Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma"

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Actually, hold my microphone.

Do it.

Give us the old tagline.

Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that thinks that you should eat food whatever you see fit.

Oh, fuck, I messed it up.

You lost it.

You lost it.

Hang on.

I'm going to try it again.

I'm trying it again.

I'm trying it again.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that wants you to eat food as much as you want, whatever you see fit.

God damn it.

Why do I keep messing with you?

What are you going for?

Are you trying to remember pollen?

No, I'm doing like our version of pollen.

His is eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Okay, okay, so you know his, but you're doing the maintenance phase one.

Right.

Our version, I would propose, would be

eat food however much you need.

How about that?

Oh, whatever you see fit.

And cyberbully your local influencer.

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

I'm Michael Hobbs.

If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenancephase, or you can go to TeePublic, where we have masks, t-shirts, mugs, all kinds of things.

Both of those are linked for you in the show notes.

And today, Michael Hobbs, we are talking about a different Michael.

Yeah, I'm really curious what you know about this.

We are doing a diet book deep dive into the omnivores dilemma, which came out in 2006, and is by Michael Pollan, who is like quite an influential person when it comes to like food and food policy and how to eat.

So my relationship to all of this is I live in Portland, Oregon, and I have a

white upper middle class family, and that means I never stop hearing about Michael Pollen.

Oh, yeah.

Never.

You've got a garden in the backyard.

I mean, I do.

You're going to farmers markets.

Here's the thing that is challenging for me about all of this is

I have not read Michael Pollen's work myself.

I have a number of family members and like former colleagues and such who have.

And the things that people are like quoting to me and telling me about Michael Pollan's work are not like anti-fat things, but those people hold really deep anti-fat beliefs.

Right.

There's a correlation happening there.

And I don't totally know what to to do with that correlation.

It's actually an odd mirror version of Supersize Me.

Oh, say more about that.

I mean, Supersize Me was like kind of an excuse to make fun of people who eat at McDonald's.

And the omnivores dilemma and what Michael Pollen's whole kind of career arc has been, it's basically selling thinness back to people as virtue.

You're not shopping at a farmer's market because you like shopping at a farmer's market.

You're shopping at a farmer's market because like you're a good person and you care about saving to earth and you're part of a food movement this like uprising of people who are trying to change the industrial sources of our food oh interesting if you do this like if you eat these quote-unquote healthy foods you are performing a civic act he's quite he's quite explicit about that oh i have so he's wolf you're gonna love this you're you're already excited if we're gonna get into the relationship between civic participation and what kind of food you eat then i am gonna have things to say Michael.

Luckily, you're sitting in front of a microphone.

Oh,

imagine that.

I'm a friend of yours who you make a show with.

I just had breakfast.

I'm all tanked up, ready to roll.

You cut your carbs.

Let's yell about some shit, Michael.

You're loaded up.

I'm excited.

I am ready.

So I think it's important to like talk about how influential.

Michael Polland was in the mid-2000s.

Yep.

Michael Pollan showed up everywhere.

He was on late-night talk shows.

He was on Oprah eventually.

Whoa.

He's kind of like NPR royalty.

The way that he framed food and the way that he framed the problem with the American food system and the solution to it, you know, you know, things, things can age badly in like the vocabulary that they use has changed or like there's a homophobic joke or something.

But then there's things that age badly in just like their ideology and their underpinning assumptions.

And so much about this book has just aged.

really badly as far as like what we know now and what has happened with the ideas that Michael Pollan was essentially like incepting into the population.

I don't think that's a word.

But it's like, it's just very 2006.

It's so 2006 that it's wearing like sandblasted boot cut jeans with those like bejeweled flap pockets.

It's showing up at a community meeting to fight against a skateboard park.

It's wearing a von Dutch hat.

Yeah.

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

which drives me fucking nuts because there's only three meals described in the book.

I don't know if I like missed something really obvious, but the book is split into three parts.

What we're going to do in this episode is we're going to kind of walk through the book and debunk as we go.

So we're going to start with the introduction, which is called Our National Eating Disorder.

Oh!

We're in good hands already.

Nope.

And so he starts with the question, what should you have for dinner?

And he says, this book is a long and fairly involved answer to this seemingly simple question.

Along the way, it also tries to figure out how such a simple question could ever have gotten so complicated.

He uses the rise and fall of the Atkins diet as a jumping off point to talk about how America bounces from like fad diet to fad diet.

Eating is so fundamental to the human condition, and yet we don't seem to know how we're supposed to eat and we're constantly getting these weird whiplash messages about what we should and shouldn't eat, and the science isn't all that helpful, and the marketing isn't all that helpful.

It actually starts out sounding a lot like this show.

I was going to say, it sounds like a thing that you and I are also trying to sort of navigate.

Exactly.

He says, we don't have a culture of food.

He says, a country with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for the quackery or common sense of a new diet book every January.

It would not be apt to confuse protein bars and food supplements with meals or breakfast cereals with medicines.

It probably would not eat a fifth of its meals in cars or feed fully a third of its children at a fast food outlet every day.

And it surely would not be nearly so fat.

Oh, I don't care for this.

And then he does some like French people or skinnier stuff.

Like, you've got to figure out what that is.

This opening, we're just setting the stakes and I don't care for it.

Yes.

Everyone's too fat.

There need to be fewer fat people.

Look at you feeding your kids in your car.

And he also, this is something I've learned making this show with you.

I think people in most modern countries have like a deeply ambivalent feeling about modernity and especially about urbanization.

He does a lot of stuff about how there was this traditional way of life, you know, these food rules later that he'll say, like, if your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, you shouldn't eat it.

Sure.

A lot of his message, even in the very, very intro of this book, is about how like we used to have these traditional farming societies.

People lived on farms, you know, ma and pa, raising the goats, whatever.

And we've lost that, and now it's like it's all fast food, and we're eating in our cars.

And there's really this sense of like a fallen society.

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.

We start to get Mumford and sons after this.

We start to get, do you know what I mean?

You're blaming him for Mumford and sons?

No, I'm not blaming him for Mumford and sons.

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 harkening back to quote unquote simpler times, which is always fraught.

Yeah.

Right.

Like that's always a fraught thing for white people to do.

Yeah.

And also, like, when is he talking about, where is he talking about?

Yeah.

We come up against this so much in the show because almost all of these nostalgia arguments break down the second you start to think about them.

