Questions SEP 6

 SEP 6 WB -176 (The Agrarian Standard... A Few Words for Motherhood)

1. Are you alarmed at the rapid historical decline of farmers in the U.S.? 132
2. Do you have personal memories of farm life, personally or via family? (I recall riding as a child with my late Uncle on his huge combine, on the ancestral family farm in Montgomery County, MO. I now know no one who farms.)
3. Can we be "a healthy people in a healthy land" if we remain literally and emotionally detached from hands-on agriculture, not knowing or particularly caring where our supermarket commodities come from or how they got to us?
4. Do you think patronizing large grocery chains like Kroger and Publix necessarily implicates us in supporting "bad [industrial] agriculture"? 
5. Have you ever participated in CSA? If not, do you intend to?
6. Do you agree that industrial agriculture "cannot use the land without abusing it"? 133 
7. Why do we have such a hard time appreciating and representing "locality"? 134
8. "The industrial mind is an organizational mind" -- what's wrong with that?
9. Is violence inherent in the (industrial agriculture) system? 135
10. What does "stewardship" mean to you? 
11. Is the "market value" of land irrelevant, from an environmental standpoint? 138
12. What is the true source of "abundance"? 139
13. What does it mean to be "landed"? 140 Can an urban apartment-dweller be landed?
14. Is anything "inevitable"?
15. What would or could you do if forced by war or some other cataclysm to "live from [your] home landscapes"? 141
16. Is it wrong for a few powerful people to own and control the land? 142
17. What does it mean to you to acknowledge that "eating is an agricultural act"? 143f. 
18. Do you feel obliged to follow any "food rules"? (See Michael Pollan, below)

• Please post your thoughts and questions, especially on "labor saving," "getting along with nature," and "motherhood"...

The Wendell Berry Sentence That Inspired Michael Pollan's Food Obsession

For Pollan, "eating is an agricultural act" offers more insight into how food relates to the world than Thoreau or Emerson's words ever could.

Perhaps more than any living writer, Michael Pollan has convinced America that food is a story—and that there's pleasure, health, and good conscience in untangling farm-to-fork narratives. For many, books like The Omnivore's Dilemma have been a gateway to more mindful eating, a path to heightened curiosity about farming and the natural world, a road to the conviction that we really are what we eat.

But what got Michael Pollan thinking about food? In a recent interview by phone, Pollan explained his transformation from Harper's editor to a writer about gardens—and from there corn fields, supply chains, and food rules. When I asked him if a particular text has guided the ethos of his work, he pointed to a line from Wendell Berry's short manifesto, "The Pleasures of Eating," that urges us to be curious and make connections... (continues)

Michael Pollan, Food Rules... Illustrated ed.

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March 23, 2009 -- We Americans suffer a national eating disorder: our unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

That's the diagnosis delivered by food author Michael Pollan in a lecture given last week to an overflow crowd of CDC scientists.

As part of an effort to bring new ideas to the national debate on food issues, the CDC invited Pollan -- a harsh critic of U.S. food policies -- to address CDC researchers and to meet with leaders of the federal agency.

"The French paradox is that they have better heart health than we do despite being a cheese-eating, wine-swilling, fois-gras-gobbling people," Pollan said. "The American paradox is we are a people who worry unreasonably about dietary health yet have the worst diet in the world."

In various parts of the world, Pollan noted, necessity has forced human beings to adapt to all kinds of diets.

"The Masai subsist on cattle blood and meat and milk and little else. Native Americans subsist on beans and maize. And the Inuit in Greenland subsist on whale blubber and a little bit of lichen," he said. "The irony is, the one diet we have invented for ourselves -- the Western diet -- is the one that makes us sick."

Snowballing rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in the U.S. can be traced to our unhealthy diet. So how do we change?

7 Words & 7 Rules for Eating

Pollan says everything he's learned about food and health can be summed up in seven words: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

Probably the first two words are most important. "Eat food" means to eat real food -- vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and, yes, fish and meat -- and to avoid what Pollan calls "edible food-like substances."

Here's how:

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.

2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.

4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.

5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"

6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.

7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.