interview with michael pollen

Michael Pollen, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, met with John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, on Februrary 27th in a public conversation(titled Past, Present, and Future of Food) in Berkeley, California. You can see a webcast of the conversation right here, and read an interview by Anne E. McBride with Michael Pollen right here.

an excerpt from the interview:

AM: Let's talk about your book more specifically. What is the dilemma of today's omnivore? How do you define it?

MP: There are a couple of different dilemmas. The basic dilemma is: What do you eat when you can eat just about everything? There's a set of nutritional answers that people are struggling for. What are the healthy foods to eat? There's also a set of ethical dilemmas. If you want to eat ethically, should you eat organic or conventional? Should you eat local or organic? Should you eat meat at all? Those are really hard questions. And there is really no simple answer. The answer really depends on what matters to you, what your values are.

Energy, for example, is a big part of the food story. Seventy percent of our fossil fuel goes to feeding ourselves, in this country. If you care about energy, you really should look at local food, which has a much lighter environmental footprint. You should get out of the supermarket and go to the farmers' market or join a CSA. If you care about the animals, actually, organic might not be the best answer because now we have organic feedlots, organic factory farms. If you care about the environment — pesticides, especially — organic is the answer. You see, it all depends on what values are driving your decisions. We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules.

My hope is that if people have the knowledge, and if they actually see where their food comes from and have access to the information, they will make better ethical choices. Whatever those choices are, they'll be better than eating in ignorance, and shopping in ignorance, which is what most Americans today do — because it's very hard to understand anything about your food. The food chain has gotten so long, so intricate, and so opaque that most people have no idea what they're eating.

The first step towards solving the omnivore's dilemma is knowledge: eating with full consciousness. When that happens, I have a lot of confidence that people will make good choices.