So Rachel Lawton is a historian who is like a historian of food, like how people used to eat.

She wrote a really good book called Cuisine and Empire Cooking in World History.

And she has written a number of responses to Michael Pollen over the years.

In an article that she wrote right after this book came out, she says, Michael Pollan's fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives.

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.

Food, like the life of a person who ate food was not good for most of human history.

So she talks about how if you lived on a farm, you know, you have this harvest and there's all this abundance, but then for three or four months of the year, typically you're eating like canned or jarred foods because there isn't, there's no crops growing in like January, February, March.

So you're literally, you're eating like this kind of gruel porridge for breakfast.

And then the other two meals of the day are like an ear of corn that you canned nine months ago.

Yum, yum.

She has colleagues from Italy who talk about like super high rates of pellagra in Italy because people were eating polenta three meals a day, these like peasant farmers.

Wait, what's pellagra?

I don't even know.

It's a B vitamin deficiency.

Oh shit, okay.

And a lot of what we think of as like traditional foods, traditional practices, are actually the tiny percentage of the population that had servants who could afford to like make them food all day.

She talks about how in Mexico in the 1800s, people who didn't have servants, like women, it was always women who were doing this kind of work, would spend up to five hours a day grinding the maize for tortillas, for like dinner.

Yikes.

But when you're talking about like the golden age of like farms, who was picking those crops?

Yeah.

Sharecroppers, like who owned that land?

The minute you start doing this stuff about like we need to tell the story of our food, it's like the actual history of this stuff gets like pretty ugly pretty fast.

Well, and also like, even if you were like a white farmer, there's also still the fucking Dust Bowl and the potato famine.

Right.

Being a farmer in itself is also not a picnic.

It just isn't like a sophisticated analysis of what has gone wrong with the American food system to just be like, it 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 in some ways.

Yeah.

So that was the intro.

A lot of this like false nostalgia and the problem with America is that we don't have a culture of food.

So part one.

The first meal that he's going to walk us through is like the industrial meal.

So we're eventually going to work our way up to a McDonald's meal, and he's going to walk us through the way that like the industrial factory farm system in America works.

This is by far the best part of the book.

A lot of his diagnosis of what is wrong with the American food system, especially like large-scale industrial farms, is like basically accurate.

So he basically starts out with this thing that, you know, corn is in everything.

You go into the grocery store and there's like high fructose corn syrup in bread, in tomato sauce.

You know, pick up any product from the shelf and it will have some derivative of corn in it, right?

Most of what we grow in America is corn and soybeans because corn is the most efficient way to get carbohydrates and soy is the most efficient way to get protein.

Oh, these are true crops that you can grow in like massive quantities and then you can break them down into all these constituent parts and then you can use them, like you can put them in everything.

There's three reasons how corn took over the American food supply.

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

Basically, you can now plant stalks of corn like mere inches away from each other, and it used to be like two feet because they've been bred to have much stronger stalks, so they grow straight up.

And it used to be that they would sort of like bend over in the sun and they would flop over on each other.

And pretty soon they're like tangled up and like nobody gets the sunlight that they need.

Whereas now they just grow ramrod straight.

So you can just plant them every couple inches and you can harvest them with a tractor.

Sure.

And like significant change.

Yeah.

So in 1920, you would get about 20 bushels of corn per acre, and now you get 180 bushels of corn per acre.

That's big.

Honestly, again, you don't want to discount this stuff.

Like, this is part of how we feed the world.

Like, this is why starvation is a much smaller problem at the world scale than it used to be.

The second big turning point was synthetic fertilizers.

This is nuts.

After World War II, they were making a bunch of ammonium nitrate, which is an ingredient in explosives for the war.

And, you know, with crops,

you have to rotate crops to put nitrogen back in the soil.

Yeah.

So ammonium nitrate is a great source of nitrogen.

This is like why you put fertilizer into soil.

So there's all these munitions plants that are making ammonium nitrate.

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

And we're just going to like give it to all the farmers.

Oh.

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

Oh, yikes.

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.

And the only way to do that is with fossil fuels, right?

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

So what Michael Polland says in his book is that like for every calorie of corn, you're burning like nine calories of oil.

Gotcha.

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

The way that Michael Pollan describes it is that agriculture has never operated on any basic capitalist principles of like like supply and demand because farmers are responsible for feeding the country, right?

So it's like in low yield years, you have a risk of like your population not having enough food or you have to import food.

And it's like, it's like an actual government project that needs to happen.

But then also, if they have a really good year and they grow too much or they have like a ton of corn that's coming out of the fields, the price of it crashes.

Whoa.

And then farmers are basically destitute because all of a sudden they're not making as much from their harvest as they had expected.

And then it fucks with the prices next year and they can't pay off their seeds, blah, blah, blah.

So it's like, you can't just like have the free market do agriculture.

Yeah.

So essentially, as early as we've had like government agriculture policy, we've always been subsidizing to try to like smooth these things out, to try to give people some sort of expected.

return so that they have a reason to grow crops and they're not just in this like horrific cycle of poverty or they stop growing crops altogether and like we don't have enough food.

Yeah.

And it is bone-crushingly hard work.

It's so hard work.

I know.

I have a good friend who's a farmer and like tells me about his 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 of those things and I'm already tired.

I don't understand.

But then, I mean, this is also like, this is also a version of this argument that I'm sure you've heard too, that basically because we're growing so much corn, In the 70s, 80s, we started putting corn in everything.

So this is when we started getting corn and Pop-Tarts, corn and bread.

They developed high-fructose corn syrup as this cheaper form of sweetening.

So now we're sweetening everything with corn.

So basically we became like a monocrop country.

Then it's like, well, the corn has to go somewhere.

And that's where we started getting this like avalanche of processed foods.

That's essentially the argument.

Okay.

Is that true?

It is actually true and quite easy to measure that we're producing more corn because there's like agricultural statistics.

Sure.

But then 60% of America's corn is fed to livestock, which Michael Pollan describes in great detail.

So it's not necessarily that all of the corn like went to human consumption.

A lot of that corn went to like we're now eating more meat than we used to.

And we also export a ton of corn and we also like corn goes into like biofuels and stuff that is not food.

I listen to a really good talk by Julie Guthman, who's an academic who has written various critiques of Michael Pollen.

What she says is you can't say with any certainty that Americans are eating more now than they used to simply because it's all based on this like self-report data.

Yeah, totally.

