Gumption (21 page)

By now, food companies have our string-pulling down to a science. A vast array of popular products on the grocery store shelves and the drive-through menu are engineered to be light on the health and heavy on the flash. Delicious flavor powder! New color, now even greenier! Wait’ll you get a load of the aromatic gases emanating from these microwavable food envelopes! Advertising has become pure psychology, tugging at our long-conditioned desires. Some modern classics are the McDonald’s campaign that gives us images of happy families and their pets, running in the yard and playing sports, to the sugary refrain of “I’m lovin’ it,” or “We love to see you smile.” I fear they may have mistaken my grimace of intestinal discomfort for a smile, but I suppose that’s forgivable given the vast viewing distance from the bank all the way to which they have laughed. It now occurs to me that they are merely referring to themselves when they intone, “I’m lovin’ it,” as they watch us mindlessly gobble those irresistible fries and deep-fried chicken clumps.

“So now what, dumbass?” I ask myself. That’s where Michael Pollan’s entertaining and illuminating road maps come in. In
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, he breaks down four different meals for us, spanning the spectrum of purity from an entirely fast-food meal to a meal comprised only of ingredients grown, hunted, or foraged. In between, he goes into gratifying detail about what items in the grocery store bear any resemblance to what their labels tell us, and how Freudenberg’s
“corporate consumer complex” has even commandeered our formerly trusted descriptors like “organic” and “natural.” Just the long list of products in the store that are made with high-fructose corn syrup is a staggering wake-up call.

Mr. Pollan can take a complicated biological subject, like how stupid it is to feed corn to cattle, and lay it out for us in digestible layers: Our country had a postwar surplus of corn. The excess corn was fed to cattle. Cattle are literally not built to digest corn, because they are ruminants (they have a “rumen,” or extra stomach, for digesting plants that carnivores can’t), so corn makes them sick. The beef industry, instead of putting an end to the corn diet, just shoots the factory cows full of drugs to keep them alive long enough to harvest their beef.

This is obviously an oversimplified summation of only one of the many revelatory topics delivered in Pollan’s writing, but it should give you the gist. I’d love to see a statistic here in 2015 of how many restaurants and butchers are now touting their grass-fed beef as opposed to corn-fed, thanks to Michael Pollan’s benign whistle-blowing. I have recently eaten in classic steakhouses in Indiana and California whose menus were still loudly advertising the “finest in corn-fed steer meat.”

Five minutes of research into factory farming will immediately turn your stomach and reveal to you the filthy, and simply evil, production methods of most of our country’s meat products: beef, pork, chicken, eggs, salmon, trout, and more. We have allowed these abominations to occur, and we continue to support them through lazily ignoring the truth. Mr. Berry, Mr. Pollan, and others have given us no excuse to remain in our passive denial.

Both of these writers speak very plainly and effectively about the heavy-handed bullying that agri-giants like Monsanto and Cargill have employed in order to legalize their genetically modified organisms, also known as GMOs. Even the acronym seems unscrupulous, its initials softening the creepy science-fictional quality of an organism that has been genetically modified. The truth that Mr. Pollan makes quite plain, that seems to me the point to which attention should be paid, is that these organisms have not been genetically modified to make our food
better.
Is that not the bottom line? Shouldn’t a food company succeed because they strive to make
good
food? That these global corporate monoliths have forced these aberrances upon us for profit alone seems inarguable. This is not the first time that man- and womankind have thought they might prosper by outsmarting nature. The Greeks have plenty to tell us in their dramas about hubris, and I’m afraid that historically things don’t ever turn out well for the guy or gal, flying too close to the sun, or inventing a “better” corn seed.

We were doing so well just a few generations ago. Among his rules for eating, Michael Pollan tells us to “avoid anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” As I learned from his
In Defense of Food
, in 1977 Senator George McGovern headed up a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, and they discerned that the solution to America’s growing epidemics of diet-related illness could be alleviated if we would consume less meat and dairy. Simple and good, right? Apparently not if you were McGovern’s cattle-ranching constituents in South Dakota. They led a firestorm of criticism that caused the committee to reword their guidelines in much softer language, meat-wise, and soon saw McGovern ousted.

Remember the Oprah Winfrey burger debacle of 1998? In the throes of fear over mad cow disease, she merely stated that a guest’s remarks about mad cow “just stopped me cold from eating another burger.” A group of Texas beef producers sued Oprah under Texas’s False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act of 1995. Of course, the Texans had their asses handed to them, but to me, the case begs the question: Why would you ever need to enact such a state law in the first place, unless there was something unseemly in your methods? The specter of mad cow had been raised because the factory farmers were feeding their beef cattle
ground-up dead beef cattle
. This is the fact that had these “ranchers” taking the moral high ground? Michael Pollan puts it into perspective very succinctly with his adage, “You are what you eat eats.”

