Great-grandma knows best

BERKELEY, Calif. — Michael Pollan came to his calling by accident.

Tall and lanky, a student of the essayists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he thought he’d end up an English professor. But a garden intervened. And a rather unfortunate incident involving a woodchuck, cabbage seedlings and a gallon of gasoline. More on this later.

So he became a writer who first focused on how humans exist in nature. From there it was a quick leap over the hedge to the study of what, why and how we eat. This turned out to be a meaty vein.

Four books later, Pollan, 52, has emerged as an important critic of the industrial food complex that grows, processes and sells what we eat. He has “an enormous influence” on how Americans think about food, says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.

His 2006 best-selling exploration of the food chain, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” was named one of the 10 best books of the year by “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post.” It won the James Beard Award for best food writing.

During that book tour, the most frequent question was “What should we eat?” His answer is his fifth book, out this month, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

Here’s the gist, conveniently inscribed on the front cover: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Pollan says we should be eating only foods that our great-grandmothers would have recognized. He started out saying grandmother, but realized that she wouldn’t necessarily predate fat-free sour cream, breakfast bars and butter-flavored crystals.

While you’re at it, avoid products that have five or more ingredients, especially if you’ve never heard of them or they’re unpronounceable.

Pollan sees himself in the role of Dr. Spock – Benjamin Spock, the baby doctor. During the 1950s and ‘60s, when everyone was busy “professionalizing” child care, Spock told mothers to relax and trust their instincts.

“Spock said ‘Your mother was right, you know a lot of this stuff.’ And that was a very comforting, liberating tactic to people. Not to mention it was right,” says Pollan.

‘Leave well enough alone’

Remember that the food industry does not have your best interests at heart, Pollan says.

“Their interests are getting you to eat too much food processed more than it should be. And your interests are to leave well enough alone with the food. But they can’t make enough money on that.”

Modern agriculture has made food cheaper than it ever has been before. But cheap food doesn’t make money for the food industry, says Pollan, so it’s always busy trying to find ways to “add value” to food, by making it more processed and complicated.

At the same time, science has been busy attempting to deconstruct food, to understand the component parts of it (vitamins, minerals, etc) that make it healthy.

Food companies twist the single-nutrient research papers (Vitamin C cures the common cold! Resveratrol in grapes protects the heart! ) to make their processed products seem more nutritious than the real thing, Pollan says.

This has led to companies spending billions of dollars each year to get us to eat larger amounts of ever more highly processed food that’s touted as healthier because the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients present in whole foods have been added back in at the factory, he contends.

None of which is necessary or good for us, says Pollan.

Not surprisingly, the food industry doesn’t agree.

The Corn Refiners Association, for example, doesn’t like Pollan’s take on high-fructose corn syrup, a highly refined form of sugar derived from corn. It’s so cheap (because of agricultural subsidies) that it shows up everywhere, says Pollan. It’s why our food is a lot sweeter than it was 100 years ago and why sweet foods are so much cheaper – and one reasons we’re eating more of them than ever before, he maintains.

The refiners don’t agree. “Sugar, honey and high-fructose corn syrup have the same number of calories and all come from natural sources,” says association president Audrae Erickson.

“Looking for villains on the store shelves is the wrong approach. The key to a healthy life is moderation in what we eat and getting plenty of exercise,” says Erickson.

Avoid the middle aisles

As to where our food should come from, Pollan counsels that at the very least we shop the periphery of the supermarket. Avoid the dreaded center aisles, where processed foods dominate. Stick to the edges, where the meat, dairy, produce and fish are pretty much as they started out.

When possible, buy locally from the people who actually produce your food, Pollan suggests. Farmers’ markets are popping up all over the country, as are community-supported agriculture. CSAs are an increasingly popular scheme in which city dwellers “subscribe” to a farm, paying in advance to get a box of whatever’s ripe each week. And eat wild foods when you can, Pollan suggests. Weeds (dandelions, etc.) are free for the taking.

Food critic and writer Mimi Sheraton wonders if the mania for local foods and foods as close to a state of nature as they can get hasn’t gone a little too far. In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Pollan went boar hunting so he could serve a meal that he’d grown, hunted or gathered entirely himself.

“I think it’s a kind of gonzo food journalism to some extent,” Sheraton says. “Michael Pollan is much more than that, of course.”

But people have been sending food all over the world for centuries, she says, in a quest to get the best. “I don’t want the broccoli if it has worms – even if it is from three miles away.”

Pollan grew up on suburban Long Island, New York, with his parents and three sisters, one of whom is actress Tracey Pollan. It was his grandfather who got him into gardening. An emigrant from Russia in 1917, he started out selling baked potatoes on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and built a produce distributorship on Long Island, which evolved into buying farm land and developing it.

Pollan went on to Bennington College in Vermont, where he studied English literature with a focus on the tradition of nature writing in America. He got his master’s degree in American literature at Columbia University in New York. He thought he was on his way to becoming a professor, but first took a summer job at an ahead-of-its-time magazine called “Channels” that focused on serious TV issues.

Pollan was eventually recruited by “Harpers” magazine and ended up being its executive editor for nine years. After 10 years in Manhattan, he and his wife-to-be bought a summer home. It was a five-acre, broken-down dairy farm in Cornwall, Conn., about 100 miles from New York City. And it was there that he fatefully planted the garden that caused him to re-think everything he’d studied in college.

“If you read Thoreau, you would feel that it was not within your rights to fence your garden off from woodchucks. You would not feel that you had any more right to your beans than the birds,” Pollan says.

It was a tremendous disconnect when Pollan, steeped in those 19th-century writings, one day found himself fire bombing the den of a woodchuck that had mowed down his broccoli and cabbage seedlings.

“Here I was pouring gasoline down its burrow and lighting a match to it and I realized I was replaying a certain American approach to nature, which is “How dare these small-brained creatures thwart our desires?’ “

He eventually wrote a piece about his war with the woodchuck, and others about his gardening, which began his first book, “Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education,” published in 1991.

Pollan worked at “Harpers” during the day and on his books and articles on nights and weekends. But with the birth of son Isaac in 1992, that equation suddenly didn’t work anymore.

“I was too tired to write at night and I didn’t want to use my weekends to write. So that brought me to another fork in the road.” In 1994 he and his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, decided that they could afford to quit their jobs and live off writing and painting if they moved full time to Connecticut.

It was there he wrote his second book, “A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder.” It was ostensibly about building a one-room writing studio, but in fact once again a meditation on nature.

Shocked by farms

Pollan’s third book really began to focus on food as a part of nature. “The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World” looked at the natural history of four human-bred plants: apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes.

“It was the first time I was on an industrial farm and I was frankly shocked by what I saw,” he says. The use of chemicals “so toxic that the farmers would not go in their fields for five days. Fields that were completely clear of any but that one species, and soil that felt like sand and had lost any kind of fertility. Yet it was growing gorgeous-looking, toxic potatoes.”

That piece led to a series of stories exploring the question of food in “The New York Times Magazine.” In one of them he famously bought the steer and followed it from wobbly-legged youth to slaughter.

Nine years later, another fork in the road appeared with an offer of a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism, which Pollan accepted in 2003.

So now he has come full circle, ensconced in both journalism and academia. And the moral of this story, he says, is that, unlike most ecological decisions, when it comes to food doing the right thing isn’t a hardship. “It tastes better, it’s better for the planet it’s healthier for you,” says Pollan. “There’s really no downside.”