We've talked on the show before about how there's only really two ways to measure people's food consumption.

You do these 24-hour diaries or you ask people what they're eating in general and they're both like fundamentally very flawed.

It's really hard to figure out how many calories people are eating.

And so her thing is like, well, maybe it sounds fairly plausible, like in a common sense way that we're eating more.

Like, I don't know.

But like, you really can't actually say with any certainty that we're eating more than we used to.

I would like to submit this as a new entry for that's what I call maintenance phase.

Is this sort of like assumes facts not in evidence narrative?

narrative.

That's a good way to put it.

The way that you sort of identify a moral panic is you look at what we don't need evidence to believe, right?

Or that's at least part of it.

You can just sort of say, we eat more now than we used to.

And people will be like, that seems right.

And folks won't necessarily like fact check it and be like, wait, how are you measuring that?

Because it seems really pedantic and it seems sort of like nitpicky, but like it really matters.

Like if that's a foundational assumption of your work.

Exactly.

And, you know, Julie Guthman points out other things that he, he often focuses on like the domestic reasons why we're all eating more and corn has become the central thing.

But what she says is like the market of food is so global now, right?

Like we're getting blueberries from Chile and the idea that like America is overproducing corn, therefore Americans are eating more corn doesn't really take into account the fact that like we're shipping that stuff overseas for then it to get processed and then shipped back to us.

And we're also importing a ton of food and we're exporting a ton of food.

The changes that have brought us to the problems with our food system are much more global than they are domestic.

Another thing that Julie Guthman points out in her book, the fact that corn is subsidized is not actually the reason why it's like cheaper in the stores.

Like fruits and vegetables are more expensive.

And Julie Guthman points out that corn is very easy to dry and very easy to store and ship.

Whereas if you're talking about like peaches, You have to pick the peaches off of trees.

You can't do it with any kind of machine.

And then you have to get it to wherever it's going to be.

I think they have to be refrigerated or some other crops have to be refrigerated.

Many crops you have to wash before you sell them.

It's just more expensive to produce a lot of fruits and vegetables.

Pollen kind of implies that it's like, if we can just get rid of the corn subsidies, all the fruits and vegetables will be cheaper or whatever.

And it's like, it's actually just a lot more complicated than that.

That makes a ton of sense to me.

That's not a critique that I have heard, and it totally makes sense to me.

Well, also, another thing that has always bugged me about the subsidies thing is that it's true that like the corn subsidies, like I agree with Michael Pollen's like diagnosis of part of the problem, but then if you started heavily subsidizing, say, broccoli, they would just start growing broccoli in massive quantities and they do high fructose broccoli syrup.

Yeah, I just want to I want to bookmark a thing.

I'm going to predict a thing.

Ooh, ooh, okay, okay.

I'm going to predict a response that I'm going to have to whatever his prescriptions are.

My response is going to be, that's an individual individual proposed solution to a systemic problem we found it we're doing it that's what i call maintenance phase is it is it just you just need to buy and eat the right kinds of foods not

we need to reorganize our food system you're spoiling the episode already cool fun found it yes i'm saving all the little sounds i want to make

you're predicting this i'm not doing it i'm very into this like i want to predict it thing it's very satisfying i find it very satisfying you love ruining my episodes You're like, this is where Mike is taking me.

Commence ruination.

But then, okay, but before we get to the prescriptions, which we will obviously get to in great detail, we have to talk about his fast food safari to McDonald's.

Oh, no.

I feel like this was also a genre of journalism in the early 2000s where, like, a wealthy writer from New York or DC or wherever would go to some like Iowa McDonald's and they would like describe it, you know, in this like zoo kind of way.

It's so gross.

It's so gross.

In his defense, Michael Pollan's McDonald's Safari is like not as bad as others I have read.

Sure.

The description is, you know, he, he's all building this around like a meal, right?

So like he and his family go into a McDonald's in the Midwest somewhere, and his son gets an order of McNuggets.

So he describes like all of the weird ingredients in the McNuggets, which like fine, fair enough.

And then he himself orders a cheeseburger.

And the problem with a cheeseburger for the argument that he's making is that if you go on the McDonald's website, a McDonald's cheeseburger is 100% beef.

And he has to sort of almost begrudgingly in the text mention that a McDonald's cheeseburger only has six ingredients.

If you don't count like all the ingredients in the bun.

Right.

So he can't level the also very popular at this time argument that it's like a Franken food.

Exactly.

It's like, it's like just a really straightforward food.

It's like pickles and onions and cheese and beef and a bun.

It's like really basic.

But then he says, in truth, my cheeseburger's relationship to beef seemed nearly as metaphorical as the nugget's relationship to a chicken.

Nope.

I'm like, how?

It's ground beef.

They took beef and then they ground it up.

It's identical to something that you would get at the grocery store.

And frankly, it's identical to something you'd get if you went to like a fancy restaurant.

They're getting their beef from the same place.

Right.

So I'm going to send you a little excerpt from this part.

Ooh.

All right, here we go.

What is it about fast food?

Not only is it served in a flash, but more often than not, it's eaten that way too.

We finished our meal in under 10 minutes.

Since we were in the convertible and the sun was shining, I can't blame the McDonald's ambiance.

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

Bookmark, disagree.

It tastes fucking good, Michael.

It's fine.

I didn't even like it.

This is, you know what this is?

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

I don't even, McDonald's doesn't even taste good to me.

What do you mean, TV?

Okay.

Okay, sorry, I'll get back to the quote.

Quote, the more you concentrate on how it tastes, the less like anything it tastes.

I said before that McDonald's serves a kind of comfort food, but after a few bites, I'm more inclined to think that they're selling something more schematic than that, something more like a signifier of comfort food.

So you eat more and more quickly, hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or french fry as it retreats over the horizon.

And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.

You're eating, you're just eating food, Michael.

You're describing eating food.

But he's describing the ennui of eating industrialized food, Michael.

You're having a perfectly pleasant meal with your family, and you're like trying to pull something shitty out of it.

Well, and also, like, listen, man, not every meal is a satisfying experience.

There are times when you're just hungry and you just need to eat some food, and that's also okay.

Yes.

I've also had fancy meals that I've eaten quickly.

Yeah.

And that don't bear savoring.

Exactly.

I've also had like really good subs from Quiznos that I've absolutely savored.

Are you going to talk about the honey mustard chicken?

Because that's what I want to talk about.

