"MIchael Pollan" news and stories

Even if you don't follow big agriculture as closely as Eric Schlosser or Michael Pollan might, we're pretty sure that at some point in the last few years you've recoiled at brutal undercover footage of poultry workers stomping chickens to death, or cringed watching sick cattle being prodded on their way to slaughter. The images, captured by groups like The Humane Society of the United States or PETA, reflect a disturbing reality for some of the animals we raise for meat in our country, and have helped propel issues of humane handling and greater food safety much closer to our dinner tables.

Now the government is hoping meat and poultry producers might choose to do some videotaping of their own.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued draft guidelines designed to help producers implement in-plant video monitoring as a way to improve operations. Federally inspected processing plants may chose to use video or other electronic recording equipment "for various purposes including ensuring that livestock are handled humanely, that good commercial practices are followed, monitoring product inventory, or conducting establishment security," according to the release.

Farmed-animal welfare advocate, Dr. Temple Grandin, is supportive of video monitoring in meat processing plants.

This October 9, two major forces in the food world will be honored in Iceland with a $50,000 award from Yoko Ono -- Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules, among other books, and Barbara Kowalcyk, who became a major campaigner for food safety after her son died following an E. coli infection in 2001 (you may remember her from Food, Inc.).

The Lennon Ono Grant for Peace, awarded biannually, was created in 2002 to keep Lennon's peaceful spirit and "dedication to human rights" alive, Telegraph UK reports.

Other recipients of the grant are Josh Fox, writer-director of Gasland (a film on natural gas drilling), and Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, who, more recently, has written about her time in Gaza.

The ceremony in Iceland will also commemorate what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday. Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band is set to rock out that evening and there will be a lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower Memorial.

The CAFO Reader is meaty. Maybe it's the fact that I read it while on vacation in Iowa, smack dab in the very heart of hog and egg laying hen confinement operations. These industrial "farms" have been here for years. Pass them on the highway, and the smell can be eye-watering, even if you can't see the operation itself from the road. Locals are fond of saying, "That's the smell of money." And it is, but too often that cash doesn't make it back into the very communities where these operations live.

That's just one of the points editor Daniel Imhoff makes as he sets out on a myth-busting mission in this book. Chapters are voiced by some of the most notable thinkers in our country's sustainable food movement -- Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry Fred Kirschenmann, Dan Barber, Tom Philpott, and Eric Schlosser among them.

From intensively farmed beef, pork, chicken, fish, dairy and eggs -- the curtain of "Big Agriculture" is pulled back with fact-driven arguments on the true costs of pollution, animal cruelty, overuse of antibiotics, immigrant labor and more, which many feel has mired our food system. Republican speech writer Matthew Scully says "instead of redesigning the factory farm to suit the animals, they are redesigning the animals to suit the factory farm."

Is it possible that Michael Pollan isn't a god? That's what an article on Salon.com contends.

In an essay in the latest New York Review of Books, Pollan -- the godfather of the locavore movement -- writes about Janet A. Flammang's new book, The Taste of Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society, that the feminist movement ruined "one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal."

Salon's Anna Clark, who describes herself as a "as a feminist and local foodie," points out that this isn't the first time that Pollan has placed the blame on the feminist movement for our fast food nation. In an earlier article in the New York Times Magazine Pollan wrote that pastry-making has been "thoughtlessly trampled" on by American feminists in "their rush to get women out of the kitchen."

The Salon article goes on to argue that if the family meal and home cooking is as important as Pollan contends, then why are women the only group demonized for zapping a pizza in a microwave? Shouldn't men be shouldering some of the blame too?

• Michael Long is the fourth generation of his family to maintain their horseradish business, and his product's quality is still "at its nasal-clearing finest."
• One writer muses on the befuddling signals of today's concepts of eating well, observing that "in 2010 you could end up with a serious case of food confusion."
• ... The solution? "Uber-foodster" Michael Pollan's guide to eating.
• New restaurant Koo Zee Doo offers authentic -- and apparently quite delicious -- Portuguese fare, "with a soulful touch that is satisfying from start to finish."
• Say no to drive-thru dinners or takeout in front of the TV: "It's time to reclaim the family dinner," argues one staff writer.