San Francisco Charonicle
Carol Ness, Chronicle Staff Writer
This might come as a shock to devotees of the Church of Michael Pollan, but his next article will be about orchid sex, not food. And his next book may not be about food, either.
“My wife says it’s time for me to move on,” the UC Berkeley journalism professor and reluctant leader of the real food movement told The Chronicle. “If you had to listen to our dinner table conversation for the last five years, as she and my son do, you might be up for a new topic.”
Since 2002, when the New York Times Magazine published Pollan’s grim account of the life of a feedlot steer bound for burgerville, a growing population of eaters horrified to learn what’s actually on their plate have embraced him as their guru of good food.
His 2006 best-seller, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” a critique of America’s industrialized food system, spawned blogs, Web sites and a flash of activism around U.S. farm policy, a famously tedious piece of legislation.
People looking for answers to the burning questions of our time – grass-fed or organic? local or humane? – found themselves asking: “What would Michael Pollan do?”
Even before his newest book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” (The Penguin Press, $21.95) went on sale last week, advance copies inspired the magazine Edible San Francisco to publish haikus riffing on the book’s mantra, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Before Pollan plunged into a two-month book tour, he sat down for lunch and a chat about the manifesto, his plans, and his take on the effects of the movement to restore wholesome, sustainable foods to the American table – and good health to a chubby, diabetes-prone population.
My suggestion that we meet at a chain restaurant like Applebee’s for a reality check on the state of the national lunch went over like a veal chop at a PETA dinner. “We only have three meals a day. I hate to waste one,” Pollan said.
We settled on 900 Grayson, a friendly cafe on Berkeley’s west side where the menu mixes humor (sides like fries and gravy are listed as “Make-up Kit & Sordid Accessories”) and attention to local tastes for high-quality, sustainably raised ingredients.
I was curious how Pollan would decide what to order, given the advice he lays out in his new book. He says he wrote it to answer the question he heard repeatedly from people who ate up “Omnivore’s” indictment of American mass food production, processing and government oversight, but then were left wondering: “So what can we eat?”
The new book puts flesh on the bones of an approach to eating that Pollan introduced in the New York Times Magazine last year:
Don’t fall into the “nutritionist” trap of treating food like dietary supplements – eating blueberries for the antioxidants, for example.
Forget low-fat and low-carb.
Eat a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, grains – real foods, not the “foodlike substances” that crowd store shelves.
Pick your proteins carefully. Choose meat raised in traditional ways, on pasture instead of in feedlots, don’t eat too much of it, and include lots of fish from sustainable fisheries.
Pollan advocates a return to traditional ways of eating, before processing, hidden sugars and, as he sees it, dietitians got in the way of health and great taste.
“Our government is doing very little about obesity,” he said. “How did it get so controversial to say, ‘Eat less,’ to say, ‘Eat fruits and vegetables’?”
He practices what he preaches, cooking dinner at home most nights, often with help from his 15-year-old son Isaac, and sitting down to eat as a family with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer. Much of their food comes from a CSA (a subscription box of produce from a local farm) and north Berkeley’s Thursday farmers’ market, a short walk from their home.
Following Pollan’s mantra sounds so easy until you’re trying to navigate a menu – or a supermarket.
For example, the burger at 900 Grayson is “Creekstone Natural Beef,” as the menu proudly declares. That’s good, right? The company has made a name for itself fighting the U.S. government for permission to test its steers for mad cow disease.
But Pollan points out, “It’s conventionally raised, in a feedlot. I’m happy they want to test for mad cow, but that’s setting the bar low.”
If a grass-fed burger were on the menu, he’d probably order it – but it’s not. Chicken is nixed because it’s mass produced, he thinks. The waiter, asked if the pulled pork is locally raised, reports back that it’s bought from a local distributor – not the same thing.
“Asking all these questions is important,” Pollan says. “The chefs hear this. It’s another way a consumer can make his or her opinions felt and see results.”
Our choices narrow fast. The vegetarian ravioli is one, but we both end up ordering the “Sorry Charlie,” a coriander-crusted tuna steak with slaw, and we split an appetizer of local Dungeness crab cakes. At a chain restaurant, Pollan said, he’d fall back on the tuna sandwich.
“We eat entirely too much meat from the point of view of the environment. The carbon footprint of meat is deep,” he says. “People think about what they drive, but if you cut out meat, it’s the equivalent of trading a sedan for a Prius.”
But what about mercury? What about overfishing? And what if you don’t have Michael Pollan right there to answer those questions for you?
“I’m hoping this book will give people tools so they don’t have to depend on people like me – and I can go out and write something else,” Pollan answers.
