Nourished Magazine :: Wisdom to thrive by

My mother once remarked that I spend an awful lot of time thinking, learning and talking about food. She wondered if I had an eating disorder. She’s probably right, I do. I am unable to simply eat. Instead I am compelled to investigate the most miniscule of details about everything that passes my lips. I am compelled to learn everything I can about the nutrients in the food I eat, how it will affect my body, where it came from, how it was farmed, how it was stored and prepared and who is making money from it. I simply must know the whole story about my food. Michael Pollan has told me that story - allbeit the American version.

Michael Pollan tells the story of the modern American farm, the myths about organic food, the hell that is a feedlot and corn’s conquest over the human food chain.

It is quite ironic that what appears to be a cornucopia of food choices is really just one - corn. The myriad of ingenious ways agribusiness and food manufacturers use corn leaves me aghast. Just about every manufactured food and feedlot animal has corn as a major constituent. Corn, served up in millions of disguises, is what ensures the American economy rolls on as its people perish from diabetes, heart disease and millions of unnameable chronic illnesses. What appears to be choice, it seems, is the only choice.

The story continued though and Pollan began to tell of a new food chain springing up among the ruins of diseased market forces. He told of pasture raising, animal loving iconoclast, Joel Salatin: who only sells to people (not companies), who won’t even bow down to rules set by organic standards - he does it better - and who slaughters his animals in an abattoir with glass walls. Pollan wrote of farmer’s markets and communities taking back sovereignty over their food chain. He wrote of hunters and foragers creating an experience lost to most of us, one of gathering their own food from the wild.

Michael Pollan’s research is comprehensive, his storytelling sublime. I was truly swept up in his sense of adventure and carried along by his marvellously inquisitive mind. He tells the story of three meals in America: the fast food, fast bucks meal supplied by the industrial food chain, the slow grown, pasture fed, life respecting meal supplied by Joel Salatin and his wife and the wild meal hunted and gathered by Michael’s own hand. The last meal, he calls the perfect meal, sounds like an experience to aim for, one that once was our birthright. One that once was all we had to choose from but it always satisfied the omnivore’s inherent, genetic desire for variety. And it always kept our wholeness intact.

Writing of the glaring disparity between the first and the last meal Pollan says:

“To compare my transcendently slow meal to the fast-food meal I “served” my family at that McDonald’s in Marin, the one that set me back fourteen bucks for the three of us and was consumed in ten minutes at sixty-five miles per hour, is to marvel at the multiplicity of a world that could produce two such different methods of accomplishing the same thing: feeding ourselves, I mean.

“The two meals stand at the far extreme ends of the spectrum of human eating - of the different ways we have to engage the world that sustains us. The pleasures of the one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance. The diversity of the one mirrors the diversity of nature, especially the forest; the variety of the other more accurately reflects the ingenuity of industry, especially its ability to tease a passing resemblance of diversity from a single species growing in a single landscape; a monoculture of corn. The cost of the first meal is steep, yet it is acknowledged and paid for; by comparison the price of the second seems a bargain but fails to cover its true cost, charging it instead to nautre, to the public health and purse, and to the future.”

If I do indeed suffer from an eating disorder, Michael Pollan seems to have it also. His incredible book certainly betrays his earnest desire that you, dear reader, contract our disease and spread it far and wide.

About the Author...

Joanne Hay, Editor of Nourished Magazine, Chief Nourisher and Mother of three is very grateful to live in Byron Bay and be able to share all she has learned about Nourishment. She has trained as an Acupuncturist (unfinished), Kinesiologist (finished) and parent (never finished). She serves the Weston A Price Foundation as a chapter leader. She loves sauerkraut, kangaroo tail stew, home made ice cream, her husband Wes and her kids Isaiah, Brynn and Ronin (in no particular order…well maybe ice cream first).