open a can of stock. And I

00:53:38.220 like to talk about politics or the movies at the dinner table, sometimes instead of food.

00:53:43.480 But imagine for a moment if we once again knew what it is we're eating, where it came

00:53:48.940 from, how it found its way to our table, and what, in a true accounting, it really

00:53:53.860 cost.

00:53:54.880 We could then talk about some other things at dinner, for we would no longer need any

00:53:59.440 reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not

00:54:04.640 industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the

00:54:09.320 world.

00:54:10.060 Whoa.

00:54:11.120 He's doing metaphorical stuff again.

00:54:12.540 This feels like an imagined reality. I mean, it is. He's saying it. If we knew where our food

00:54:17.940 came from, we would never talk about it. And my experience is, as soon as I know where food comes

00:54:23.000 from, it's all I want to talk about. Yeah, it's like, I don't know how much time he spent in

00:54:27.380 Seattle or Portland. But the idea that like people stop talking about food once they know where it's

00:54:31.860 from does not match my experience. Truly. Truly. It's linked into this sort of set of ideas about

00:54:41.920 social change that is just like, people just need to know and then things will be different.

00:54:47.160 And if you talk to people who work in social change movements, if you talk to people who

00:54:53.040 work in policy or public health or any of the folks who are sort of like tasked with

00:54:58.380 creating and managing that change, knowledge doesn't actually do it.

00:55:02.900 People knowing things doesn't necessarily change their behavior because there are other

00:55:08.380 constraints in our lives. And because not everybody has the same priorities, my guy.

00:55:12.720 What's frustrating to me about the book is that he applies all this stuff to food,

00:55:15.740 that it's like our connection to our natural world. And, you know, he makes all these kind

00:55:18.480 of metaphorical connections. But then you can make all the same connections to like our clothing.

00:55:23.140 Yeah.

00:55:23.380 Right. It's like we would die without clothing in the winter. And, you know, what can be more

00:55:26.960 important than like the cloth we put on our backs, right? And like, most of us know the

00:55:31.340 conditions that our clothing is produced under are like not good.

00:55:35.120 Right. We don't we don't know the particulars, but we know it's real bad.

00:55:38.840 Yeah. And like, it's not changing. So this theory of change, like if we knew we would behave differently, like I've actually read up on public information campaigns for like various podcasts over the years.

00:55:49.600 and like there's a really narrow range of issues on which just delivering people information is

00:55:56.480 going to actually change things and it's mostly things where like people have the power to do

00:56:01.860 something they just lack the information and it's like something that benefits them the idea that

00:56:06.820 it's like we all just have to buy food that's way more expensive yeah by choice because it's like

00:56:12.280 better for the planet or whatever like that's never going to work because people want to spend

00:56:16.260 their money on other things. Well, and in that way, it makes sense that he's foregrounding Joel

00:56:20.700 Salatin for all of this, because what he's proposing is a deeply libertarian solution,

00:56:26.860 right? He's not proposing big overhauls of the food system. He's not proposing anything actually

00:56:32.040 that would lead to meaningful accountability for agribusiness if that's his wheelhouse. And if

00:56:37.180 that's the bee in his bonnet, like none of this, like a bunch of people electing to go out to

00:56:42.020 smaller farms and buying from those smaller farms. Like, let's say you scale that and it gets huge.

00:56:48.340 Even if it gets huge, that's not that's taking a tiny bite out of the markets of these massive,

00:56:55.380 massive farms. It would be great for those small farms to get more business and all that kind of

00:56:59.640 stuff. Like, great. Absolutely. But like, in terms of like a transformational force in the

00:57:04.140 food system? No, no, no, no. His whole program is like ways to opt out of our shitty system.

