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Click here to advertise on Viceland Michael Pollan is one of the foremost food and plant experts in America. He wrote The Botany of Desire a few years ago, he teaches about food, plants, and biodiversity at the University of California, Berkeley, and he just finished a new book called The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's about eating in the same way that the Bible is about God. Michael Pollan: I recently set out to make a meal where I used only things that I hunted, gathered, or grew all by myself. They have some boar genes in them, but they are descended from pigs that were released by the Spanish in the colonial times. They're all over northern Sonoma County and Mendocino County. It's not like they're easy to find--they are nocturnal--but they kind of rip up the earth quite a bit, so you can locate signs of them and track them down. This Sicilian guy who lives in San Francisco taught me how to hunt. I blew my first chance because I was so hyperworried about safety that I was carrying my gun without a bullet in its chamber, thinking I would put it in when the time came. Then I found myself with a really good shot, but it was a pump-action rifle that I had. To put the bullet in the chamber would have lost me the shot--the animal would have heard me. So I had to give that shot to somebody else who was more prepared than I was. I had wanted to do it and I worked really hard to do it. So when I fired the gun and the animal went down, it was thrilling. Luckily it was a very clean shot and the animal went down and died quickly. I expected to feel much more ambivalent about the whole thing. The moment did come when I started to feel different about it. The first time was when we opened up the animal and started cleaning it. There was a weird moment of recognition because they look a lot like us inside. In fact, we were going to make prosciutto from the rear legs. For that you have to leave the skin on and then shave it with a razor. Well, all this stuff is going on to allow you to eat it. The food chain we're a part of needs to be more visible and legible to people. I think anyone who's been to a confinement farm in Iowa or a feedlot in Kansas should feel differently about eating that meat and how cheap it is. When was the second time you felt guilty about the boar? I posed over my pig and I did the classic hunter-porn shot with the gun across my chest and my hand on the beast. When I looked at the photo in my email that night, I was just disgusted with it. I had this shit-eating grin and there was this dead animal with this, like, delta of blood seeping out from under it. Suffice it to say, hunting feels very different inside than it looks outside. They purport to lay bare a part of the food chain, but it always feels like sensationalistic bullshit. I show PETA videos in a course on food I teach at Berkeley. You never know, because they will never disclose where or how they got their tapes. So, yes, what we are seeing on the tape happened--but what are we to conclude from it? That cover story you did for The New York Times Magazine, "An Animal's Place," seemed to say that eating organic meat is actually better for the animal kingdom than being a vegetarian. I've spent a lot of time looking at organic agriculture, which has itself become industrialized. I don't think a lot of people realize that there are organic factory farms. They may not be quite as big or quite as brutal, but when you buy your organic eggs and it says "free range" or "roaming hens," it's not quite what it's cracked up to be. I've been to some of those places and, yeah, the chickens aren't in battery cages stacked to the ceiling. But on the other hand, the animals aren't really allowed to go outside. There might be a little door because they're required to have that under the organic rules, but they're still living indoors and there's too many of them. You always walk a funny line when you're criticizing organic agriculture, but it needs to be held to a higher standard. It's better than the norm and it's to be applauded for that. You look at the packages and see these representations of happy cows and chickens, and we're all suckers for it. I struggled for a long time to see if I could justify it. There are farms where animals live in accordance with their creaturely character and are killed mercifully. And we are helping some species by eating them--they would vanish if we didn't eat them. It's important to defend the 1 percent of the American meat supply that does come from the good farms. But all the work I have done looking at industrial meat has led me to not eat industrial meat anymore. There's also a place that grows chickens under good conditions here. But even when I was in rural Connecticut, I would find farmers who grew good meat and I would buy a quarter of a steer or a bunch of chickens and put it all in the freezer. To eat well, which is to say to eat both responsibly and healthily, takes more money and more leisure time than eating cheaply. But just because a movement, like the alternative-food movement, is elitist, doesn't mean that we should dismiss it out of hand. A lot of social movements have begun as elite movements and gradually filtered down. Abolition, women's suffrage, and the environmental movement all began with the elite, so I don't think that's a devastating blow against it. Because the US government subsidizes industrial agriculture. We pay enormous subsidies to people who grow corn and soybeans. Since you can buy corn for less money than it costs to grow it, it makes sense for farmers to gather together instead of raising their own cattle or pigs. And on the factory farms, the animals are fed all the subsidized corn and soybeans. There was a period of hyperinflation and food costs got out of hand. You had housewives taking to the streets to protest the high cost of butter and horsemeat showing up in butcher shops. The goal of agricultural policy since then has been to force down the price of food as much as possible. We began encouraging farmers to plant fencerow to fencerow and "get big or get out"--that's what Earl Butts, Nixon's agriculture secretary, said. When corn is cheap, it all follows--beef is cheap, butter is cheap, eggs are cheap. First, to grow all that corn causes environmental devastation. Also, to eat so much highly processed food--because it isn't like we're eating fresh corn on the cob--causes lots of health problems. We're designed by evolution to eat a wide variety of different things. But if we're just eating rearrangements of corn we're not getting all our nutrients. The main ingredient in Coke, people don't often realize, is corn. So, with all this corn, it makes sense that Cokes are getting bigger. When I was a kid, the average Coca-Cola was a six- or eight-ounce bottle. It's all corn, plus a few chemical sweeteners and a couple natural flavors. I took a McDonald's meal to a scientist on campus here and he ran it through a mass spectrometer. You can actually trace the identity of the carbon in the meal. He ran the meal through and told me exactly what percentage of everything was corn. The cheeseburger was like 66 percent, and the Paul Newman salad dressing was about the same. Even the French fries were dripping with corn because they are fried in corn oil. INTERVIEWED BY JESSE PEARSON Michael Pollan's new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, comes out next month.
Your email: Their email: send Comments: Subject: Brokeback toilet Date: Mar 14 2006 09:43:08 AM Author: I Love Bobby McFerrin I used to know this guy who was so fat, we realized when he took a shit it was probably as big as a small child. Then we imagined what this child shit would look like after he ate corn.... just imagine nasty shit corn babies crawling out of the bowl! PS Too bad Bobby McFerring doesn't sing as well as he writes. Thanks for clearing that up, and please report it to the Imaginary Internet Hate Crimes Commission as soon as possible ummmkay? And while you're at it, don't forget to turn yourself in as a crime against maintaining the median IQ. Subject: df Date: Mar 14 2006 02:23:38 AM Author: fgh thats offensive to asian people Subject: so what you're s...
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