Omnivore Atlanta

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and king of all things politically correct in the food world, has announced that he does not support the boycott of Whole Foods:

John Mackey’s views on health care, much as I disagree with them, will not prevent me from shopping at Whole Foods. I can understand why people would want to boycott, but it’s important to play out the hypothetical consequences of a successful boycott. Whole Foods is not perfect, however if they were to disappear, the cause of improving Americans’ health by building an alternative food system, based on more fresh food, pastured and humanely raised meats and sustainable agriculture, would suffer.

I happen to believe health care reform has the potential to drive big changes in the food system, and to enlist the health care industry in the fight to reform agriculture. How? Because if health insurers can no longer pick and choose their clients, and throw sick people out, they will develop a much stronger interest in prevention, which is to say, in changing the way America feeds itself.

When health insurers realize they will make thousands more in profits for every case of type II diabetes they can prevent, they will develop a strong interest in things like corn subsidies, local food systems, farmer’s markets, school lunch, public health campaigns about soda, etc. So Mackey is wrong on health care, but Whole Foods is often right about food, and their support for the farmers matters more to me than the political views of their founder. I haven’t examined the political views of all the retailers who feed me, but I can imagine having a lot of eating problems if I make them a litmus test.

Announcement of the statement on Huffington Post produced over 1500 comments.

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Well, here’s something cool. Ezra Klein has begun a new bi-weekly column, Gut Check, in the Washington Post. It’s about food and politics.

In preparation for his first column, Klein interviewed Robert Kenner, the director of Food, Inc., and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and a consultant on the film.

Klein’s first column looks at the film. A snippet:

Amid all the concern over global warming, we are beginning to reckon with the fact that meat production accounts for more carbon emissions than cars. As we labor to reform the country’s health-care system, we now realize that the skyrocketing costs are in no small part due to the way our diets make us obese and sick. An IBM poll released last week found that 77 percent of Americans want more information about the food they buy. That’s no surprise. As food writer Michael Pollan says at the start of the film, “the way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than the previous 10,000.” The way we think about the way we eat hasn’t kept up.

Quite the opposite, in fact. We know rather less about our food than our grandparents did. In part, that’s because the process of creating food in a lab is less familiar than the process of growing it in a garden. Food producers might have to print ingredient lists, but no one ever passed a law saying we had to understand them. (How do you hydrogenate an oil, anyway?)

But there also has been a concerted effort to pull a curtain across the food production system. You see that twice in “Food, Inc.” Once, when a farmer who raises chickens for Tyson agrees to allow cameras onto his farm, only to have Tyson quickly call and persuade him to rescind his offer. And again, when Monsanto refuses to comment on, well, anything. It’s one thing to be kept out of Dick Cheney’s underground lair(s?). But we’re eating this stuff.

Klein is also the author of a blog on domestic policy and economics for the Post.

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OK, that’s not quite true – there was a small segment at the beginning of last night’s show that was about the White House press conference cell phone debacle. But apart from that, it was a food-heavy episode last night, with outrage over the proposed soda tax, dining and dashing on $1000 meals, and an interview with Michael Pollan. My favorite part? Watching Colbert snort 24 carat edible gold. Just in case you missed it, here’s the episode.

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EAT IT AND WEEP, POLLAN: Beet soup at Dynamic Dish

Trends of the last year?

Slow-roasted meats. More tapas. Local produce. Organic meat. Fancy burgers. Gastropubs. Fixed-price menus. Chocolate. Mainstreaming of molecular cuisine. Yummy scrap meat. Gluten-free dining. Tea. Chef-driven steak houses.

And then, looking ahead: poverty and bad health. No, they’re not exactly dining trends but they’re certainly beginning to play a significant role in our food life.

This hit home with me recently, when Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food,” appeared on the PBS program “Bill Moyers’ Journal.”

“People with more money generally have healthier diets,” he said, “but affluent people who don’t cook are not as healthy in their eating as poor people who still cook….If you don’t have pots and pans, get them.”

Pollan, whose research is first-rate, didn’t cite a source for the statement, but, as someone who has eaten out most days of the week for over 20 years, the space where my gall bladder used to be certainly intuits the truth of his statement. Fast food like McDonald’s is just about universally recognized as unhealthy. (See the film “Super Size Me.”) But we increasingly learn that what passes for “fine dining” may be anything but fine from our health’s perspective, too.

(more…)

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As Cliff mentioned in an earlier blogpost, acclaimed author and organic food activist Michael Pollan will be speaking at the Georgia Organics Conference on March 21, 2009 in Decatur. Slow Food Atlanta gives guests the opportunity to meet and greet with Pollan and chow down on what the earth has to offer.

In bigger news, Pollan has put together a petition encouraging President Obama to nominate a Secretary of Agriculture who supports sustainable family farmers. Add your name to the list of over 13,000 people already taking action.

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New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof writes that President-Elect Barack Obama should consider appointing a “secretary of food” to replace the antiquated position of secretary of agriculture:

A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.

Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy — all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

“We’re subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket — high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil, and we’re doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food,” notes Michael Pollan, author of such books as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”

Pollan, incidentally, will be the keynote speaker at the Georgia Organics 12th Annual Conference and Trade Show in March. Pollan is without doubt the nation’s most influential writer about food, politics and culture. You can find details about his appearance on Georgia Organics’ website.

