The Religion of Nutritionism and the Soul of a Carrot

“Eat food, mostly plants, not too much,”

I’ve been working to alter my food habits and generally be more aware of the sustainability and resource impact of products I buy. In a nutshell, I’m trying to eat foods that are grown locally and in-season. Along this path a friend of mine gave me a copy of Michael Pollard’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemna” (buy it from your local bookstore), which examines the practices of global agri-business and how it impacts our health, the health of our environment, and the quality of our foods. It’s really fascinating and paints a highly monetized and extremely un-sustainable picture of global agriculture. Of specific interest, Pollard goes into great detail about the inordinate value and consumption of just a few corn species monohybrids. Our food economy is based in cheap overproduction of corn, fed by petroleum, then downstreamed to feedlots and bionegineered to just about every type of food imaginable. In some sense, Safeway and McDonald’s are little more than corn outlets. Indeed, his examination suggests that corn is a far more adapted and successful species than our own.

The above video is of Pollard’s recent talk at Google where he addresses the solutions to the problems posed by “Dilemna”.