Is this part of that "eating carbs for pleasure" thing you were
advocating?  I can see now why it's not possible to have a meeting of
the minds here -- my definition of "pleasure" seems to be quite
different from the one you're using.

You continually contradict yourself -- are you just making this up as
you go along?  You misrepresent what a low-carb WOL actually *is* and
are defensive when you're called on it.  

I've lost over 80 pounds in the last year and a half -- and yeah, I
think that's pretty awesome.  I'm enjoying it immensely -- being able
to actually look in a mirror and starting to like what I see.  The
compliments don't hurt, either.  Frankly, I'm lookin' pretty hot for
an old lady.  But I'm the furthest thing from a low-carb "zealot" that
you're likely to find.  If I'm zealous about anything, it is personal
responsibility -- something that doesn't seem to interest you.  

I go on "vacation" occasionally myself.  It's a choice.  It isn't
giving in to ancient primal desires, or the inability to interact in a
social setting without eating what everyone else is eating -- it's a
choice *I* make and *I* take responsibility for without trying to come
up with a long list of excuses.  

Why not just say, "I wanted that dessert."  Why throw in "I was being
polite to my in-laws?"  Why not just say, "I wanted to eat beans and
rice."  Why preface that with "They ate all the chicken before I got
there?"  Obviously, you ate those things because you wanted to.  Why
isn't that enough?  Why all the rationalization that goes with it?  

You don't need to justify what you eat to anyone -- certainly not to
the people who read this group.  But for some reason you seem to feel
compelled to do so.  If it's to help others understand how your
dietary choices are working for you, I think the part of your post
that I quoted above shows that is not the case.  

These are your choices -- why not own them?  Instead, you seem to have
a need to see yourself -- and everyone else -- as helpless in the face
of a constant dietary onslaught.  No thanks.

"Orlando Enrique Fiol" <ofiol@verizon.net> wrote in message

Zealot? Hardly. I think successful low-carber fits better. People that
successfully low carb, usually don't have those kinds of cravings after
awhile. In my experience, it's all the forays into "sugar-free" and
substituting for what I consider to be real foods that bring those cravings
on. Sure, after a person has lost the weight they want to lose, some of that
can be fine on occasion, though not necessary. I've been on LC for many
years, and my beloved foods are BBQ any kind of meat without commercial
sauce, roasts, chicken, fish, veggies, cheese, taco salads, etc. It's JMO,
and I did struggle with it when I slacked up for more than a few days.

Cheri

More misinformation.  A low-carb WOL does *not* mean that you can't
have carbs "in some form."  

I would think the short-term desires would be the desserts and the
rice, and the bigger picture would be losing weight and feeling
better.  But the message in your posts is the opposite of this.  

I didn't realize I was browbeating anybody about what they were eating
-- or not eating.  I'm sure we all have differing opinions about the
purpose of this group.  

If I was browbeating anyone, it was you for perpetuating the
misinformation and the myths that are spread by people who know
nothing about low-carb plans.  

What a great idea!  When are you going to start doing that?

I tried that. The cheapest foods "seem" to be junk foods. I say "seem"
because they they are deficient in nutrients. The false food you eat
now, leaving you overfed and undernourished, will require a doctors
attention, if you live long enough. So, if you like yourself, read
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html?pagewanted=
1&ei=5090&en=e8328c69f0b3f4be&ex=1334894400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>

You Are What You Grow

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: April 22, 2007

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington
named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery.
He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of
obesity in America today is a person's wealth. For most of history,
after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories,
not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount
of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to
purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he
could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the
supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft
drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods -- dairy,
meat, fish and produce -- line the perimeter walls, while the
imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that
a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only
250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips,
he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170
calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more "energy dense" than fresh foods:
they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which
makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular
calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace,
which is why we call the foods that contain them "junk." Drewnowski
concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in
such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational
economic strategy is to eat badly -- and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the
inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots,
a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance
as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture,
involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately
manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So
how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic
cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This
resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of
legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to
do so again, sets the rules for the American food system -- indeed, to a
considerable extent, for the world's food system. Among other things, it
determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the
case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written
offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most
processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of
carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat -- three of
the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of
some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last
several decades -- indeed, for about as long as the American waistline
has been ballooning -- U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such
a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities,
especially corn and soy.

That's because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting
them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say,
by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did.
The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and
added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and
milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost
nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these
policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real
price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly
40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn)
declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the
supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill
encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a
nation faced with what its surgeon general has called "an epidemic" of
obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the
production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of
the farm bill: the nation's agricultural policies operate at
cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the subsidies are
only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine what sort of
food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow. The
school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of
America's children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural
commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is
overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh
food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve
enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets
and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements
flow. The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall
for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged
American farmers to overproduce.

