Up in Ontario

An omnivores double hit

Just a quick note this evening to point to two Michael Pollan articles. Pollan is the author of a book I'm looking forward to reading called The Omnivore's Dilemma: a natural history of four meals, and already, in anticipation, I've become quite a fan of his thinking and writing.

Article one is from the NY Times and is called The Vegetable Industrial Complex, a clear-headed look at how spinach became contaminated with e.coli bacteria and scared the hell out of people across a continent.

Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. “I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers.

Article two is from Truthdig and is called Micheal Pollan: the Truthdig interview. It's an interview with the author about the aforementioned book, among other tidbits.

Just reading the coverage of mad cow disease was an incredible educational experience. For example, we read that you’ve got to stop feeding cows to cows. It’s like, “What? We’ve been feeding cows to cows?” And we’ve got to tighten up those rules about feeding chicken litter to cows. “We’ve been feeding chicken crap to cows?” If you read those stories, it made me realize that the system by which we’re producing our food is not one I feel very good about participating in.

So I began looking into the food chain and alternatives to the main industrial food chain—doing what I think of as a series of food detective stories, and much of what I learned in these detective stories was astonishing to me, and forced me to re-approach the way I shop for food and go about eating it.

Food: you put it in you. It becomes part of you. You're made of it.