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MICHAEL POLLAN ON HIS 25-YEAR FIGHT WITH THE FOOD INDUSTRY  
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Zoe Williams
June 6, 2024
The Guardian
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_ “It was the tobacco companies, under pressure from the government
over smoking, that bought the food industry. So it’s a similar
playbook, except now they know to burn the internal memos saying:
‘We know this food is unhealthy.’” _

Hot Dog, Jeepers Media

 

In the middle of Food, Inc 2
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the follow-up documentary to 2008’s Food, Inc, narrated by Michael
Pollan and Eric Schlosser – scientists share what they have recently
discovered about ultra-processed foods
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They are not just bad for you in a trashy, empty-calories kind of way;
they interfere with the brain and the body’s ability to process
food; they mess with you on a cellular level. Whole populations are
seeing health deteriorate, profoundly, for no purpose beyond profit.
It must be annoying, I suggest to Pollan, 69, to hear scientists
deliver this as a discovery. He been warning against processed food
for decades.

Pollan’s mantra – “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” –
was immortalised in his 2008 book In Defence of Food
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of the genesis, meaning and production of what we eat, thanks to The
Botany of Desire (2001) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). His other
memorable phrase from that time was: “Don’t eat anything your
great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food.”

His cultural impact, in the US and far beyond, was immense. It
wasn’t just these nutritional fundamentals, but his entire modus
operandi. He would follow a foodstuff from its birth, or germination,
to the point where it hit your mouth in the most intricate detail. He
took apart Bismarck’s apocryphal line about laws being like
sausages. Maybe you _do _want to see them being made. Maybe, in the
long term, you will end up with better sausages.

‘We were naive about how merely arming the consumer with information
would drive change in the food system’ … Michael Pollan.

He has also written about psychedelics, in 2018’s How to Change
Your Mind
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which in 2022 became a Netflix documentary series
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took a wild dive into MDMA, LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. Today, he
is a nonfiction professor at Harvard and a science and environmental
journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley. But,
above all that, he is Mr Food.

Anyway, back to the question: does it irk him that science took so
long to catch up with ultra-processing, grandmothers and so on? “We
assume science always gets there first,” he says. “It has such
authority. But sometimes the grandmas know things.” He is speaking
over a video call from California, looking relaxed and urbane. “I
remember being struck, when I was working on nutrition in 2008, by
this study that came out saying that the lycopene in tomatoes [often
claimed to be an antioxidant] can’t be absorbed by the body unless
it comes in the form of fat. OK, so olive oil on tomatoes. There’s a
wisdom in that and the grandmas got there first.”

While grandmas, Pollan and Schlosser (the author of 2001’s Fast Food
Nation) have been on to junk food since for ever, “that had no
scientific meaning”, Pollan says. The gamechanger was Carlos
Monteiro, a professor of nutrition at the University of São Paulo,
who appears in the new documentary. “He labelled and defined
ultra-processed food,” says Pollan. “Processed food you could make
at home. An ultra-processed food is one that contains ingredients no
normal person has at home and requires equipment you could only find
in a factory.”

If UPFs are driving obesity, they are just one part of a giant food
pipeline that is completely bust. While Food, Inc 2 is about the US,
so many of its elements are true of food systems across … well, for
brevity, I would call it “late capitalism”, but Pollan pushes back
on that. “Capitalism is a game that can be played according to
different rules,” he says. “We can just change the rules.”

Pollan and Schlosser didn’t intend to make a sequel – until Covid.
Its effects on the food system were dramatic. “We all had to
scrounge for food. Getting into a supermarket was a challenge and
then, once you’d got in, there were empty shelves,” says Pollan.

“This is such a weird idea for Americans. We live in abundance. Our
supermarkets are cornucopias. We used to look at videos of empty
shelves in the Soviet Union and feel self-satisfied. Suddenly, it was
happening here. And for very similar reasons: an overly centralised
system that didn’t have any redundancy built into it.”

We keep exempting agriculture from all the laws we have around labour
and animal welfare ... Michael Pollan

At the same time, in the early days of the virus, pigs were being
euthanised in jaw-dropping numbers, because they couldn’t be
processed due to lockdowns. Academic papers have been written about
the huge psychological toll this took on vets.

