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Interview on Democracy Now - February 8, 2010
Guest: Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. His latest is Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. MICHAEL POLLAN: The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous 10,000. The modern supermarket has, on average, 47,000 products. The industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you’re eating, because if you knew, you might not want to eat it. ERIC SCHLOSSER: We’ve never had food companies this powerful in our history. UNIDENTIFIED MAN 1: Everything we’ve done in modern agriculture is to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper. |
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: If you can grow a chicken in forty-nine days, why would you want one you’ve got to grow in three months?
MICHAEL POLLAN: When you go through the supermarket, there is an illusion of diversity. So much of our industrial food turns out to be rearrangements of corn.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Sometimes you look at a vegetable and say, “OK, well, we can get two hamburgers for the same price.”
MICHAEL POLLAN: They have managed to make it against the law to criticize their products. There is an effort to make it illegal to publish a photo of any industrial food operation.