To speak of the farm bill's influence on the American food system does
not begin to describe its full impact -- on the environment, on global
poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers
to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow
them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the
price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places
will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities -- or to
the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta
is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite
direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government
estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural
workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom
has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling
from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been
an unalloyed disaster for Mexico's eaters as well as its farmers.) You
can't fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without
comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural
agriculture in Mexico.

And though we don't ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms,
few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American
landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don't have
a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides what
happens on private property in America, but that's not exactly true. The
smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the farm bill
helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land in America:
whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be managed to
maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals) or to
promote environmental stewardship. The health of the American soil, the
purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape
owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae
buried deep in the farm bill.

Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the
nation's political passions every five years, but that hasn't been the
case. If the quintennial antidrama of the "farm bill debate" holds true
to form this year, a handful of farm-state legislators will thrash out
the mind-numbing details behind closed doors, with virtually nobody
else, either in Congress or in the media, paying much attention. Why?
Because most of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about
"farming," an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know
and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own
representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial
piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues.
Since we aren't paying attention, they pay no political price for
trading, or even selling, their farm-bill votes. The fact that the bill
is deeply encrusted with incomprehensible jargon and prehensile programs
dating back to the 1930s makes it almost impossible for the average
legislator to understand the bill should he or she try to, much less the
average citizen. It's doubtful this is an accident.

But there are signs this year will be different. The public-health
community has come to recognize it can't hope to address obesity and
diabetes without addressing the farm bill. The environmental community
recognizes that as long as we have a farm bill that promotes chemical
and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a pipe dream. The
development community has woken up to the fact that global poverty can't
be fought without confronting the ways the farm bill depresses world
crop prices. They got a boost from a 2004 ruling by the World Trade
Organization* that U.S. cotton subsidies are illegal; most observers
think that challenges to similar subsidies for corn, soy, wheat or rice
would also prevail.

And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly
concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in
America. A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food issues
today, and while it is still somewhat inchoate, the manifestations are
everywhere: in local efforts to get vending machines out of the schools
and to improve school lunch; in local campaigns to fight feedlots and to
force food companies to better the lives of animals in agriculture; in
the spectacular growth of the market for organic food and the revival of
local food systems. In great and growing numbers, people are voting with
their forks for a different sort of food system. But as powerful as the
food consumer is -- it was that consumer, after all, who built a $15
billion organic-food industry and more than doubled the number of
farmer's markets in the last few years -- voting with our forks can
advance reform only so far. It can't, for example, change the fact that
the system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the
marketplace the only ones the poor can afford. To change that, people
will have to vote with their votes as well -- which is to say, they will
have to wade into the muddy political waters of agricultural policy.

Doing so starts with the recognition that the "farm bill" is a misnomer;
in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the
interests of eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who think it in
their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how
poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of
artificially cheap food -- to their health, to the land, to the animals,
to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns
agricultural policy with our public-health and environmental values, one
with incentives to produce food cleanly, sustainably and humanely.
Eaters want a bill that makes the most healthful calories in the
supermarket competitive with the least healthful ones. Eaters want a
bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than
processed surplus commodities from far away. Enlightened eaters also
recognize their dependence on farmers, which is why they would support a
bill that guarantees the people who raise our food not subsidies but
fair prices. Why? Because they prefer to live in a country that can
still produce its own food and doesn't hurt the world's farmers by
dumping its surplus crops on their markets.

The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for
farmers won't solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted
agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some
imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to
focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on
growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for
food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the
current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater's
farm bill could not be more straightforward: it's one that changes the
rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming)
over and above its quantity.

Such changes are radical only by the standards of past farm bills, which
have faithfully reflected the priorities of the agribusiness interests
that wrote them. One of these years, the eaters of America are going to
demand a place at the table, and we will have the political debate over
food policy we need and deserve. This could prove to be that year: the
year when the farm bill became a food bill, and the eaters at last had
their say.

*World Trade Organization
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/world
_trade_organization/index.html?inline=nyt-org
------

and for good measure,
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/13/in_defense_of_food_author_journalis
t

February 13, 2008
Pollanweb
In Defense of Food: Author, Journalist Michael Pollan on Nutrition, Food
Science and the American Diet

Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan argues that what most
Americans are consuming today is not food but "edible food-like
substances." His previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural
History of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by
the New York Times and the Washington Post. His latest book, just
published, is called In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.

Guest:

Michael Pollan, Professor of science and environmental journalism at UC
Berkeley. His previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History
of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New
York Times and the Washington Post. His latest book, just published, is
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.

AMY GOODMAN: "You are what to eat." Or so the saying goes. In American
culture, healthy food is a national preoccupation. But then why are
Americans becoming less healthy and more overweight?

Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan argues that what most
Americans are consuming today is not food, but edible food-like
substances. Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental
journalism at University of California, Berkeley. His previous book, The
Omnivore's Dilemma, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the
New York Times and Washington Post. His latest book is called In Defense
of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.

