"michaelpollan" news and stories

Sunday afternoon, midwesterners packed a small independent movie theater in Kansas City, Mo., for a screening of the new documentary "Fresh," which takes a close and at times disturbing look at factory farming in the United States. Along with its director, Ana Sofia Joanes, "Fresh" (click the trailer above) is wending its way across the country in the hopes, Joanes said at a panel discussion between two sold-out screenings, of "changing the misconception that we need the industrial food system." This isn't the first new anti-Big Farming flick to hit the silver screen, so we're calling a trend.

"Fresh" follows the lives of four farm families, including a Missouri hog farmer who exterminated his industrial stock after being gored by one of his hogs and doctors found that he was resistant to most antibiotics. Michael Pollan and John E. Ikerd, Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics at the University of Missouri, make cameos as talking heads.

The real star, however, may be the swoon-worthy (if you like the rugged type) sustainable Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, who has the vocabulary of a professor and no shame about embracing "the chickenness" of his hens when greeting them with a "Good morning, girls!" each day.

Troubled by what he had been reading about his dinner, documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner embarked on a 6-year, cross-country journey to expose the nation's agribusiness industry. "Food, Inc." (see the trailer above) features interviews with authors Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and quotes from some of the heads of Big Farming from Walmart to Tyson. Kenner examines recent salmonella scares, chats with organic farmers and calls his film -- which hits the big screen next month -- "entertaining and hard-hitting." We caught up by phone with Kenner in L.A. to chat mutant chicken nuggets, Oprah's legal issues and his quest to leave you "delightfully disturbed."

What made you want to make this film?
We spend less of our paycheck on food now than at any time in our history, which is great, but it also comes at a great cost to us ... I made a film that I hope will leave you delightfully disturbed.

What do you mean by "a great cost to us"?
One out of every three babies born after 2000 will develop early onset diabetes. A lot of that is attributed to corn and corn byproducts. We can't sustain that. There are environmental costs and ultimately it is a cost to the consumer. You might be paying less money, but you are paying additional [health] costs that are becoming very, very expensive.

Men in suits, their strawberries and Oprah after the jump.

Shhh! Be quiet, or they'll find us.

I'm typing this from under the kitchen sink in my triple-bolted Brooklyn apartment where I'm cowering in fear of Chef Alice Waters. If the New York Post's Carla Spartos and the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd are to be believed, the founding Slow Foodista and her hench-polemicist Michael Pollan are hell-bent upon mugging every last McNugget-lovin' American of their free will, hard-earned cash and bags of pre-shredded iceberg lettuce.

It's my fault. I didn't speak up the first time they came and forced me, at Shun-point, to trek to Dan Barber's Blue Hill Farm and choke down sun-warmed, newly picked cherry tomatoes that tasted of summer and promise and the few times my grandfather was kind to me.

I remained silent when they dragged me hemp-bound to the Union Square Greenmarket to spend several dollars less than I would at my local C-Town grocery store to meet the folks who got their hands dirty growing ridiculously delicious heirloom peppers, beans and squash with more Earth-friendly farming practices. And I cried hot, sloppy tears when they pointed and laughed at my insufficiently grained bagel. See, according to Spartos' recent N.Y. Post editorial "Gourmonsters," Officer Waters and her ilk are out to shame us all.

"They're the food police and their patron saints -- Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, chief among them -- are on a crusade to tell you not just what you should eat, but how you should eat it.

Like an exclusive clique of anorexic cheerleaders, they think they're better than you."

Silly me.

My sister has gone through a number of different diet schemes over the years. First she was a vegetarian. Then she shifted to vegan (but missed cheese too much to go on). Then for a while, during some really lean times, she was a freegan, eating anything that she didn't have to pay for. These days, she distills her eating principle down to the basic phrase, "I don't eat things where the female of the species carries its young in a uterus." This means beef is out, but poultry is in.

I'm sure that there are lots of you out there who have equally quirky and specific dietary guiding principles and Michael Pollan, the man who coined the phrase "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." wants to know what they are. On Monday, he put a call out on New York Time's Well blog, soliciting these food mottos from readers. He's looking for something that is both poetic and appropriate.

So what's yours?

Source

Today, Slashfood wishes prominent food writer, speaker, and celebrity Michael Pollan happy birthday. Pollan's revolutionary and compelling arguments about the direction of the food industry continues to influence both food enthusiasts and politicians. The Omnivore's Dillemma has become somewhat of a bible for gourmands, farmers, and people simply concerned with reforming the modern food chain.

When I think of the trend to eat local I think of Pollan and his impressive impact on American food culture. It's no wonder that on May 8, 2007, the James Beard Foundation named The Omnivore's Dilemma its 2007 winner for the best food writing. Recently, Pollan published In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto which reveals the relationship with what he terms "nutritionism" and the "Western diet." Recently, he is investigating practices of the meat industry.

While Pollan did not initiate the current discourse on food, he has contributed enormously to it. Pollan's work on the food industry and trends in American agriculture have drastically opened up people's minds when thinking about how to eat. In 2002, he received the Reuters World Conservation Union Global Awards in environmental journalism.