Corduroy Orange

I saw Michael Pollan when he came to Pittsburgh on March 5 as part of the Drue Heinz Lecture series. Its one of two big lecture series in Pittsburgh and just a small part of the bonanza of cultural offerings this city has to offer.

It’s interesting that even as our communication methods change, the lecture still draws a crowd. True, the Drue Heinz Series draws speakers who are top in their field, and usually focuses on topics that are of interest to the public at large, even when most ideas are exchanged nowadays via digital transmission. Even in a hall of hundreds who had come specifically to hear this speech, a flurry of activity fluttered through the crowd when the emcee began his introduction by saying, “I’m sure all of you have by now already turned off your cell phones and pagers.” It’s a rare opportunity anymore to sit and focus your attention on an individual in the flesh, sans electronic distractions. Indeed, it’s a lot to expect of a person to entertain a crowd whose attention spans have been whittled away by modernity.

Mr. Pollan did not disappoint. He held the crowd enraptured for the length of his speech and through the allotted question and answer period. If he had remained on the stage, the audience would probably have continued to lob follow-ups to follow-ups at him well into the night.

He started the lecture by pointing out the silliness of our nation’s eating habits: as a whole, we are susceptible to diet crazes and shift our eating habits according to the most recent expert opinion. It is symptomatic, says Pollan, of a “national eating disorder.” He went on to say that the success of his most recent book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is yet another symptom of the same problem: there would not have been need for 450 pages on this topic at any other time or in any other culture; yet, here and now, the message is one he feels compelled to deliver.

There are, explained Pollan, now four parallel food chains that operate in this country: highly industrialized, organic, local, and hunter-gatherer-grower. It was his observations about the highly industrialized food chain that I found most surprising.

I already wasn’t a fan of processed fare. I hadn’t realized, though, what an unbelievably large role corn plays in the processing process. More than half the items in a grocery store, said Pollan, rely on corn at some stage of processing. The partial list he rattled off was tremendous: most of the animals–including farm raised fish–eat it, thus beef, chicken, pork, turkey, lamb, catfish, tilapia, salmon, eggs, milk, cheese, and yogurt all rely on corn. Beyond that, though, processed foods like chicken nuggets have multiple layers of corn use: starch in the breading; the oil that they were fried in; and the lecithin, coloring, and citric acid used to prettify and preserve it are corn derived.

Beyond the meat aisle, corn is in syrup form in most sweetened drinks. Glucose from corn is even used in beer fermentation. Corn is in frosting, gravy, mayonnaise, mustard, salad dressing, vitamins, twinkies, cheez whiz, trash bags, toothpaste, vegetable wax, the wax coating on cardboard boxes, the glossy finish on magazines, pesticides, wallboard, and joint compound … and those are just some of the items that Pollan named in a list that he acknowledged was incomplete to begin with.

Pollan compared our current reliance on corn to the reliance that the Irish had on potatoes before the great potato famine. The monocropping of our soils leads to harsh environmental implications; the increasingly large amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizers that are required to make the food grow run off into our waterways. Areas near farms experience the direct danger from this waste in “blue baby alerts,” warning parents that the nitrate level in the drinking water is too high for their children to safely drink. The Gulf of Mexico has an expanding dead zone of nitrogen pollution where nothing will live.

Atrazine, a weed killer that has been banned in Europe, is still allowed to be used in the United States despite overwhelming evidence that it will cause health problems. According to Pollan, 1 ppb in water will chemically emasculate a frog; levels of up to 3 ppb are tolerated in our drinking water.

Even more land has been dedicated to corn (a total of 88 million acres this year) thanks to the new hope for corn-based ethanol as an automotive fuel. Unfortunately, the farm equipment that is required to grow the corn burns so much petroleum that the actual energy gain is negligible.

Not only that, but animals (including humans) who are asked to subsist on a corn-based diet miss out on vital nutritional components that corn can not offer. Even as individuals gain weight (and indeed become overweight), they experience nutritional deficiencies (such as rickets) that ought not to be seen in a country with as much food as is available in the states.

And that’s where (to draw conclusions based on the information provided in the first 1/4 of Pollan’s lecture), the government is failing its citizens. Instead of establishing agricultural policies that make sense for the health of the nation and that will help ensure that every citizen in this great nation has the opportunity to receive balanced, sensible nutrition, it establishes policies that subsidize corn growth and lead to an overabundance of the substance. Families in poverty are most affected by the state of affairs because they are the ones whose food choices are most stringently tied to the economics of the situation; it’s easier to feed a family on fewer dollars when you buy what’s cheap, and what’s cheap is corn-based, processed crap. And that leads to obesity, to diabetes, to poor health in general resulting from a non-balanced diet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Sustainable Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.