Michael Pollan recently joined me here in the firehouse studio for a
wide-ranging conversation about nutrition, food science and the current
American diet. I began by asking him why he feels he has to defend food.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Food's under attack from two quarters. It's under
attack from the food industry, which is taking, you know, perfectly good
whole foods and tricking them up into highly processed edible food-like
substances, and from nutritional science, which has over the years
convinced us that we shouldn't be paying attention to food, it's really
the nutrients that matter. And they're trying to replace foods with
antioxidants, you know, cholesterol, saturated fat, omega-3s, and that
whole way of looking at food as a collection of nutrients, I think, is
very destructive.

     AMY GOODMAN: Shouldn't people be concerned, for example, about
cholesterol?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: No. Cholesterol in the diet is actually only very
mildly related to cholesterol in the blood. It was a--that was a
scientific error, basically. We were sold a bill of goods that we should
really worry about the cholesterol in our food, basically because
cholesterol is one of the few things we could measure that was linked to
heart disease, so there was this kind of obsessive focus on cholesterol.
But, you know, the egg has been rehabilitated. You know, the egg is very
high in cholesterol, and now we're told it's actually a perfectly good,
healthy food. So there's only a very tangential relationship between the
cholesterol you eat and the cholesterol levels in your blood.

     AMY GOODMAN: How is it that the food we eat now, it takes time to
read the ingredients?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

     AMY GOODMAN: You actually have to stop and spend time and perhaps
put on glasses or figure out how to pronounce words you have never heard
of.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it's a literary scientific experience now
going shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten
more complex. It's--for the food industry--see, to understand the
economics of the food industry, you can't really make money selling
things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to
the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for seventy-nine
cents. There's no money in that, because it doesn't have any brand
identification. It's a commodity, and the prices of commodity are
constantly falling over time.

     So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you
take those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can
charge four bucks for that seventy-nine cents--and actually even less
than that, a few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios
become a commodity. You know, everyone's ripping off your little
circles. And so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like
cereal bars. And now there's cereal straws, you know, that your kids are
supposed to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. It's made
out of the cereal material. It's extruded.

     So, you see, every level of further complication gives you some
intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to
charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as you
make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to make it
last, to make it taste good, to make--and because, you know, food really
isn't designed to last a year on the shelf in a supermarket. And so, it
takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen.

     AMY GOODMAN: I was a whole grain baker in Maine, and I would
consider the coup to be to get our whole grain organic breads in the
schools of Maine for the kids, but we just couldn't compete with Wonder
Bread--

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

     AMY GOODMAN: --which could stay on the shelf--I don't know if it was
a year.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: That's amazing.

     AMY GOODMAN: Ours, after a few days, of course, would get moldy,
because it was alive.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Right. And, in fact, one of my tips is, don't eat
any food that's incapable of rotting. If the food can't rot eventually,
there's something wrong.

     AMY GOODMAN: What is nutritionism?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Nutritionism is the prevailing ideology in the
whole world of food. And it's not a science. It is an ideology. And like
most ideologies, it is a set of assumptions about how the world works
that we're totally unaware of. And nutritionism, there's a few
fundamental tenets to it. One is that food is a collection of nutrients,
that basically the sum of--you know, food is the sum of the nutrients it
contains. The other is that since the nutrient is the key unit and, as
ordinary people, we can't see or taste or feel nutrients, we need
experts to help us design our foods and tell us how to eat.

     Another assumption of nutritionism is that you can measure these
nutrients and you know what they're doing, that we know what cholesterol
is and what it does in our body or what an antioxidant is. And that's a
dubious proposition.

     And the last premise of nutritionism is that the whole point of
eating is to advance your physical health and that that's what we go to
the store for, that's what we're buying. And that's also a very dubious
idea. If you go around the world, people eat for a great many reasons
besides, you know, the medicinal reason. I mean, they eat for pleasure,
they eat for community and family and identity and all these things. But
we've put that aside with this obsession with nutrition.

     And I basically think it's a pernicious ideology. I mean, I don't
think it's really helping us. If there was a trade-off, if looking at
food this way made us so much healthier, great. But in fact, since we've
been looking at food this way, our health has gotten worse and worse.

     AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about the diseases of Western civilization.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: The Western diseases, which--they were named that
about a hundred years ago by a medical doctor named Denis Burkitt, an
Englishman, who noted that there--after the Western diet comes to these
countries where he had spent a lot of time in Africa and Asia, a series
of Western diseases followed, very predictably: obesity, diabetes, heart
disease and a specific set of cancers. And he said, well, they must have
this common origin, because we keep seeing this pattern.

     And we've known this for a hundred years, that if you eat this
Western diet, which is defined basically as--I mean, we all know what the
Western diet is, but to reiterate it, it's lots of processed food, lots
of refined grain and pure sugar, lots of red meat and processed meats,
very little whole grains, very little fresh fruits and vegetables.
That's the Western diet--it's the fast-food diet--that we know it leads to
those diseases. About 80 percent of heart disease, at least as much Type
II diabetes, 33 to 40 percent cancers all come out of eating that way,
and we know this. And the odd thing is that it doesn't seem to
discomfort us that much.

