The film Food Inc., not widely released but written about in mainstream media ranging The New Yorker to the LA Times, features him as a narrator, and caused the Cargills and Monsantos to quickly put up rebuttal sites. Nicholas Kristof summarizes Pollan's arguments in a recent article. There exists a host of other books and films that I completely fail to mention and should. Many of them call upon Pollan's name.
It is because he is the theoretical epicenter of new, innovative social movements ranging from healthy black market chicken trafficking in urban New York, to increased outcry around the nutritional risks that come with sending almost all American cattle to a small number of slaughterhouses, or the increased monopolization and genetic modification of corn and soy products.
As the US and much of the developed world gets fatter and unhealthier, and health care is debated more fiercely, expect to see more attention paid to these issues. A debate on how to improve health care has been sorely missing a discussion on how to improve nutritional health, period. This discussion would need to examine the destructive practices resulting from irresponsible agricultural and nutritional policies that are part of this health crisis.
Don't believe me? Try buying some of Safeway's cheap ground beef, sourced from Cargill's finest. A barbeque-loving Texas conservative or a locavore Portland hipster can easily come to a bipartisan agreement that it tastes awful. Look a little deeper into how it was created. The way the cows are raised, their diet, their horrible transportation conditions, the massive slaughterhouses abusing illegal immigrant workers, its nightmarish stuff. The spread of E.Coli was the result of this. And the American public has so far played along.
Just as a side note, a good primer on the current state of the American meat industry is The Meatrix short video series.
Photo is used courtesy of Farm Sanctuary.
Posted on August 24, 2009
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