00:57:11.040 it's like charter schools but for food exactly and it's not even just that they're opting out 0.84

00:57:15.880 he's literally telling them that like this is a political act shopping at the farmer's market is

00:57:20.220 a political act damn it and he keeps describing what he's proposing as a food movement but he

00:57:27.080 never defines what this movement should actually want uh-huh what i kept shouting at this book 0.98

00:57:32.940 is like europe he just completely gives up on the idea of like regulating

00:57:38.600 like large farms. But the minute you start digging into this, there's 72 pesticides that are legal

00:57:45.940 in America and illegal in the EU. It's one quarter of America's pesticide use is pesticides that you

00:57:51.980 can't use in the EU. He describes all of these factory farms for 150 pages. And then he's just

00:57:57.500 like, well, all we can do is go to the farmer's market. And it's like, there's actually lots of

00:58:03.160 models for countries that regulate factory farms and have far better factory farm conditions

00:58:09.140 than america does yeah totally i read a really interesting article by heidi zimmerman

00:58:14.220 called caring for the middle class soul ambivalence ethical eating and the michael

00:58:19.780 paulin phenomenon whoa she talks about this book and the rest of his work as like what it really

00:58:26.000 is is lifestyle instruction yeah it's sort of masquerading as social and political analysis

00:58:32.320 but it's telling you how to live. And this article actually gave me a lot more sympathy

00:58:38.300 for Michael Pollan and like these arguments in that it is really upsetting to be confronted

00:58:45.240 with like the fact that we live in a world where we're complicit with a lot of like really awful 1.00

00:58:49.700 shit. You read about this stuff and you're like, oh my God, like everything I'm eating 0.99

00:58:53.440 was picked by somebody who's working under terrible conditions and everything I'm wearing,

00:58:57.720 the car that I drive is polluting the environment. And like, it's not clear like what we should do.

00:59:02.320 with that or like what we should do about that. And a lot of us just carry around a lot of anxiety

00:59:06.960 because we're powerless, right? You have your one vote that you do every four years or whatever.

00:59:11.340 But other than that, you know, even like a local political action or something,

00:59:15.400 it's very hard to sort of see change from that, right? It's very difficult.

00:59:19.280 And so you've got this massive population, especially of like upper class, white,

00:59:24.800 fairly privileged people who are like kind of aware of their own, our own complicity in all

00:59:31.440 these systems, right? Because we're the people that are doing most of the consuming in America,

00:59:35.580 right? And so there's this constant need for exoneration. Tell me that I'm not as bad as I

00:59:43.740 feel about all this. And a lot of the instruction that Michael Pollan is offering people, and I

00:59:49.360 don't think that he's doing this deliberately. I don't think he's an evil guy. I don't think that

00:59:52.480 any of this is deliberate. But I think what he's offering people is some absolution and like some

00:59:58.320 way of opting out and being like, well, factory farms are terrible, but you know what? I get most

01:00:02.720 of my stuff at the farmer's market. I'm actually not part of the problem. He's offering you this

01:00:07.300 way of feeling okay with not only opting out of these factory farm systems, but also of paying a

01:00:15.560 lot of money to do so. So much of this is like, it's basically a luxury product. Michael Pollan

01:00:21.760 also talks a lot about how the food on Joel Salatin's farm, it tastes better and the yolks

01:00:26.080 of the eggs are yellower and the chicken tastes chickenier and it's just so much better and it's

01:00:31.620 like yeah man you're just describing like a rich people product like rich people are willing to 0.75

01:00:37.280 pay more for like fucking manuka honey and these high-end goods so you're selling these choices 0.70

01:00:43.620 back to them as like no no this is your civic duty you're voting with your fork yeah and i mean 0.97

01:00:49.860 it also feels like i don't know that sort of phenomenon that you're talking about about like

01:00:54.780 we're sort of like broadly aware but tried to remain specifically unaware of the impacts of

01:01:02.340 our sort of consumer behaviors and you know what that leads to and what we're supporting and all

01:01:06.500 that kind of stuff i'm with you like i don't think michael pollan is like doing this intentionally

01:01:11.100 it doesn't seem that way to me but it is quietly like a very very troubling approach to just be

01:01:18.460 like the critiques of the food system just give rich people a way out of feeling like they're

01:01:23.220 part of something that's like morally conflicted. And then everybody else is just like on their own.