     AMY GOODMAN: Talk about coming from another culture and coming
here.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

     AMY GOODMAN: When you specifically talk about sugar, refined
wheat, what actually happens in the body?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, that's where you see it most directly. When
populations that have not been exposed to this kind of food for a long
time--we've seen it with Pacific Islanders, if you go to Hawaii, we've
seen it with Mexican immigrants coming to America--these are the people
who have the most trouble with this diet, and they get fat very quickly
and get diabetes very quickly. You know, we hear about this epidemic of
diabetes, but it's very much of a class and ethnically based phenomenon,
and Hispanics have much more trouble with it. And the reason or the
hypothesis is that, culturally and physically, they haven't been dealing
with a lot of refined grain, whereas in Europe, we've been dealing with
refined grain for a couple hundred years.

     AMY GOODMAN: And what does refined wheat do?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, what happens is, when you--there was a key
invention around the 1860s, which is we developed these steel rollers
and porcelain rollers that could grind wheat and corn and other grains
really fine and eliminate the germ and the bran. And the reason we
wanted to do that was we loved it as white as possible. It would last
longer. The rats had less interest in it, because it had less nutrients
in it. And also you get a kind of a real strong hit of glucose. I mean,
basically it digests much quicker, as soon as it hits the tongue. I
mean, everyone has--you know, if you've ever tasted Wonder Bread, you
know how sweet it is. The reason it's sweet is it's so highly refined
that as soon as your saliva hits it, it turns to sugar.

     Whole grains have a whole lot of other nutrients. You know, it
once was possible to live by bread alone, because a whole grain loaf of
bread has all sorts of other nutrients. It has omega-3s, it has, you
know, lots of B vitamins. And we remove those when we refine grain. And
it's kind of odd and maladaptive that refined grain should be so
prestigious, since it's so unhealthy. But we've always liked it, and one
of the reasons is it stores longer.

     AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Michael Pollan. His new book is In
Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly
plants." Talk about the funding of nutrition science.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, nutrition science is very compromised by
industry. Organizations like the American Dietetic Association take
sponsorship from companies who are eager to find--you know, be able to
make health claims. Not all nutrition science. And there are very large,
important studies that are, you know, published--that are supported by
the government and are as good as any other medical studies in terms of
their cleanness. But there is a lot of corporate nutrition science
that's done for the express purpose of developing health claims. This
science reliably finds health benefits for whatever is being studied.
You take a pomegranate to one of these scientists, and they will tell
you that it will cure cancer and erectile dysfunction. You take, you
know, any kind of food that you want. And now, it's not surprising,
because food is good for you, and that all plants have antioxidants. And
so, you know, you're bound to find--

     AMY GOODMAN: Explain what an antioxidant is.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, an antioxidant is a chemical compound that
plants produce, really to protect themselves from free radicals of
oxygen that are generated during photosynthesis. They absorb these kind
of mischievous oxygen radicals, molecules, atoms, and disarm them. And
as we age, we produce a lot of these oxygen radicals, and they're
implicated in aging and cancer. So antioxidants are a way to kind of
quiet that response, and they have health benefits. They also help you
detoxify your body.

     So--but my point is kind of, you don't need to know what an
antioxidant is to have the benefit of an antioxidant. You know, we've
been benefiting from them for thousands of years without really having
to worry what they are. They're in whole foods, and it's one of the
reasons whole foods are good for you. And there are not that much in
processed foods.

     AMY GOODMAN: Isn't it odd that the more you put into foods--so
that's processing fruits--the less expensive is? The simpler you keep it,
getting whole foods in this day and age in this country, it's extremely
expensive.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. Well, there are reasons of policy that that
is the case. You're absolutely right. Most processed foods are made from
these very cheap raw ingredients. I mean, they're basically corn, soy
and wheat. And if you look at all those very-hard-to-pronounce
ingredients on the back of that processed food, those are fractions of
corn, and some petroleum, but a lot of corn, soy and wheat. And the
industry's preferred mode of doing business is to take the cheapest raw
materials and create complicated foodstuffs from it.

     The reason those raw ingredients are so cheap, though, is because
these are precisely the ones that the government chooses to support, the
subsidies--you know, the big $26 billion for corn and soy and wheat and
rice. So it's no accident that these should be the ones, you know, grown
abundantly and cheap, and that's one of the reasons the industry moved
down this path. There was such a surfeit of cheap corn and soy that the
food scientists got to work turning it into--

     AMY GOODMAN: In fact, getting away totally from sugar to corn
syrup.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, that's right. And we don't--yeah, there's
very little sugar in our processed food. It's all high-fructose corn
syrup, which, in effect, the government is subsidizing.