That thing, which is great.

That thing is so good.

Just this idea that it's like it's fundamentally an industrial experience to eat at McDonald's and you can't eat slowly and you can't sit for an hour with your family at McDonald's and like have a nice talk as you're all eating your McDonald's food.

It's like, that's just straight up bullshit.

Yeah.

We were not a McDonald's family growing up, but when we did fast food, we would go to Dairy Queen.

And I will say, I have like plenty of fond memories.

Yeah.

Like good quality family time, getting a dipped cone at Dairy Queen.

Like, it's fine.

It's fine.

To be fair, you know my whole thing that, like, I think it's really important to be fair to people.

So far, this book is like mostly fine, right?

We're like 200 pages into it.

Most of it has been about the history of corn and corn subsidies which is actually really interesting and really cool and like maybe he didn't represent the full picture there's quibbles to be had but if the whole book was like this there would there wouldn't be a whole lot of like dunk festing but then part two

is called pastoral grass and this is him having like a grass-fed meal okay

this is the section

where we get to the first big twist of the book that Michael Pollen fucking hates organic farms.

What?

And he hates Whole Foods.

Like the store Whole Foods?

He fucking hates it.

Listen, okay.

We've talked a lot so far about fuck McDonald's for real fuck Whole Foods.

Truly fuck Whole Foods.

Go look up the views of that CEO.

Go look up their responses to employees speaking Spanish in their stores, to customers who speak Spanish.

Go look up their labor laws.

Go look up their BMI bonus.

God.

They're terrible.

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

I'm excited to rip into Whole Foods.

He hates it so much.

Quote, with the growth of organics and mounting concerns about the wholesomeness of industrial food, storied food is showing up in supermarkets everywhere these days.

But it is Whole Foods that consistently delivers the most cutting-edge grocery-lit.

On a recent visit, I filled my shopping cart with eggs, quote, from cage-free vegetarian hens, milk from cows that live, quote, free from unnecessary fear and distress, wild salmon caught by Native Americans in Yakutat, Alaska, population 833, and heirloom tomatoes from Capay Farm, quote, one of the early pioneers of the organic movement.

The organic broiler I picked up even had a name, Rosie, who turned out to be a sustainably farmed, free-range chicken from Petaluma Poultry, a company whose, quote, farming methods strive to create harmonious relationships in nature, sustaining the health of all creatures and the natural world.

This is what bugs me about Whole Foods, too, is that everything has like a little label on the back where it's like a story.

Sure.

It's like Stony Mansions Farms was founded in 1802, and then you go to the front, it's like a $9 thing of yogurt.

It's a place that I really try hard not to shop because every time I get a glimpse into like what their actual business model is, it's like a horror show.

It's funny how we're going harder on Whole Foods than McDonald's.

I feel harder about Whole Foods than I do about McDonald's.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So basically, Michael Pollan feels about Whole Foods the same way that we do, which is like very roasty.

Yeah.

This leads into his critique of the organic farming movement, that organic farms are basically just another way of saying industrial farms.

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.

It's fascinating.

Here, this is, I'm going to send you another

excerpt.

Quote: 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.

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.

Instead of toxic pesticides, insects are controlled by spraying approved organic agents, most of them derived from plants, and by introducing beneficial insects like lace wings.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to farming organically on an industrial scale is controlling weeds without the use of chemical herbicides.

Greenways tackles its weeds with frequent and carefully timed tilling.

Even before the crops are planted, the fields are irrigated to germinate the weed seeds present in the soil.

A tractor then tills the field to kill them, the first of several passes it will make over the course of the growing season.

When the crops stand too high to drive a tractor over, farm workers wielding propane torches will spot kill the biggest weeds by hand.

What do you think?

I mean, I think he's describing like a big farm.

Yeah.

This doesn't feel like a smoking gun to me

at all.

This whole section of the book, he is presenting exactly what you just read as a smoking gun.

Weird.

He wants us to like marvel at like, oh, look how industrial it is.

But I'm like, dude, you just spent 150 pages complaining about all the fossil fuels that are going into corn production.

You're now describing a farm that is using significantly less fossil fuels and is actually growing something in a way that sounds to me a lot more sustainable.

But it's like he describes all of this stuff as if we're supposed to be disgusted by it.

And it's like, no, man, they're not using pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

And like, this whole section is like, what do you want, Michael?

This sounds like they're doing the thing that you're asking them to do.

Yeah, I was going to say, it feels like this is not out of line with the expectations that I would think that most organic shoppers would have.

Yeah.

This is also like a thing that rankles me about this era of food system critiques is that all of them seem to be organized around this idea that like, you don't even know what you're putting in your body.

I know.

The worst thing that's happening here is you're eating foods that you don't know what they are.

Not the worst thing that's happening here is that we're paying people less than minimum wage to pick the foods that you eat.

My main concern about this sort of stuff is less about like, what are the unknown chemicals that are coming into my body and who needs to be around those chemicals all day?

Yeah.

There are real critiques to be had here that transcend just the idea of like, there's a chemical on your food and you don't know what it is.

This is the only place in the the book where he mentions farm workers.

What?

This is like the only, the only mention.

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

But then, but this is kind of where he's leading us to, because he's trying to make organic look as bad as possible.

And then he says, you know, the time for organic is over.

We tried organic.

It's clearly, it's become this industrial monster, just like the other factory farms.

And it's now time to, he says, move beyond organic.

This is like where he's leading us.

Here's what farms should look like.

So a huge chunk of the book for the next like 150 pages, he spends on Poly Face Farm, which is in Virginia.

And it's run by a guy named Joel Salatin.

And a lot of this book is like a profile of this like single farmer guy who's running like a local, sustainable, artisanal farm, like a farmer's market farm.

There's a lot of like metaphorical stuff in this section.

We like meet Michael Pollan as he's like standing in a meadow and like looking at the cows and it's like sunset.

There's a lot of just like weird aesthetic stuff going on where he's describing this like small family farm.

Do you know what it is?

He's describing the Olestra ad about a farmer.

It's 100% the Olestra ad.

Right?

This is like a Republican campaign ad in like Pennsylvania.

Listen to this.

This is insufferable.

This is Joel Salatin's entrance.

He talks about Joel Salatin walking toward him from across a meadow or something.

And he's wearing overalls and a hat or whatever.

And then Michael Pollan describes the hat.

So he says, Salatin's broad-brimmed straw hat did more than protect his neck and face from the Virginia sun.

