What to do about the nations food supply

September 7, 2006 9:09 AM

"One Thing to Do About Food". Short essays on what to do about the nations food supply by Michael Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and others.
posted by stbalbach (28 comments total)

My 'one thing' would be for the government to pay the hottest ad companies to come up with ads for fresh vegetables.

Really f'n sexy adds for carrots. That's what we need.
posted by unSane at 9:27 AM on September 7, 2006

Its OK. Becuase the Government is keeping us safe. From shipping hay willy-nilly.
posted by rough ashlar at 9:40 AM on September 7, 2006

Mike's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma is really good.

I think the main problem with food safety/security writing is the real issue that there are perhaps 20 good food writers in the US/UK and they are all writing about how much they enjoy food. BUT there is little seen about how our relationship with food bring species to the brink of extinction. For example, we never see Ruth Reichl writing in Gourmet about the demise of the sea bass.
posted by parmanparman at 9:44 AM on September 7, 2006

When I was pregnant, I was constantly bombarded with two wildly contradictory messages: 1. Eat fish, it's healthy! 2. Don't eat fish, it's full of mercury! And then occasionally, fresh fish is safer! No, ocean fish is safer!

I didn't eat any fish at all, because I could not trust that what I was being told was correct; I decided to miss out on those good proteins because I was more afraid of birth defects.

But you're right; what food columnist ever discusses how popular foods are being polluted/hunted out of existence?
posted by emjaybee at 9:52 AM on September 7, 2006

fresh fish=fresh water fish. Obviously, rotted fish is not so good.
posted by emjaybee at 9:53 AM on September 7, 2006

Obviously, rotted fish is not so good.
posted by emjaybee at 9:53 AM PST

No! If the fish rots, then its not using Mercury as a preservative.
posted by rough ashlar at 9:54 AM on September 7, 2006

Totally agree with emjaybee and parmanparman. A Ph.D. student friend studying California rivers told me she didn't expect any species of California salmon to survive global warming, because overfishing, dams, and steam degradation from logging have left their populations so depleted already.
posted by salvia at 10:06 AM on September 7, 2006

i actually started a blog on butchering and love based on an email thread debating the relative merits of veganism vs. eating animals. there's a fair amount of related content and links there regarding issues of diet and some discussion of the omnivore's dilemma. some of the links were featured in the blue, but there's other stuff that may be interesting...to people who are interested in this kind of stuff.
posted by snofoam at 11:03 AM on September 7, 2006

Let's all just hold off on the fish discussion until he weighs in.
posted by NationalKato at 11:05 AM on September 7, 2006

we shall eat the Irish' babies!
posted by joelf at 11:15 AM on September 7, 2006

Nice article; thanks.

What I find interesting about things like the mercury in fish question is, the debate seems to try to put all the responsibility on the consumer, rather than on the companies polluting the water with mercury. Especially when it's pitched at pregnant women, the message becomes "You are irresponsible if you subject your fetus to mercury; bad mother" rather than "We as a society are irresponsible for allowing this toxin into our food supply."

And I have seen articles, or at least concern, about the extinction of various species due to trendy eating. Fish, mainly -- various people kept trying to tell America that "Chilean sea bass" was, first of all, not bass, and second of all, being overfished to the point of extinction. And I've seen the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch fish-buying guide popping up a lot.
posted by occhiblu at 11:28 AM on September 7, 2006

What to do about the nations food supply

I just noticed the title of this post. Does this refer to the food supply of the United States, or the food supply of The Nation?
posted by snofoam at 11:42 AM on September 7, 2006

we never see Ruth Reichl writing in Gourmet about the demise of the sea bass.

Beg to differ on this. For at least the last year or so, Gourmet has been doing seemingly an article or two a month on sustainability, slow food, the culinary and ecological value of locally sourced ingredients, etc., etc.

