Last night at the Unity Temple, Rainy Day Books owner Vivien Jennings introduced Michael Pollan as "the rock star of the food world." But looking up from my computer in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel just an hour earlier, the gardening essayist-turned-investigative journalist looked like some sort of spiritual guru.
The shaved head. The untucked, long-sleeved white shirt draping his lanky frame. The way he ordered a hot tea with one packet of sugar on the side, instead of a cocktail, in the hotel's gold-and-leather bar.
But it turns out Michael Pollan doesn't have a pretentious or preachy bone in his body. He doesn't want to be your dietary guru or take the reins of a national movement to reclaim our food system.
He's just a journalist -- one who isn't uncomfortable admitting he ate a burrito at the Minneapolis airport for lunch.
If you're reading this blog entry, you probably know Pollan's take on the American agricultural system. He wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma, revealing the industrial origin of the substances we put in our mouth, stuff society has labeled "food." In his latest book, In Defense of Food, he outlines the uniquely Western phenomena of reducing our diets to menus of nutrients prescribed by experts -- whose science is apparently so advanced that it's precipitated an obesity epidemic.
Hundreds of people crammed into Unity Temple last night to hear Pollan's alternately entertaining and incisive rules about how we should perceive and purchase our food. Before his speech, I got to sit down with Pollan. As a longtime fan, I didn't want him to tell me how to eat. I've read -- and loved -- his books already. I wanted to know how he came to be a "rock star."
Growing up in Long Island, Pollan got the writing bug in junior high school. He worked on the literary magazine. After high school, he got a summer job at the Vineyard Gazette, a weekly newspaper prone to environmental crusades. He worked for a few months at the Village Voice, too. "But I didn't think I could support myself as a writer," he says. Instead he became a magazine editor, logging hours at a succession of titles he knows nobody would remember now.
After finding a home at Harper's magazine in 1983 and guiding that publication for a decade, he started writing for The New York Times Magazine. Having studied the wilderness genre -- Thoreau, Emerson, Melville -- in graduate school, he was interested in the natural world. But not from a position of worship. "I liked to write about everyday places," he says. "I didn't like to go camping." His interest: "Taking that nature writer perspective to lawns and architecture and messy places where humans and nature get mixed up."
Writing about the ecological and philosophical folly of suburban lawns in the late 1980s might have put Pollan in the wilderness of social thought at the time. But within a decade, Pollan's editors could see the rest of America was starting to catch up. "They had a sense back in 2001, 2002 that their readers wanted a different kind of writing about food than they were getting, something more investigative," Pollan says.
Even the reporter was bowled over by what he uncovered about the source of our food.
"Remember, I was an Easterner," he says. "I'd never seen a big farm. A potato farm on Long Island was maybe 50 acres. To go to Idaho and see 5,000-acre, remote-controlled, chemically intensive, irrigated farms or to go see feedlots in California with 40,000 head of cattle was mind-blowing."
In the past eight years, during which Polllan has authored three books specifically addressing the unpleasant underpinnings of food systems, those editors' foresight came to fruition. Pollan's books are bestsellers and he fills auditoriums with energized citizens looking for guidance in creating a safer, healthier food system. The author chalks up the crowds to the parade of food scares, from mad cow disease to swine flu. "We keep peeling back the curtain every time we have one of these crises," he says.
At the same time, Pollan worries about the media manning that curtain. He should know: He's now a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He's concerned that more than a dozen states have "veggie libel laws" that allow industry groups to sue news outlets that disparage their product. Think Oprah Winfrey and the National Cattleman's Beef Association. Newspapers don't want to lose advertisers -- let alone face lawsuits, Pollan says. So only the big flagships, like The New York Times, have the moxie to do real ag journalism.
And don't expect the blogosphere to step up. Pollan takes a dim view on the unsubstantiated gossip-mongering. Take, for example, he says, the current panic about H.R. 875, a food safety bill in Congress. "One blogger started this very alarmist story that this bill represented a Monsanto-directed effort to crush organic farming," he says. "Which is complete bullshit. I asked her to produce quotes from the bill. If you're making charges like that, show me the language in the bill. And she couldn't do it."
Pollan's not saying he's strictly objective. He defines himself as an advocacy journalist with a strong point of view. "But I'm very concerned that, in every article, I earn that point of view, whether through argument or research or reporting," he says. "For me, the definition of a journalist is to still speak as an individual, not on behalf of an interest or movement. I'm very sympathetic to this movement, but I still stand outside of it. If they screw up, I want to be able to write about it."
So when NPR called to get Pollan reaction to the naming of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, the author gave the radio host his honest reaction. He said the appointment was "agribusiness as usual."
"A lot of people in the movement were annoyed and said, 'We've got to keep those doors open,'" he says. "And I'm thinking, 'Who's this we?' My first obligation is to speak to my readers in a way they can count on, that's not calculated, not tactical."
Still, he understands why he packs the room at his speaking engagements. Food is an empowering political issue, he says, because you don't have to wait for Congress to enact new legislation. Anyone can start prodding the industry with their grocery dollars. "There are many people standing in the way of reform, but you don't have to wait for that to happen; you can do something now," he says.
Pollan himself has embraced a diet based on largely local products, leafy greens and meat that was raised on a pasture, not one of those mind-boggling feedlots. On this Wednesday evening, fresh off the plane from Minneapolis, he's a week into his current book tour. Often, during such trips, local groups prepare gourmet spreads engineered for Pollan's palate. He remembers one night in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, when a group put together an entirely local menu. It was wonderful, he says, except for one notable exception.
"The chef had this idea to make pesto from the new shoots from the end of Spruce branches," he says with a good-humored cringe. "It really tasted like cough medicine; it was really strong. But everything else was fantastic."
Before he wanders over to Unity Temple, Pollan asks me where he could grab dinner that evening. Probably on the Plaza, because he's on foot. I suggest Eden Alley, but warn that many of the other restaurants in the shopping district are national chains that probably get their veggies from frozen sacks trucked in by Sysco.
Pollan isn't too distressed. He's used to being challenged to find good food while he's on the road. Earlier in the day, though, he enjoyed some five-grain pancakes for breakfast at his hotel in Minneapolis. He ate a fairly decent bean burrito for lunch at the airport. He's not into self-deprivation, he says, holding up his packet of refined sugar from beside his now-empty tea cup as proof of his flexibility.
Of course, he is unyielding when it comes to one thing.
"I don't trust meat in airports," he says. "That's really sketchy stuff."
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My one criticism of the Pitch would have to be that some really great articles/posts get buried way too fast. This one being a perfect example.
Great story, now I may have a little bit of a crush on Michael Pollan. I think it was the bit about gossip mongering that did it. Or, more probably, the airport burrito.
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