It declared a political and aesthetic stance, one descended from Virgil through Jefferson, with a detour through the 60s counterculture.

Whereas a feed company cap blazoned with the logo of an agribusiness agribusiness giant would have said labor, would have implied, in more ways than one, a debt to the industrial, Salatin's jaunty chapeau,

grass rather than plastic, bespoke independence, sufficiency, even ease.

The cartoon version of me is named Jaunty Chapeau.

I would just like to say that.

Oh, God.

So he's describing this guy like fucking Gaston from Beauty and the Beast.

Right.

He's just like, man of the people, salt of the earth.

Sure, it's part of this romanticism.

And he loves the fact that this guy describes himself as a grass farmer.

So he doesn't grow crops.

He grows grass and then his cattle and his chickens graze on the grass.

All he's doing is reproducing the conditions of the planet naturally.

And like this is how cows and chickens are supposed to live.

And so this produces like a much more like an ecosystem approach rather than this horrific monoculture approach where it's like you're blasting the chemicals and you're spraying it and you're tractoring it.

This is just like a dude out in nature, cows eating grass.

So I'm going to send you another

excerpt.

He unleashes portable chicken yards, known among small-scale farmers as chicken tractors, on fields after cows have finished grazing there.

The chickens peck at the remaining grass, sterilize the cow manure of worms, and leave their own manure behind.

All of this prepares the pasture for the next planting of grass without a bit of off-farm fertilizer.

Cows eating grasses that had themselves eaten the sun, the food chain at work in this pasture could not be any shorter or simpler.

The farm and the family comprised a remarkably self-contained world in the way I imagined all American farm life once did.

I imagined doing some heavy lifting there.

I know.

But the agrarian self-sufficiency that Thomas Jefferson celebrated used to be a matter of course and a product of necessity.

Nowadays, that sort of independence constitutes a way of life both deliberate and hard won, an achievement.

Ooh.

Were Jefferson to return today, he would no doubt be gratified to learn that there were still farmers down the road from Monticello as Jeffersonian as Joel Salatin.

I hate this.

You see what he's doing here.

Boy, oh boy, lifting up Thomas Jefferson as your example.

I know.

It feels reminiscent to me of Jared being the like weight loss success story in Super Size Me where I'm like, we are not lifting up Thomas Jefferson, like a famed sexual assaulter.

Thomas Jefferson like what?

Also, are we lionizing like the farming practices of someone who owned slaves?

Right, like every part of this.

You can't just evoke like the farm of Thomas Jefferson without like unpacking or at least acknowledging like some stuff we probably wouldn't want to do today.

But I mean pick a different white dude.

I know!

There's a lot of farmers out there.

Find one that didn't own people.

I know.

And then sexually assault those people.

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.

What?

Which is like, should give you a sense of like the kinds of beliefs he has.

So Michael Pollan regularly just parrots this guy, saying the most deranged anti-government, like people don't want to work anymore.

The problem in America is that like the government is tyranny.

Good, that's true.

Pollen presents it over and over again as this like kind of quirk of his character.

He'll be like, oh, he loves talking about anti-government stuff at the breakfast table.

Like, guess I'm going to get one of his lectures.

He wants me to come to a meeting of the three three percenters with him.

That seems good.

We now understand this as like a huge red flag.

And I realize that like political, everything was different back then.

But it's like, you do get the sense that he's kind of softpedaling some of this guy's actual beliefs.

And what we later find out, so Joel Salatin is still around.

He kind of became a celebrity.

after this book came out.

He became like an influencer because he owns his farm and he would give advice to people.

He's now in like the least twisty twist ever.

He's now like a COVID denier guy.

He held a bunch of meetings during the pandemic where he like wouldn't let people wear masks and he made people turn off their cell phones because COVID is caused by 5G.

Oh boy.

He's written all these like how-to guides to being the kind of farmer that he is.

And like I guess one of them in 2005 had like a long screed against abortion doctors.

Okay.

I don't know how you get this in like a book about farming, but it's like, it's really obvious this guy has some like really ugly beliefs and not like cute Robert Nozick Night Watchman State libertarian beliefs, but like weird conspiratorial beliefs and like Michael Pollan just like doesn't touch it at all.

It's very fun to me that you described libertarianism as cute.

Like, oh, look at them.

Look at those guys.

I think what drives me so nuts about this is that even as he presents Joel Salatin's beliefs as like kind of kooky, like another one of his anti-government rants, he kind of like half endorses a lot of these completely bananas ideas that this guy has that end up in Michael Pollan's best-selling book.

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

Quote, you can't regulate integrity, Joel is fond of saying.

The only genuine accountability comes from a producer's relationship with his or her customers and their freedom to, quote, come out to the farm, poke around, sniff around.

If after seeing how we do things, they want to buy food from us, that should be none of the government's business.

Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology.

I bet he does.

It is a compelling idea.

Is it?

Imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as polyfaces.

So much of what happens behind those walls, the cruelty, the carelessness, the filth, would simply have to stop.

We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse, Salatin says.

We ask for too much salvation by legislation.

All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.

What do you think?

I mean, so listen, one of the things that I would sometimes do in my old line of work, which was organizing, like I'm a white lady, I could cover up tattoos.

My hair was long enough that I didn't read as queer necessarily to folks.

I'd be the person who would go to like far-right garbage meetings.

And this sounds like really not different from what I would hear at those far-right opposition meetings.

Oh, really?

Absolutely.

Like, we're just waiting on the government to save us.

We just need to empower.

There are good people who want to do good work.

We just need to empower them to do that work.

And it's wild to read him be swayed by it.

That's what's so weird to me to present it without comment and kind of like, whoa, it's an interesting idea.

Like transparency.

We can all, he has this long section about his techniques for slaughtering animals and how like the customers of his farm can like come and see their chicken get slaughtered and like then buy the chicken afterwards and how that's the only way to ensure like good hygiene or whatever.

And it's like, this farm is a three hour drive from Washington, D.C., where like most of its customers are.

So, like, am I supposed to spend a whole fucking day driving out to a farm?

And, like, with my, with my zero experience in inspections and my zero knowledge about what a farm is supposed to look like,

this is not a solution.

It's, it's nuts that he even presents this as like, imagine this.

It's like, yeah, it fucking sucks.

Yeah.

And also, like, hey, you know what you need in order to like go out and see a farm is a car or someone who can drive you.