     AMY GOODMAN: Cottonseed oil, is it regulated by the FDA? Is it
considered a food, even though it's in so many of the processed foods we
eat?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Is it considered a food? Yeah, I think it's
probably--

     AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering, because--to do with the pesticide
that is in it--

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

     AMY GOODMAN: --that if it's considered--if it's done for cotton, it
doesn't matter how much pesticide there is.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Right.

     AMY GOODMAN: But if it's for food, it does matter. And it's in so
much to keep it right, stable for so long on the shelf.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: That's right. That's right. And it's a food I
would avoid. I mean, you know, humans have not been eating cotton for
most of their history. They've been wearing it. And now we're eating it.
And you're right, it receives an enormous amount of pesticide as a crop.
How many residues are in the oil? I don't really know the answer, but it
has been approved by the FDA as a foodstuff. And--but it's one of these
novel oils that I'm inclined to stay away with. I mean, my basic
philosophy of eating is, you know, if your great-grandmother wasn't
familiar with it, you probably want to stay away from it.

     AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan is our guest. Talk about--well, you
started with a New York Times piece called "Unhappy Meals," and in
it--and you expand on this in In Defense of Food--you talk about the
McGovern report, 1977, what, thirty years ago.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, that's really, I think, one of the red
letter days in the rise of nutritionism as a way of thinking about food.
It was a very interesting moment. McGovern convened this set of hearings
to look at the American diet, and there was a great deal of concern
about heart disease at the time. We had--we were having--you know, after a
falloff during the war in heart disease, there was a big spike in the
'50s and '60s, and scientists were busy trying to figure out what was
going on and very worried about it. McGovern convened these hearings,
took a lot of testimony, and then came out with a set of guidelines. And
he said--he implicated red meat, basically, in this problem. And he said
we're getting--we're eating too much red meat, and the advice of the
government became--the official advice--eat less red meat. And he said as
much. Now, that was a very controversial message. The meat industry, in
fact the whole food industry, went crazy, and they came down on him like
a ton of bricks. You can't tell people to eat less of anything.

     AMY GOODMAN: As Oprah learned when she said she won't eat
hamburgers.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Exactly. This is just a taboo topic in America. So
McGovern had to beat this hasty retreat, and he rewrote the guidelines
to say, choose meats that will lessen your saturated fat intake,
something nobody understood at all and was much to the--and that was
acceptable. But you see the transition. It's very interesting. We've
been talking about whole food--eat less red meat, which probably was good
advice--to this very complicated construct--eat meats that have less of
this nutrient. It's still an affirmative message--eat more, which is fine
with industry, just eat a little differently. And suddenly, the focus
was on saturated fat, as if we knew that that was the nutrient in the
red meat that was the problem. And in fact, it may not be. I mean, there
are other things going on in red meat, we're learning, that may be the
problem.

     AMY GOODMAN: Like?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, some people think it's the protein in red
meat. Some people think it's the nitrosomines, these various compounds
that are produced when you cook red meat. We see a correlation between
high red meat consumption and higher rates of cancer and heart disease.
But, again, we don't know exactly what the cause is, but it may not be
saturated fat.

     AMY GOODMAN: And then the political economy of, for example,
eating meat?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, that--because of that--I mean, that's why
McGovern lost in 1980. I mean, the beef lobby went after him, and they
tossed him out. And so--but from then on, anyone who would pronounce on
the American diet understood you had to speak in this very obscure
language of nutrients. You could talk about saturated fat, you could
talk about antioxidants, but you cannot talk about whole foods. So that
is the kind of official language in which we discuss nutrition.

     Conveniently, it's very confusing to the average consumer.
Conveniently to the industry, they love talk about nutrients, because
they can always--with processed foods, unlike whole foods, you can
redesign it. You can just reduce the saturated fat, you know, up the
antioxidants. You can jigger it in a way you can't change broccoli. You
know, broccoli is going to be broccoli. But a processed food can always
have more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. So the industry
loves nutritionism for that reason.

     AMY GOODMAN: So, for people who don't have much money, how do they
eat? I mean, when you're talking about whole foods, they have to be
prepared, and if you don't have much time, as well, processed foods are
cheaper and they're faster.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, processed foods--you know, fast food seems
cheap. I mean, if you have the time and the inclination to cook, you can
eat more cheaply. But you do--as you say, you do need the time, and you
do need the skills to cook. There is no way around the fact that given
the way our food policies are set up, such that whole foods are
expensive and getting more expensive and processed foods tend to be
cheaper--I mean, if you go into the supermarket, the cheapest calories
are added fat and added sugar from processed food, and the more
expensive calories are over in the produce section. And we have to
change policy in order to adjust that.

     AMY GOODMAN: How do you do that?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: You need a farm bill that basically evens the
playing field and is not driving down the price of high-fructose corn
syrup, so that, you know, real fruit juice can compete with it. You need
a farm bill that makes carrots competitive with Wonder Bread. And we
don't have that, and we didn't get it this time around.

     AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel like any candidates are addressing this
issue?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: No, because they all pass through Iowa, and they
all bow down before conventional agricultural policy. In office, I think
that, you know, there have been--Hillary Clinton has had some very
positive food policies, basically because she has this big farm
constituency upstate, and she's very interested in school lunch and
farm-to-school programs and things like that. John Edwards has said some
progressive things about feedlot agriculture and what's wrong with that,
while he was in Iowa.

     AMY GOODMAN: Explain feedlots.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Feedlots are where we grow our meat, in these huge
factory farms that have become really the scourge of landscapes in
places like Iowa and Missouri, I mean these giant pig confinement
operations that basically collect manure in huge lagoons that leak when
it rains and smell for miles around. I mean, they're just, you know,
miserable places. And they're becoming a political issue in the Midwest.
And I think they will become a political issue nationally, because
people are very concerned about the status of the animals in these
places. My worry is, though, that when we start regulating these
feedlots, they'll move to Mexico.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan's latest book is In Defense of Food: An
Eater's Manifesto. We'll come back to him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with award-winning author and
journalist Michael Pollan. His latest book is called In Defense of Food:
An Eater's Manifesto. I asked him about his earlier book, the acclaimed
bestseller The Omnivore's Dilemma.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: The Omnivore's Dilemma is, if you're a creature
like us that can eat almost anything--I mean, unlike cows that only eat
grass or koala bears that only eat eucalyptus leaves--we can eat a great
many different things, and meat and vegetables, but it's complicated. We
don't have instincts to tell us exactly what to eat, so we have--we need
a lot of other cognitive equipment to navigate what is a very
treacherous food landscape, because there--as there was in the jungle and
in nature, there are poisons out there that could kill us. So we had to
learn what was safe and what wasn't, and we had this thing called
culture that told us, like that mushroom there, somebody ate it last
week and they died, so let's call it the "death cap," and that way we'll
remember that that's one to stay away from. And, you know, so culture is
how we navigate this.

     We are once again in a treacherous food landscape, when there are
many things in the supermarket that are not good for you. How do we
learn now to navigate that landscape? And that's what this book was an
effort to do, was come up with some rules of thumb. And so, you know, I
say eat food, which sounds really simple, but of course there's a lot of
edible food-like substances in the supermarket that aren't really food.
So how do you tell them apart?

     AMY GOODMAN: You talk about shopping the periphery of the
supermarket?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. Well, that was one rule that I found really
helpful. And if you look at the layout of the average supermarket, the
fresh whole foods are always on the edge. So you get produce and meat
and fish and dairy products. And those are the foods that, you know,
your grandmother would recognize as foods. They haven't changed that
much. All the processed foods, the really bad stuff that is going to get
you in trouble with all the refined grain and the additives and the
high-fructose corn syrup, those are all in the middle. And so, if you
stay out of the middle and get most of your food on the edges, you're
going to do a lot better.

     AMY GOODMAN: What is the localvore movement?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: The localvore movement is a real new emphasis on
eating locally, eating food from what's called your foodshed. It's a
metaphor based on a watershed. You know, a certain--draw a circle of a
hundred miles around your community and try to eat everything from
there. It's an interesting movement, and I'm very supportive of local
food. I think that it's verging on the ridiculous right now--I mean, you
know, because, frankly, there's no wheat produced in a hundred miles of
New York. You know, do you want to give up bread? I'm not willing to
give up bread. So people get a little extremist about it.

     But the basic idea of when products are available locally, eating
them and eating food in season, is a very powerful and important idea.
It supports a great many values. The fact is that food that's produced
locally is going to be fresher. It's going to be more nutritious because
it's fresher. You're going to support the farmers in your community.
You're going to check sprawl. I mean, you'll keep that farmland in
business. You are going to keep basically, you know, some autonomy in
our food system. I mean, make no mistake: the basic trend of food in
this country is to globalize it, and there will come a day when America
doesn't produce its own food. In California, the Central Valley is
losing, you know, hundreds of acres of farmland every day, and the
projections there are that we will no longer produce produce in
California by the end of the century. I don't want to live in that
world. I--you know, we lost control over our energy destiny, and we don't
want to lose control over our food destiny.

     AMY GOODMAN: What are the environmental effects of transporting
food across the globe?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the biggest is energy. I mean, it's a--people
don't really think about food in terms of climate change, but in fact
the food system contributes about a fifth of greenhouse gases. It is as
important as the transportation sector, in terms of contributing to
greenhouse gas. It's a very energy-intensive situation. What we did with
the industrialization of food, essentially, is take food off of a solar
system--it was basically based on photosynthesis and the sun--and put it
on a fossil fuel system. We learned how to grow food with lots of
synthetic fertilizers made from natural gas, pesticides made from
petroleum, and then started moving it around the world. So now we take
about ten calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food energy.
Very unsustainable system.