01:01:27.880 Good luck. Bye. Yeah, I fucking love the farmer's market. Yeah, I'd love getting my shit at the

01:01:32.880 farmer's market. But like, there's no civic duty. Like that's not me engaging as a political actor. 0.99

01:01:38.600 That's not systems change in like a meaningful way. Exactly. That's not like large scale systems

01:01:43.080 change. Yes, I agree. Yeah. Like it's tough. Like this seems like tough talk time. But also like,

01:01:47.460 it's true. Yeah. If you really want to look at this stuff and what it would take to fix it,

01:01:53.280 it gets really big and really explicitly political really fast. Like if you want to fix the food

01:02:00.620 system, hello, that requires you to align yourself with and advocate for immigrants and migrant

01:02:08.020 workers. Yeah. There's a bunch of like worker stuff that gets really quickly into union territory

01:02:12.780 and what labor laws ought to look like, right?

01:02:15.860 If you want to do this stuff, you have to think really globally.

01:02:20.320 You have to think outside of the US and you have to think outside of individual behaviors.

01:02:25.560 Yeah.

01:02:26.680 I'm tired.

01:02:28.220 I know.

01:02:29.140 I'm tired.

01:02:30.540 Slight epilogue.

01:02:31.780 Tell me.

01:02:32.560 I mean, this really clicked in my brain when I read Heidi Zimmerman's article about this

01:02:37.000 being lifestyle instruction.

01:02:38.600 Because effectively, what Michael Pollan has done since this book came out is he became like a diet guru, right? He then publishes three books about like how to eat. And it's very telling to me that this book that is like kind of ostensibly about politics, right? It's like corn subsidies and like the creation of fertilizer and stuff. People read this book and he says, the question he gets the most is how should I eat? How should I eat?

01:03:05.380 people want these like individual lifestyle choices from this book and so that's what he's

01:03:10.100 given them which fair enough whatever but it's like i i think that reveals like the nature of

01:03:15.300 the project all along or at least the nature of like what it was always going to be used for

01:03:19.140 is that people just wanted to know like should i eat this or that so you know by the time he shows

01:03:23.800 up on oprah in 2010 he's basically just like any other diet influencer that she has on this is part

01:03:29.820 of the sort of like wave of food system criticisms that also ushered in an era of quote unquote

01:03:37.380 clean eating. This is an era that really supercharged moralizing around specific foods.

01:03:45.480 Like what's the source of your food? What's the nutrient profile of your food? Who grew it? What

01:03:50.920 did it, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. And that's also what led us to like a heightened

01:03:54.640 cultural conversation about orthorexia, which is this like emerging framework for talking about a

01:04:01.920 kind of disordered eating that is about eating particular foods or not eating particular foods,

01:04:07.980 often based on this idea of like, is it good for you? Or is it bad for you? Is it clean? Or is it

01:04:12.800 dirty? This feels like a real story of like, here's what happens when you write something

01:04:18.040 that's personally meaningful for you. And then just don't really think about how it plays out

01:04:22.300 more broadly or don't want to think about how it plays out more broadly to his credit michael

01:04:26.840 pauland now speaks much more openly about like the need for politics i found a i think it was

01:04:32.140 2018 interview with him where he basically admits that like the food movement such as it is has been

01:04:37.940 a total failure no one really tried to direct all of this energy i think there was actually like

01:04:43.900 an opportunity for change there and there were a lot of people who were really fired up

01:04:47.680 about the food system being terrible.

01:04:50.180 But then instead of going into anything,

01:04:52.260 we've just created like a pretty robust

01:04:54.180 alternative economy for food,

01:04:57.040 like a high-end economy for food.

01:04:58.820 I mean, I guess...

01:05:00.100 I feel sad now

01:05:03.800 in a way that I sometimes feel sad

01:05:05.340 at the end of our episodes.

01:05:06.440 I feel like a little despondent.

01:05:07.860 Glad I did this to you again.

01:05:09.480 But you know, I know what I got to do

01:05:11.660 and that's go visit a right-wing farm.

01:05:14.180 Bye!

01:05:17.680 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - April 05, 2022

Michael Pollan's ＂The Omnivore's Dilemma＂

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