You need time in the day when the farm is open and accepting visitors and staff is working, but you're not working.

Yes.

You need disposable income and so much time to do what he's describing here.

Yes.

Like, oh, this might not be a thing that everyone can or even just wants to do.

I actually think that like going out and visiting a farm would be really cool.

It's fun.

If I had kids and if that was available, I would like absolutely take them on like a farm weekend or whatever and see what it's like, see what the conditions are like, like meet the animals.

On the most surface level, I think the idea of like understanding where our food comes from is like, yeah, great.

Totally.

But also, like, it's not, it's not a substitute for like government inspectors who know what they're doing.

As I've mentioned on the show so many times, I worked in human rights for 11 years.

I worked on almost all my career was dedicated to the human rights impacts of businesses.

So I know people who inspect factories.

They have checklists of like 140 items.

They spend days doing this.

They know how to spot a fake ID in like Guatemala because people will oftentimes get fake IDs so they can work when they're not 18 yet.

It's like you need technical skills to inspect a farm or a workplace for like hygiene violations.

Like, okay, what temperature are they like keeping the meat storage at?

It's like, this is a really hard job and like a technical skill to inspect things.

I don't want to do that.

Yeah.

It feels like the advice that he's giving here is like, when you have a lot of wealth and time and ability to dig into this, here's how you navigate a fucked up food system.

Yeah.

Not here's how we fix the food system, right?

Like that's not actually, it seems what he's arguing here.

It seems like what he's arguing is like, you just need to make better choices within the sea of garbage choices that I think we have.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, goddamn.

It's this weird fetishization of small farms too.

There's nothing constitutionally that says that a smaller farm would have better working practices.

There's nothing that says they actually might be worse because small farms are exempt from a lot of the labor laws that govern farm workers.

I mean, nobody follows the fucking labor laws for farm workers anyway, so it's kind of a moot point.

There's different animal welfare rules.

The idea that small farms just inherently have better production is like, why?

No.

Like, this is what I just don't get about Michael Pollen's thing.

He explicitly says that like he hates organic certification, right?

He hates like the sticker.

But it's like, at least the sticker has like an actual set of clearly defined rules.

He says that like, you know, what Joel Salatin is doing is beyond organic and it's so much more sophisticated than organic.

Okay, I mean, maybe that's true in Joel Salatin's case.

But considering you can charge two to three times more for meat and produce that is produced under conditions like this, why wouldn't people just fucking lie about it?

Without a mechanism of accountability, this is not a real alternative to factory farming.

It's just producing the same problems potentially.

I do think that there's value in smaller farmers.

It gives us more diversity.

You know what I mean?

Like, I do think that there's like a thing here about balance of power between major farming entities and smaller farmers.

Totally agreed, smaller farmers can still lie about their conditions and that sort of stuff.

Like I think there are benefits to that.

It doesn't sound like those are the benefits that he's talking about.

Like it seems like part of what he's arguing here is that smaller farmers are producing better food.

I would believe you if you told me that was true and I would believe you if you told me that it wasn't.

My guess is that it's somewhere in between.

What's frustrating is he keeps mixing up like the potential potential to make better food and like they are producing better food.

Because again, without any certification system or any system of inspections, well, how do I know that the local farmer isn't using pesticides and like synthetic fertilizers?

Sure, sure, sure.

The worst boss I've ever had was like a mom-and-pop video store owner who's just like a total fucking dirt dog.

And like the worst landlord I've ever had was like a mom-and-pop landlord.

I don't actually think that like small is worse than big.

I think that it's really silly to make that argument that like, oh, we should have more big corporations in America.

That would fix our problem.

Like, that's fucking deranged.

But also, like, there's nothing inherent about small businesses that makes them better.

You do, in a large country with like millions of people, you need to have like control mechanisms, especially when there's huge economic incentives involved.

Yeah, I mean, again, this all feels like it's like one step above an individual solution to a systemic problem.

Yes.

If you want to establish a floor for a set of practices, or if you want to raise that floor, the mechanism that we have for that is regulation.

Feel however you want to feel about that, but that's the pathway that we have currently.

So like, I don't know what to tell you.

I'm not going out to a farm.

Yeah.

I'm not going to visit Joel Salatin and hear him tell me about, you know, people really misunderstand the oath keepers.

Like, I don't need that.

But then what's also what's so interesting to me too is that this vision of like over-regulation, like Joel Salatin complains about over-regulation and like the tyranny of government control constantly.

And and Michael Pollan kind of parrots this.

But then, actual smallhold farmers have written quite a bit in the ensuing years since this book came out about how over-regulation is not really the problem.

Like, it is actually true that a lot of rules for the USDA are geared toward like large slaughterhouses.

It can be a little bit too stringent for smaller producers.

Like, that's an actual problem, and like the regulations need to be better on that.

Sure.

The real issue is that, like, Joel Salatin is selling people this vision of like, if the regulators would get out of the way, all of these small farms would flourish.

And like, it's just not true, partially because Joel Salatin inherited his farm from his father.

So plenty of other people have written about like, yeah, this stuff works and is profitable if you don't have like any land mortgage rents to pay.

And he also uses free labor on his farm.

Michael Pollan talks about his interns?

What?

Because he has interns like doing chores?

Okay, that just sounds like free labor to me.

It does to me too.

And I will say, hot take, I feel that way about every single unpaid internship in

the past world.

And like a farm work internship is like, that's, I know, that is dark.

And there's websites where like former interns have posted about like bad living conditions and like getting weird food poisoning and stuff.

Like

people have actually kind of come forward about this stuff.

Yeah.

But then there's been some really interesting pushback to this.

There's a guy named Chris Newman who is like a person of color color who like did this.

He like left the rat race and like bought a farm and tried to make it work.

And he has 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.

I recently found myself with the free time to do some simple math.

One of the larger farmers markets I participate in has about 100 vendors.

I'm one of the mid-sized operations that sells there and I'm paying about $1,000 a year in fees to participate.

I'm also devoting about 250 hours a year in staffing and prep time and about $650 in fuel getting to and from the market.

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

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

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

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

A million dollars annual operating budget could comfortably lease, service, and staff a large urban brick-and-mortar market that's open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, year-round.

Instead, we spend it on a pop-up market that's open just half the year for two days a week, four hours at a time, and it's probably outdoors where rain, excessive heat, or a cold snap will effectively ruin the day.