     AMY GOODMAN: And what about the argument of efficiency, and if you
want to feed the planet? You have sugar growing in Cuba. You have grapes
and meat in Argentina and Uruguay and Chile.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, that's the argument. There are a lot of
problems with it. First, it does depend on cheap fossil fuel, and we are
not going to have cheap fossil fuel, so that if Uruguay loses its
ability to produce anything else, they're going to be hungry. It's very
important that you have local self-sufficiency in food--some
self-sufficiency, not complete--before you start exporting. If you put
all your eggs in the basket of, say, coffee, when the international
market shifts, as it inevitably does, because it will always go to
whatever country is willing to produce it a little more cheaply, you
will decimate your industry. And--

     AMY GOODMAN: What if you only consume coffee and nothing else?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Oh, you have all sorts of problems we don't even
want to get into. You cannot live on coffee alone. It's not like bread.

     So globalizing food has certain advantages of efficiency, but it
also has very high risks. And, you know, efficiency is an important
value, but resilience is even more important, and we know this from
biology, that the resilience of natural systems and economic systems is
something we have to focus more on. This globalized food system is very
brittle. When you have a breakdown anywhere, when the prices of fuel
escalates, people lose the ability to feed themselves.

     What's happening with Mexico and NAFTA and corn, you know, they
opened their borders to our corn, and it put one-and-a-half million
farmers there out of business. They all came to the cities, where you
would think, OK, now the price of tortillas should go down, but it
didn't go down, even with the cheap corn, because there was an oligopoly
controlling tortillas. Tortilla prices didn't go down. And so, a lot of
these former Mexican farmers became serfs on California farms, and this
was the effect of dumping lots of cheap corn.

     AMY GOODMAN: And now they're the target--

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Now the price -

     AMY GOODMAN: --of main politicians all over the country to--"We send
our food down, and you send immigrants back who are coming here."

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, "And we don't want your immigrants." And,
you know, we don't understand that these things are connected, that we
make a decision in Washington and that this is what leads to an
immigration problem. And--but the dumping of our corn on Mexico is a big
part of the immigration problem.

     AMY GOODMAN: Do you know anything about cloned livestock? The Wall
Street Journal says cloned livestock are poised to receive FDA clearance.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, well, the FDA has been looking at this.
There are techniques now to clone livestock, usually for breeding
purposes. If you have a really champion bull, the semen of that bull is
very valuable. So, gee, if you could turn that bull into five bulls,
wouldn't that be great? Actually, it won't be great. It's the rareness
that makes the semen so valuable. But--

     AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, if you--you know, if you multiply your
champion bull, the supply will go up and the demand will go down.
So--but, anyway, so the FDA needs approval so that once they're done
using these animals for breeding purposes, they can just drop them into
the food system as hamburger. And there is some controversy over whether
we should be eating cloned livestock. I'm not, you know, familiar with
the risks. I'm a skeptic on genetically modifying food. But the specific
risk of cloning livestock, I don't know. I don't want to be eating them.
But--

     AMY GOODMAN: You have the French farmer, Jose Bove, who has just
gone on a hunger strike to promote a ban on genetically modified crops
in France.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I hadn't known that. The Europeans
have reacted much more strongly to genetically modified crops than we
have.

     AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think it's so different?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: A couple reasons. We have a misplaced faith in our
FDA, that they've vetted everything and they've taken care of it and
they know what's in the food and that they know the genetically modified
crops have been fully tested, which, in fact, they have not, whereas the
Europeans, after mad cow disease, are very skeptical of their
regulators. And when their regulators tell them, "Oh, this stuff is
fine," they're like, "Oh, wait. You said that about the beef." So
they're much more skeptical. They also perceive it as an American
imposition, as part of a cultural imperialism. Even though a lot of the
GMO companies are European, the perception is it's Monsanto. And for
some reason, the European countries have managed to get under the radar
on this issue.

     AMY GOODMAN: Does it also have something to do with our media
sponsored by food companies?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it does. And we--and the fact that our--we
have not labeled it, so nobody knows whether you're eating it or not. I
mean, that's been a huge fight. You know, Dennis Kucinich has tried to
get labeling. Very simple. You know, he's not saying ban the stuff; he's
saying just tell us if we're eating it, which seems like a very
reasonable position.

     AMY GOODMAN: And Monsanto fought this.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Viciously.

     AMY GOODMAN: They said that if you say it does not have GMO--

     MICHAEL POLLAN: That's right.

     AMY GOODMAN: --genetically modified organisms, in it--

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, you can't even say that.

     AMY GOODMAN: --that that suggests there's something wrong with it,
so when Ben & Jerry's tried to do that--

     MICHAEL POLLAN: That's right.

     AMY GOODMAN: --they weren't allowed.

     MICHAEL POLLAN: That's right. There's a lot of litigation over
that still in Vermont and other states, in California, as well. Now, why
is the industry so intent on not having this product regulated--labeled?
Well, they think, rightly, that people wouldn't buy it. And the reason
they wouldn't buy it is it offers the consumer nothing, no benefit. Now,
if you could--Americans will eat all sorts of strange things, if there
was a benefit. If you could say, well, this genetically modified soy oil
will make you skinny, we would buy it, we would eat it. But so far, the
traits that they've managed to get into these crops benefit farmers,
arguably, and not consumers.