But the ripple effects are traumatic for democracy-lovers, too. Tyson
Foods, one of the largest meatpacking companies in the US, started a
meat-shortage panic
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an advert in the New York Times imploring President Trump to invoke
the Defense Production Act. “It’s a piece of legislation designed
to make companies do things they don’t want to do in the national
interest,” Pollan says. “In this case, Tyson wanted to be allowed
to do exactly what they wanted, which was to reopen production
lines.”

Meatpacking workers were incredibly vulnerable to Covid infection, due
to the conditions, and these plants became vectors of infection
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surrounding areas. One report in 2020 found that between 3% and 4% of
all_ _US Covid deaths were linked to the meatpacking industry
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The US food industry is a story of overconsolidation, usually with
four mega-companies dominating 80% or more of every sector, from meat
and dairy to cereals and soft drinks. It gives them undue political
influence – almost an immunity to legislation. “We keep exempting
agriculture from all the laws we have around labour and animal
welfare,” Pollan says.

Before Covid, Pollan didn’t think enough had changed in the industry
to make it worth another look. But this concentration of power and
production was “a new wrinkle”, as was the ultra-processing. “So
it was a sad moment – because, as much attention as Eric’s and my
books had had, we hadn’t made that much of a dent. The forces
arrayed against us were so much stronger than we realised. I think
that we were naive about how merely arming the consumer with
information would drive change in the food system. It did drive some
change, but nowhere near as much as it would take to dislodge power in
the food system.”

[US agricultural workers in a scene from Food, Inc 2]

US agricultural workers in a scene from Food, Inc 2. Photograph:
Courtesy of River Road and Participant

He believes in the power of organised consumer boycotts, which are
justified by another of the film’s scandals, in which farm workers
are so mistreated that their employment amounts to a state of
semi-serfdom (you have to watch it for the labourers’ stories –
they are staggering). But he is also powerfully aware of state
failure. “Policies should be organised around two pillars – one is
health of the citizens and the other is health of the environment –
and they are not,” he says. “They’re basically designed to lead
to overproduction and cheap agricultural commodities, which benefits
the soda makers and meat makers.”

There is no doubt that food as it is produced is as harmful to health
as tobacco, but there is a question mark over whether that sea change
– where cigarette giants were forced to take responsibility for
their products – would be possible now, when corporations seem so
much more powerful and better defended.

“You realise that it was the tobacco companies, under pressure from
the government over smoking, that bought the food industry,” says
Pollan. “So it’s a similar playbook, except now they know to burn
the internal memos saying: ‘We know this food is unhealthy.’ ‘We
know how we can get people to overeat.’ Because the reason they got
screwed on tobacco was that there was a paper trail. So they’re not
going to make that mistake again.”

[aerial photo of field being harvested]
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‘A system perverted by corporate money’: inside documentary sequel
Food, Inc 2
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Read more
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Their other strength now, of course, is that food is too big to fail.
When the supply chain of Abbott Laboratories, one of only four
significant baby formula manufacturers in the US, was disrupted in
2022 after two shutdowns at its main plant
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contributing to a nationwide shortage, the panic in young mothers’
faces as they recounted it to the media was palpable and contagious.

If Pollan comes off as much more optimistic – jaunty, even – in
the film than these case studies warrant, it’s because he has a
great deal of faith in technology. He is surprisingly enthusiastic
about the frontiers of synthesised and cultured meat, given that your
great-grandmother would definitely not recognise any of this as food.

In person, though, he is ambivalent about it. “If you can pick off
10% of meat eaters and get them to reduce their consumption, that’s
a good thing. But you can’t escape the fact that synthesised meat
has 21 ingredients or whatever, some of them never seen before in the
human diet. We may look back on this and say: ‘Oh no – we didn’t
see this health problem coming.’ But it’s such a non-American
idea, precaution. It doesn’t go with the frontier spirit, the heroic
individual. It’s so namby-pamby.”

But despite what he has discovered, Pollan still takes enormous
pleasure in food: “I just pay more attention to it.” Thank God
someone does.

_Food, Inc 2 is in UK cinemas and available on demand from Friday,
with previews at selected cinemas_

_Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist. Twitter @zoesqwilliams
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* Michael Pollan
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* Food Industry
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* junk food
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* food science
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