In 1910 Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the dedication of the John Brown Memorial (and I am most definitely not saying Brown was not a Freemason). Roosevelt said, “It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.” In 1907 the Tillman Act had been signed into law to curtail the very corruption of which number twenty-six spoke, but no federal committee was ever enacted to enforce the new legislation.

Michael Pollan is one of the key investigators today, pointing out the direct effects of this malfeasance running rampant in the aisles of our grocery stores. Food corporations are aware of the harmful
effects of their products, so they muscle legislation into existence so that nobody is allowed to say that their food is unhealthy? We are dietetically mired in a morass of advertising falsehood, when all we want to do is feed ourselves and our families delicious and healthy comestibles. How do we get back to the kind of eating wherein good health is simply a matter of course? Pollan tells us, in no uncertain terms. From
In Defense of Food
: “If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.”

As we were finishing up our delicious chat at Chez Panisse, a restaurant that it seems like Alice Waters started in 1971 just to wait for Michael Pollan to arrive and champion it, the waiter asked if we would like dessert. I scrutinized the menu and declared that I really shouldn’t have dessert with lunch, but for the sake of research, I had better order the Epicenter Orchards Apple and Huckleberry Galette with Vanilla Ice Cream. Michael generously offered to help me out with it, and we ordered coffee (for me) and tea (for him) as well.

Just then, the waiter brought out the first dessert on the menu, charismatically entitled A Bowl of Bob’s Black Mission Figs and Frog Hollow Farm Warren Pear, as though it’s nomenclature had been penned by Mark Twain for a café at Disneyland
.
Michael said, “Look at this. This bowl is absolutely just simple fruit; it’s the ultimate Chez Panisse creation. What they’re saying is, ‘We can’t improve on this.’ Some of it’s not even cut up . . . it’s just
curated.
” We shared the fruit, and it was sublime. I mentioned that it reminded me of a recurring theme in the woodworking we do at my shop, particularly with the
slab tables: We try to inflict as little ornamentation as possible upon the wood, oil it and polish it, and get out of the way of Mother Nature. Like George Nakashima, of whom you may soon read (in chapter 15).

“Oh, I love Nakashima,” replied Michael Pollan. “My parents own a bunch of his pieces.” O the serendipity. Hilariously, in fact, Michael remembered going to Nakashima’s studio as a kid, and while George sketched ideas for his folks’ furniture needs and they browsed among the stacks of slabs to find just the right piece of walnut for their dining room, Michael ran around bored with Nakashima’s son, Kevin.

Michael said that he understood my comparison of Nakashima to Chez Panisse: “You’re describing the philosophy of this restaurant. If they get the right ingredients, cooking’s not an issue.” He tells us in his essay “Unhappy Meals”: “Even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another.” In fact, that too sounds just like the woods we use in my shop. “Fine woodworking” comprises a set of techniques shaped around a respect for the unpredictable and sometimes downright ornery behavior of wood. We know that wood is an organic compound, made up of cells that can behave in mysterious ways, and so we join pieces of the compound together by methods that pay respect to that misbehavior.

When it comes to knowledge, again, I feel that we have been seduced into thinking that total comprehension is possible, because we have on our phones instant access to more
information
than we can cognitively handle. But there is a huge difference between information and knowledge. Tanya Berry said to me that she finds it upsetting
nowadays when people look into their phones in the middle of a conversation, first because it’s rude, but second because anytime there is a question, people will now just Google the answer. Wendell chimed in and added, “They’re losing the ability to use those three beautiful words:
I don’t know.
”

Wendell Berry snagged this inbound 1945 quote from Sir Albert Howard, tossed it to Michael Pollan, who then passed it along to me via his writing, and now I’m lobbing it to you, in the hope that you’ll resoundingly dunk it through the hoop of public clarity, over the outstretched hands of FDA befuddlement: that we would do well to regard “the whole problem of health, in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject.” With that wisdom in place, I vote that we try to simplify things as much as possible, starting with our food purchases. Another bon mot from Michael Pollan’s deep well: “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

The answers to all the confusion about food lie in simplification. Michael Pollan suggests that we simply make our food, and hence our health, more of a priority. If you love your child/spouse/pet/self, then don’t feed them fast food or processed products that you know are unhealthy. Make your meals important enough that you simply take the time and effort to pack a lunch rather than depend on what is offered by retail food locations near your work or school.

Seek out local sources, like a farmer’s market or CSA (community-supported agriculture), which will deliver fresh produce to you weekly.

“Pay more, eat less,” says Pollan. It sounds antithetical until you realize that cheap food has not been created for your health or quality
enjoyment; it’s been engineered to be cheap. I am still working on it, but since I first started reading Michael Pollan’s food/cooking books, my wife and I eat exponentially better, and we feel great, and she looks great. I still look like me, but I did go down a size in jeans. Suck on that, McDonald’s. I’m smiling wide, but you can’t see me.

MAKERS