Bestselling food author, activist, and advocate Michael Pollan will speak at Bellarmine University, Thursday, October 7, in Knights Hall, 7:30 pm. Free. Open to the public.
In his NYT Review of Books article on the rising food movement this past summer, Pollan points out, “although cheap food is good politics, it turns out there are significant costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture—and as these became impossible to ignore in recent years, food has come back into view.”
His article looks at the proliferation of books on the subject, and he devotes a section to food politics, noting, “Attorney General Eric Holder recently avowed the Justice Department’s intention to pursue antitrust enforcement in agribusiness, one of the most highly concentrated sectors in the economy.3 At his side was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, who has planted his own organic vegetable garden at the department and launched a new ‘Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food’ initiative aimed at promoting local food systems as a way to both rebuild rural economies and improve access to healthy food. Though Vilsack has so far left mostly undisturbed his department’s traditional deference to industrial agriculture…'”
Pollan adds “that while the administration may be sympathetic to elements of the food movement’s agenda, it isn’t about to take on agribusiness, at least not directly, at least until it senses at its back a much larger constituency for reform.”
Pollan quotes Wendell Berry’s stance on the corporate willingness to “grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.”
Pollan’s conclusions are correct when he asserts “food is invisible no longer.”
Click here to purchase Michael Pollan’s books Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual
or In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
, or Food, Inc.
on DVD.
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