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Our 2008 Food Issue hit the streets today. When conceiving of this year’s food issue, I struggled with whether to do another piece on local eating. I covered the same topic in my 2006 food issue, although from a very different angle. When I arrived in Atlanta in 2006, it seemed that the city was way behind in terms of its awareness of the local eating movement, so I covered the chefs who were at the forefront of bringing awareness to their customers. This year, I wanted to cover local producers – the folks living in Georgia who make local eating possible. So I decided to frame the issue around a week of totally local eating. And it was heartening to find out that even I, who has been thinking about this topic for years, had some things to learn about what we have to offer here in Georgia.

So, while the local eating theme has been visible for a couple of years now, I decided that it was still important enough to cover in a new way. That the issue coincided with the final stretch of this election cycle was a coincidence, but it turns out that the election is spurring others to talk about local food as well. If you haven’t already, you really should check out Michael Pollan’s open letter to the next president, which appeared in the October 9th New York Times Magazine Food Issue. You can also listen to Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Pollan, which aired on Monday. I find the most interesting part of the interview to be where Pollan addresses whether or not the local food movement is an inherently elitist movement, driven by wealthy foodies. Of course, there is that aspect to it, but Pollan makes a convincing argument for how and why we need to move beyond that perception.

Even if you did see CL’s food issue in the paper, make sure to check out the online version, which has tons of extras: a guide to local food resources, recipes from local chefs, and a photo gallery of Mike Buckner milling local flour at his home in Junction City.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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One of the suggestions for sensible eating in Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, is avoiding anything with ingredients you’ve never heard of.

While I was shopping at Publix a few days ago, I noticed this label on one of its pre-made salads. It includes everything from mold inhibitors and sodium nitrite to corn syrup and “vegetable color.” The potato salad label was even lengthier.

Meanwhile, the store was out of Fuji apples, the dried cherries I eat in my oatmeal every morning and the brown sugar I also put in my oatmeal. The store manager explained to me that there’s a “sugar shortage” because a processing plant burned down somewhere. Who knew?

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I lunched today at Anis with my friend Brad, as we do just about every week. Brad just returned from a two-week visit with his mother in Los Angeles. He ended up spending a great deal of time there in the bed with a bad case of the flu. Brad, a serious foodie and heart attack survivor, tends to be the optimistic sort and he was quick to identify the flu’s silver lining: “I lost seven pounds!”

So now, he says, he’s on a “serious diet.” He ate a salmon salad while I ate roasted chicken and devoured the basket of bread. “It’s the carbs that can make you fat,” he said. “Thank you, Dr. Atkins,” I muttered to myself.

Brad is reading the latest anti-carb text, Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories (reviewed in the New York Times here). Taubes maintains that the widely held beliefs about the relationship between eating and health, including obesity, are mainly based on very flimsy science. He aims to correct it, but he’s ended up being accused of some scientific hocus-pocus himself because of some significant studies he’s ignored.

Brad is also reading Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Pollan, whom I regard as the most important food writer in the country, is well known for his articles in the New York Times and his first book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Like Taubes, he exposes the weakness of nutritional science — including our obsession with healthy eating while we get fatter and fatter. He’s also well known for exposing the politics of food production and regulation.

The reality of how unhealthy our diet has become was anecdotally well documented in a recent article in the Times about obesity among food bloggers, food journalists and chefs, whom author Kim Severson has nicknamed the “Fat Pack.” She writes:

“I do find it irresponsible that they have done nothing to address health issues,” [Jason Perlow] said of eGullet, which he left in 2006 after a dispute with another of the site’s founders, Steven Shaw.

“The whole foodie lifestyle and diet I used to participate in — I’m not going to say it is unhealthy, but it is excessive,” he said. “I think you can still keep the food very interesting, but do it in moderation. That’s what the food community of the future is going to have to be.”

To which many members of the Fat Pack say: Shut up and pass the pork butt. Among a certain slice of the food-possessed, to suggest that indulgence might put one’s health in peril is to invite ridicule.

Without using the word, Severson documents the widespread denial among foodies, who can get enormously fat and blame their genetics rather than their diets. For example:

Mr. Shaw said he believes the genetic component of weight and health matter more than moderation and exercise. Although his father died from heart disease, he thinks that the state of medical knowledge on the relationship of diet to health changes so frequently that it can’t be trusted.

Some of his views about diet and health border on the extreme. “I think the whole diabetes thing is a major hoax,” he said. “They are overdiagnosing it.”

As denial implodes with the diagnosis of diabetes and heart disease, more foodies are taking up the subject of health in their blogs, according to Severson, which undoubtedly helps explain, too, the growing prominence of writers like Taubes and Pollan.

As for my own experience with this, it’s been unpleasant. Years ago, besides writing the Grazing column, I also wrote a monthly column for Georgia Trend that required me to eat all over the state, do a (detestable) weekly gig on WGST Radio and write occasional dining features for other magazines. Even though I continued to go to the gym daily, I gained about 30 lbs. Believe me, there’s a point where no matter how much weight you lift in the gym, it won’t counteract lifting a fork constantly. Nor will cardio do any good without a change in diet.

By cutting out the other gigs and paying more attention to my diet, I took off most of the extra weight, but it remains a battle. A huge meal like the one I ate Wednesday night at the Glenwood demands extra cardio and significant calorie restriction the following day. So tonight, it will be salad. Or maybe I’ll get the flu.

VAGUELY RELATED: Speaking of Anis, the restaurant’s owner, Arnaud Michel, and his wife Dawn are the parents of a third child, born last Sunday. Theo Philippe Michel weighed in at 8 lbs. 13 oz.

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