Yeah, this is a thing that I have talked to farmer friend about that he's like, farmers markets are like so deeply not worth it.

This whole vision of like local farms are the way out of factory farming and like they're they're the way to break America's addiction to corn and fossil fuels, blah, blah, blah.

It doesn't really make sense for consumers and it doesn't really make sense for farmers either.

Like you don't really make a lot of money doing this.

It's wildly inefficient and like no one's really benefiting from this.

Like what you actually need is like government subsidies for these people to like get their produce into supermarkets.

Or restaurants or whatever.

Yeah.

Yes.

And you need like community supports and something Chris Newman has written a lot about is that we have this idea of like the sort of the family farm and it's based on this idea of like the nuclear family and that you like own your own land.

It's all wrapped up in this like weird white 1950s picket fence bullshit.

And if that's not your model, then like there isn't really any help for you and you're like not part of the national conversation about farmers.

It's not that government regulation is like choking farmers, it's that like there aren't enough government supports to incentivize people to do this.

There are ways to just get the outcomes that we want without these weird workarounds.

Yeah, I mean, I think like the hard thing here, the thing that I'm struggling with, the tension that I'm struggling with in response to all of this is like it feels like what we need is like a wholesale like audit of the food system and then like a reconfiguring of how a bunch of things work.

But the challenge is, if and when we do that, we have to be able to do it in a way that centers the needs and experiences of like poor people and disabled people and people who are working multiple jobs and people who are on food stamps and other sort of like assistance programs and like make sure that it actually works for more than like me and Michael Pollan.

Yeah, exactly.

It is aimed squarely at us.

And what it feels like none of these critiques, particularly from this era, really really tangle with is just like, what does that mean for anybody else?

And like, there's nothing, there's nothing in Michael Pollen's book, like, for those people at all.

Like, there's no message to like poor people at all.

There's no message to anyone who's not also basically Michael Pollen.

Exactly, yes.

Also, a little epilogue to this story.

This guy, Chris Newman, after he writes his blog post being like, I'm doing all this local farming stuff and it's like really not working for me, in which he doesn't mention Joel Salatin at all.

Joel Salatin then writes a blog post where he's like, I disagree with Chris, but I can't even talk about that because then you'd call me racist.

What?

I don't know why you're saying that.

And then there's like a whole back and forth ensues, and this like culminates with him saying, I would suggest that black, indigenous, and people of color who feel America offers them no opportunity should give up all modern conveniences and return to their tribal locations and domicile.

Fully go back to Africa.

And then he also said that 75% 75% of black boys grew up without a father,

which is not true.

And I was like,

that sounds fucked up.

And then I looked it up and it's like, I guess this is like a thing that goes around like right-wing internet.

Oh, yeah, it absolutely does.

Yeah.

I mean, that's obviously where all this stuff was going to go, right?

This feels, it feels unsurprising.

Yeah, it's never like this libertarian COVID denier 5G guy also has really good racial politics.

You know what?

He's really thoughtful on immigration.

You'd be surprised.

Especially

nuanced stuff.

Yes.

So, okay,

that was meal two.

He then has like a grass-fed meal, but like, it's not that interesting.

It's just like he eats grass-fed beef and it's good.

And then we get to part three, the forest.

The whole conceit of this section is he wants to make a meal where everything is like hunter or gathered by Michael Pollen.

There's not that much to say here.

I mean, this section is like kind of fine.

It's him learning how to hunt and he kills a wild boar and there's this like pretty cool sounding dude who shows him how to forage and he looks around he finds like weird mushrooms and he has them like analyzed before he eats them and it's all kind of fine.

Like it doesn't really say anything about the American food system and it like doesn't really try to.

I'm gonna send you the final paragraph.

Whoa.

Of the entire book?

Of the entire book where he kind of lays out his like theory of change.

Right on.

So he's like sitting there at the end of this like beautiful, wonderful meal that he spent like months preparing, basically.

And he's like sitting there and contemplating.

This is not the way I want to eat every day.

I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics or the movies at the dinner table sometimes instead of food.

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew what it is we're eating, where it came from, how it found its way to our table, and what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

We could then talk about some other things at dinner, for we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry.

And what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

Whoa.

He's doing metaphorical stuff again.

This feels like an imagined reality.

I mean, it is.

He's saying it.

If we knew where our food came from, we would never talk about it.

And my experience is, as soon as I know where food comes from, it's all I want to talk about.

Yeah, it's like, I don't know how much time he spent in Seattle or Portland, but the idea that like people stop talking about food once they know where it's from does not match my experience.

Truly.

Truly.

It's linked into this sort of set of ideas about social change that is just like people just need to know and then things will be different.

And if you talk to people who work in social change movements, if you talk to people who work in policy or public health or any of the folks who are sort of like tasked with creating and managing that change, knowledge doesn't actually do it.

People knowing things doesn't necessarily change their behavior because there are other constraints in our lives and because not everybody has the same priorities, my guy.

What's frustrating to me about the book is that he applies all this stuff to food.

It's like our connection to our natural world.

And, you know, he makes all these kind of metaphorical connections.

But then you could make all the same connections to like our clothing.

Yeah.

Right.

It's like we would die without clothing in the winter.

And, you know, what can be more important than like the cloth we put on our backs, right?

And like most of us know the conditions that our clothing is produced under are like not good right we don't we don't know the particulars but we know it's real bad yeah and like it's not changing so there this theory of change that 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 and like there's a really narrow range of issues on which just delivering people information is going to actually change things.

And it's mostly things where like people have the power to do something.

They just lack the information and it's like something that benefits them.

The idea that it's like we all just have to buy food that's way more expensive by choice because it's like better for the planet or whatever.

That's never going to work because people want to spend their money on other things.

Well, and in that way, it makes sense that he's foregrounding Joel Salatin for all of this because what he's proposing is a deeply libertarian solution, right?

He's not proposing big overhauls of the food system.

He's not proposing anything actually that would lead to meaningful accountability for agribusiness if that's his, if that's his wheelhouse and if that's the bee in his bonnet, like none of this, like a bunch of people electing to go out to smaller farms and buying from those smaller farms, like let's say you scale that and it gets huge.

Even if it gets huge,

that's taking a tiny bite out of the markets of these massive, massive farms.

It would be great for those small farms to get more business and all that kind of stuff.

Like great, absolutely.

But, like, in terms of like a transformational force in the food system, no, no, no, no.