     The other reason, I understand, that they resist labeling is that
if there were labels, there would be ways to trace outbreaks of allergy.
Any kind of health problems associated with GMOs you could tie to a
particular food. Right now, if there are any allergies that are tied to
a GMO food, you can't prove it. And so, one of the reasons the industry
has fought it is that they're vulnerable to that.

     When the GMO industry was starting transgenic crops, they made a
decision not to seek any limits on liability from the Congress, as the
nuclear industry did, and they decided that would not look good to ask
for that, so they just took a chance. And this is, in the view of many
activists, their great vulnerability, is product liability. And so,
labeling is a way to help prevent that eventuality. So they fought it,
you know, ferociously and successfully.

     AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan, what were you most surprised by in
writing this book, In Defense of Food?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: I was most surprised by two things. One was that
the science on nutrition that we all traffic in every day--we read these
articles on the front page, we talk about antioxidants and cholesterol
and all this kind of stuff--it's really sketchy that nutritional science
is still a very young science. And food is very complicated, as is the
human digestive system. There's a great mystery on both ends of the food
chain, and science has not yet sorted it out. Nutrition science is where
surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising,
but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don't think so. I
don't think we want to change our eating decisions based on nutritional
science.

     But what I also was surprised at is how many opportunities we now
have. If we have--if we're willing to put the money and the time into it
to get off the Western diet and find another way of eating without
actually having to leave civilization or, you know, grow all your own
food or anything--although I do think we should grow whatever food we
can--that it is such a hopeful time and that there's some very simple
things we can all do to eat well without being cowed by the scientists.

     AMY GOODMAN: The healthiest cuisines, what do you feel they are?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the interesting thing is that most
traditional cuisines are very healthy, that people--that the human body
has done very well on the Mediterranean diet, on the Japanese diet, on
the peasant South American diet. It's really interesting how many
different foods we can do well on. The one diet we seem poorly adapted
to happens to be the one we're eating, the Western diet. So whatever
traditional diet suits you--you like eating that way--you know, follow it.
And that--you know, that's a good rule of thumb.

     There's an enormous amount of wisdom contained in a cuisine. And,
you know, we privilege scientific information and authority in this
country, but, of course, there's cultural authority and information,
too. And whoever figured out that olive oil and tomatoes was a really
great combination was actually, we're now learning, onto something
scientifically. If you want to use that nutrient vocabulary, the
lycopene in the tomato, which we think is the good thing, is basically
made available to your body through the olive oil. So there was a wisdom
in those combinations. And you see it throughout.

     AMY GOODMAN: The whole push for hydrogenated oils? I grew up on
margarine. "You should never eat butter! Only margarine!"

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, I know. I did, too. And that was a huge
mistake. That was a mistake.

     AMY GOODMAN: Can we go back in time?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, we can. Yeah, the butter, fortunately, is
still here.

     AMY GOODMAN: Re-eat?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: We can't re-eat, but we can switch to--one of the
important--

     AMY GOODMAN: Where did it come from?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, margarine was cheaper. Again, take a cheap
raw material, which was to say they had developed these technologies for
getting oil out of cottonseed and soy and all this kind of stuff, and
there then was this health concern about saturated fat, the great evil.
I mean, one of the--another hallmark of nutritionism is that there's
always the evil nutrient and the blessed nutrient, but it's always
changing. So the evil nutrient for a long time has been saturated fat,
and the good nutrient was polyunsaturated fat. So people thought, well,
let's take the polyunsaturated fats, and we'll figure out a way to make
them hard at room temperature, which involved the hydrogenation process.
You basically fire hydrogen at it. And then you had something that
looked like butter.

     It was very controversial, though. People--actually, in the late
1900s, several states passed laws saying you had to dye your butter pink
so people wouldn't be confused and would know that that's an imitation
food. And then the Supreme Court--the industry got the Supreme Court to
throw this out. So butter was elevated as the more modern, more healthy
food. And it turned out that we replaced this possibly mildly unhealthy
fat called saturated fat with now a demonstrably lethal one called
hydrogenated oil.

     AMY GOODMAN: How is it demonstrably lethal?

     MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, they have since proven to, you know, pretty
high standard that trans fats are implicated both in heart disease and
cancer.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan is a UC Berkeley professor. His latest book
is called In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Oh, and by the way,
this interesting note: the New York City Board of Health voted to
require restaurant chains operating in New York to prominently display
calorie information on their menus and menu boards beginning on March
31st. It applies to any New York City chain restaurant that has fifteen
or more outlets nationwide and includes posting calorie information
about cocktails.

------

Good luck, and eat healthy,

Yeah, I threw up a little into my mouth a bit from that.

Just someone playing the group.

Susan

Yeah -- that did it for me, too.  He had fun while it lasted, though,
eh?  :-)