The general guidelines in the book are intended to remind eaters of the big picture, to pull dinner back from the minutiae of dietitians and epidemiologists, he says, adding, “Nutrition is kind of where surgery was in 1650.”
He often has to remind people that he is a science writer, not a food writer.
Before arriving at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in August 2003, Pollan – who is about to turn 53 – had written widely about subjects related to plants and the landscape. Among his topics, “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns” and “How to Make a Pond.”
Plants led him to food, and by the turn of the 21st century his titles had evolved into things like “Feeding Frenzy” and “Produce Politics.”
By then he’d left his job as longtime executive editor at Harper’s Magazine, was living in Connecticut with his family and writing books – the first two about gardening and building.
“I’ve always thought my topic is nature,” especially the places where nature and humans engage, he likes to say. “And food is part of that.”
He’s also not the first Pollan to be deeply involved in food – his mother, Corky Pollan, is style director for Gourmet magazine and, according to her son, “a terrific cook.” (His father, Stephen Pollan, is a lawyer who writes popular books on personal finance. And his sister is the actress Tracy Pollan, who is married to Michael J. Fox.)
Lured west to be director of the science and environmental journalism program at UC Berkleley, Pollan hit the Bay Area about a year after “Power Steer,” his New York Times Magazine cover story on a steer’s life, snared the attention of the local, sustainable food community. He was immediately adopted into the Alice Waters-Slow Food set and found himself in demand as a speaker.
“Omnivore” turned him into a celebrity, hitting at a time when “the culture was ready to have this conversation.” And when the farm bill came up for consideration in Congress last year, Pollan seized the opportunity to help focus attention on it as an unrecognized but important influence on the nation’s eating habits, on obesity and diabetes, and on the environment.
“We really are at a crossroads,” he explains over lunch. “We are either going to accept the price of our diet – have a dialysis center on every block, or we change. We go back to the way of eating that didn’t make us so sick.”
His cult status and ability to make complicated, boring subjects like crop subsidies seem fascinating turned him into a leader for farm bill reform. Pollan timed speaking engagements for San Francisco when he knew U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House majority leader, was home from Washington. Much to his surprise – journalists are usually the ones calling politicians – he found politicians calling him.
Emerging as a food movement leader “makes me uncomfortable. I’m a journalist,” Pollan says. “But just because I’m a journalist I don’t give up my rights as a citizen.”
Becoming a leader makes him uncomfortable for other reasons too, he says. When people ask him what a new crop subsidy policy should be, he keeps having to say, “I don’t know. I’m a journalist. I hope I can shine a light on it.”
He goes on: Rachel Carson, whose book, “The Silent Spring,” launched the modern environmental movement, “didn’t write the Clean Air Act. She started a conversation and then politicians take over. And that’s how it’s supposed to work. The question here (on farm policy reform) is: Where are the politicians?”
Though Congress defeated any substantial farm policy reform late last year, Pollan thinks the real food movement is making gains and the farm bill debate showed that “we have the politicians’ ear.”
“We’re at the beginning of this. Change comes very slow,” he says.
The leadership vacuum doesn’t mean he has to be the one to fill it, Pollan insists.
But his public may not agree, as he learned during a recent speech at Williams College in Massachusetts. As usual, there were a “couple of 10-gallon hats in the audience,” the local grass-fed beef ranchers. Pollan told them he might be moving on, writing about something other than food.
“Afterward, this farmer came up to me and he’s poking his finger in my chest (and saying), ‘You have an obligation. You’ve started something. You’re representing us,’ ” Pollan relates. “That threw me for a loop. I mean, do I have an obligation?”
He answers his own question. “My first obligation is to my own interests, and curiosity, and to my readers. Becoming part of a movement – that’s not why I got into writing.”
For now, Pollan is taking a spring semester sabbatical from UC for his book tour, to write an article for National Geographic magazine on orchids’ wily ways of seducing insects they need for pollination – and to figure out what his next big topic will be.
“Maybe something on ethanol,” he says. “I’m still very interested in food – I just don’t know if I have anything else to say about it.”
But, he adds, “I can write about other things and still keep my hand in on this issue.”
The published Pollan
A selected bibliography of Michael Pollan’s recent works:
— “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” (The Penguin Press, 2008). Reviewed Dec. 30 in The Chronicle’s Book Review section. See link with this story at sfgate.com/food.
— “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” (The Penguin Press, 2006).
— “The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World” (Random House, 2001).
— Contributed “Farmer, Chef, Storyteller: Building New Food Chains” to “Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed” (Vandana Shiva, ed. South End Press, 2007).
E-mail Carol Ness at [email protected].