His whole program is like ways to opt out of our shitty system.

It's like charter schools, but for food.

Exactly.

And it's not even just that they're opting out.

He's literally telling them that, like, this is a political act.

Shopping at the farmer's market is a political act.

Damn it.

And he keeps describing what he's proposing as a food movement, but he never defines what this movement should actually want.

What I kept shouting at this book is like, Europe!

He just completely gives up on the idea of like regulating like large farms.

But the minute you start digging into this, there's 72 pesticides that are legal in America and illegal in the EU.

It's one quarter of America's pesticide use is pesticides that you can't use in the EU.

He describes all of these factory farms for 150 pages, and then he's just like, well, all we can do is go to the farmer's market.

And it's like, there's actually lots of models for countries that regulate factory farms and have far better factory farm conditions than America does.

Yeah, totally.

I read a really interesting article by Heidi Zimmerman called Caring for the Middle Class Soul: Ambivalence, Ethical Eating, and the Michael Pollen Phenomenon.

Whoa.

She talks about this book and the rest of his work as like, what it really is, is lifestyle instruction.

Yeah.

It's sort of masquerading as social and political analysis, but it's telling you how to live.

And this article actually gave me a lot more sympathy for Michael Pollan and like these arguments in that it is really upsetting to be confronted with like the fact that we live in a world where we're complicit with a lot of like really awful shit.

You read about this stuff and you're like, oh my God, like everything I'm eating.

was picked by somebody who's working under terrible conditions.

And everything I'm wearing, the car that I drive is polluting the environment.

And like, it's not clear what we should do with that or like what we should do about that.

And a lot of us just carry around a lot of anxiety because we're powerless, right?

You have your one vote that you do every four years or whatever.

But other than that,

even like local political action or something, it's very hard to sort of see change from that, right?

It's very difficult.

And so you've got this massive population, especially of like upper class, white, fairly privileged people who are like kind of aware of their own, our own complicity in all of these systems, right?

Because we're the people that are doing most of the consuming in America, right?

And so there's this constant need for exoneration.

Tell me that I'm not as bad as I feel about all this.

And a lot of the instruction that Michael Pollen is offering people, and I don't think that he's doing this deliberately.

I don't think he's an evil guy.

I don't think that any of this is deliberate.

But I think what he's offering people is some

absolution and like some way of opting out and being like, well, factory farms are terrible, but you know what?

I get most of my stuff at the farmer's market.

I'm actually not part of the problem, right?

He's offering you this way of feeling okay

with not only like opting out of these factory farm systems, but also of like paying a lot of money to do so.

So much of this is like, it's basically a luxury product.

Yeah.

Right.

Michael Pollan also talks a lot about how the food on Joel Salatin's farm, like, it tastes better and the yolks of the eggs are yellower and the chicken tastes chickenier and and it's just so much better.

And it's like, yeah, man, you're just describing like a rich people product.

Like, rich people are willing to pay more for like fucking Manuka honey and these high-end goods.

So you're selling these choices back to them as like, no, no, this is your civic duty.

You're voting with your fork.

Yeah.

And I mean, it also feels like, I don't know, that sort of phenomenon that you're talking about, about like we're sort of like broadly aware, but tried to remain specifically unaware of the impacts of our sort of consumer behaviors and, you know, what that leads to and what we're supporting and all that kind of stuff.

I'm with you, like, I don't think Michael Pollen is like doing this intentionally.

It doesn't seem that way to me, but it is quietly like a very, very troubling approach to just be like, the critiques of the food system just give rich people a way out of feeling like they're part of something that's like morally conflicted.

And then everybody else is just like on their own.

Good luck.

Bye.

Yeah.

I fucking love the the farmer's market.

Yeah.

I'd love getting my shit at the farmer's market, but like there's no civic duty.

Like that's not me engaging as a political actor.

That's not systems change in like a meaningful way.

Exactly.

That's not like large scale systems change.

Yes, I agree.

Like it's tough.

Like this seems like tough talk time, but also like it's true.

Yeah.

If you really want to look at this stuff and what it would take to fix it, it gets really big and really explicitly political really fast.

Like if you want to fix the food system, hello, that requires you to align yourself with and advocate for immigrants and migrant workers.

Yeah.

There's a bunch of like worker stuff that gets really quickly into union territory and what labor laws ought to look like, right?

Yeah.

If you want to do this stuff,

you have to think really globally.

You have to think outside of the US and you have to think outside of individual behaviors.

Yeah.

I'm tired.

I know.

I know.

I'm tired.

Slight epilogue.

Ooh, tell me.

I mean, this really clicked in my brain when I read Heidi Zimmerman's article about this being lifestyle instruction.

Because effectively, what Michael Pollen 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?

People want these like individual lifestyle choices from this book.

And so that's what he's given them, which fair enough, whatever.

But it's like, I think that reveals like the nature of the project all along, or at least the nature of like what it was always going to be used for.

Is that people just wanted to know, like, should I eat this or that?

So, you know, by the time he shows up on Oprah in 2010, he's basically just like any other diet influencer that she has on.

This is part of the sort of like wave of food system criticisms that also ushered in an era of quote-unquote clean eating.

This is an era that really supercharged moralizing around specific foods.

Like, what's the source of your food?

What's the nutrient profile of your food?

Who grew it?

What did it, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff.

And that's also what led us to like a heightened cultural conversation about orthorexia, which is this like emerging framework for talking about a kind of disordered eating that is about eating particular foods or not eating particular foods.

Right.

Often based on this idea of like, is it good for you or is it bad for you?

Is it clean or is it dirty?

This feels like a real story of like, here's what happens when you write something that's personally meaningful for you and then just don't really think about how it plays out more broadly or don't want to think about how it plays out more broadly.

To his credit, Michael Pollan now speaks much more openly about like the need for politics.

I found a, I think it was 2018 interview with him where he basically admits that like the food movement, such as it is, has been a total failure.

No one really tried to direct all of this energy.

I think there was actually like an opportunity for change there and there were a lot of people who were really fired up about the food system being terrible.

But then instead of going into anything, we've just created like a pretty robust alternative economy for food, like a high-end economy for food.

I mean, I guess.

I feel sad now in a way that I sometimes feel sad at the end of our episodes.

I feel like a little despondent.

Glad I did this to you again.

But you know, I know what I got to do, and that's go visit a right-wing farm.

Bye!