Here, for example, is a Treehugger post about last December's feature on eating sustainably harvested fish (can't find the actual story, alas).
posted by gompa at 12:00 PM on September 7, 2006

In a grad school class with one of the most hardcore teachers I had, discussing something totally abstract like global ecological collapse, we asked her what one action she would have society take. Her answer was that we should get rid of all the grocery stores. I've been thinking about it ever since. How is that the single most important environmental action we could take? I think the answer is that it would raise the importance of certain facts, e.g. that fish from the San Francisco Bay are (pretty much) too polluted to eat.
posted by salvia at 12:13 PM on September 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

I don't know that we really need to be worrying much about obesity and other decadent-Western food issues what with the End Of Oil and The End Of The Climate As We Know It both battering down our hatches. Fattening us keeps us happy in the interim and that blubber will serve us well as we scrabble for survival through the dustbins of civilization in the apocalypse to come.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:19 PM on September 7, 2006

Well, more importantly, it would cut down on trucking food thousands of miles away, reducing fossil fuel consumption and forcing people to eat locally. It would also force large farms that rely on transporting their food around the country out of business, and so also promote small local farms. It would indirectly, then, force people into more awareness about their local food culture.
posted by occhiblu at 12:19 PM on September 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

I hate to be such a cynic but after reading all these essays and books about the state of food in the US, I get the feeling that the best thing I could do for my health is to... not eat.

There's so many differing opinions about where to buy food, where not to buy food, what to eat, what not to eat, how to prepare food, how not to prepare food, what to cook food in, what not to cook food in,..... maybe just starvation is the most beneficial meal plan. I mean I get 0 calories, 0 fat, 0 trans fat, 0 mercury, 0 bad carbs, 0 preservatives, 0 artificial flavors, and no animals are harmed in the process, no oil-producing countries get my money, and I'm not supporting/denying any farm subsidies. If anyone has a better diet that will make everyone happy, I'm all ears.

Or maybe I just need to move to another country where people are just content to eat together and not get in a masturbatory frenzy over what they stick in their mouth.
posted by junesix at 12:43 PM on September 7, 2006

My $0.02: Teach kids to read the nutrition labels, understand them, and follow them, at a very early age.
posted by DenOfSizer at 12:53 PM on September 7, 2006

Also, make sure to instill in children the evils of High Fructose Corn Syrup. If you see it on the label, put it down and buy an alternative.
posted by NationalKato at 1:12 PM on September 7, 2006

*waits for him to weigh in*
posted by ZachsMind at 1:21 PM on September 7, 2006

we never see Ruth Reichl writing in Gourmet about the demise of the sea bass.

Beg to differ on this. For at least the last year or so, Gourmet has been doing seemingly an article or two a month on sustainability, slow food, the culinary and ecological value of locally sourced ingredients, etc., etc.

That's precisely the problem, in this slow food movement, we hear about preservation but not about loss. Who cares if Wynona LaDuke is winning awards for saving a species of native Minnesota rice when most of our farmed land is monoculture anyway?

And to the locally sourced argument: that's all well and good, but have any of you every tried to live on the 100-mile diet IN WASHINGTON DC? Try your fucking best my friend, because for all the writing, it's as good to become law as I am to become pope.
posted by parmanparman at 1:47 PM on September 7, 2006

we hear about preservation but not about loss.

That doesn't make any sense. The point of preservation is preventing loss. If we don't preserve wild rice, we will lose it. They're the same topic.
posted by occhiblu at 1:49 PM on September 7, 2006

I mean, that's exactly what the concept of sustainability is -- how do we best manage the diverse resources we have so as not to either overstrain or underutilize them?
posted by occhiblu at 1:55 PM on September 7, 2006

We need test-tube meat already! Science, get on it!
posted by Laugh_track at 2:29 PM on September 7, 2006

you can test my tube meat
posted by sonofsamiam at 2:41 PM on September 7, 2006

does it make it's own gravy?
posted by jefbla at 3:00 PM on September 7, 2006

I bet Wal-Mart will sell more organic food at retail in a few years than every retailer in America will sell in 2006. By the same token Cargill and ADM will sell more organic food at wholesale that year than every organic farmer in America will sell in 2006 -- includes ten of thousands of acres of organic soy in Brazil and organic corn in Iowa. What will all those fervent enemies of the market quoted in the "Nation" symposium say then?
posted by MattD at 6:39 PM on September 7, 2006

We need test-tube meat already! Science, get on it!

Nova did a segment about this recently, there is in fact test-tube meat now. However, the cost per ounce was pretty high... long way to go before this becomes practical. In theory it could be made more efficient than raising animals for meat, and clearly more humane.
posted by wildcrdj at 7:46 PM on September 7, 2006