Michael Pollan's Favorite Food Rules

by Tara Parker-Pope

In March, the best-selling author Michael Pollan asked readers of the Well blog for help. He wanted your food rules — the folklore, wisdom and common sense that guide your family eating habits.

Well readers rose to the challenge, offering more than 2,600 rules (and counting) for healthful eating. Mr. Pollan, who is soon releasing a book on the topic, this week offers a preview in The New York Times Magazine of 20 of his favorite rules.

A reader, Carol Jackson, offered: “You don’t get fat from food you pray over.”

“It’s better to pay the grocer than the doctor,” John Forti wrote.

“No second helpings, no matter how scrumptious,” Karen Harmin suggested.
(click title to see original story)

Michael Pollen on "Talk of the Nation"

Michael Pollan recently participated in a discussion on NPR's Talk of the Nation program with farm representatives and the VP of the Corn Growers Association. The discussion was not as contentious as one might have expected.

An Interview with Michael Pollan

In preparation for a cover story in this week's Isthmus newspaper, news editor Bill Lueders conducted a telephone interview with author Michael Pollan.

Lueders shares an edited version of the interview here. This may give readers of the book In Defense of Food insight into Pollan's journalistic motivations and some of the delimma's he faced in writing this book and others.

Michael Pollan: I'll Still Shop at Whole Foods

by Michael Pollan


John Mackey’s views on health care, much as I disagree with them, will not prevent me from shopping at Whole Foods. I can understand why people would want to boycott, but it’s important to play out the hypothetical consequences of a successful boycott. Whole Foods is not perfect, however if they were to disappear, the cause of improving Americans’ health by building an alternative food system, based on more fresh food, pastured and humanely raised meats and sustainable agriculture, would suffer. 

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

By Brian Walsh

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

Controversial book focus of UW-Madison project

by Jim Massey

Wisconsin agriculture groups say they're concerned about a new UW-Madison program that encourages students to read a book critical of mainstream agriculture and the U.S. food system.

The program, known as "Go Big Read," invites students, faculty, staff, alumni and the community to read a selected book and participate in campus discussions and community events. New chancellor Carolyn "Biddy" Martin initiated the program.

The university is providing the book free to students and faculty members. A UW-Madison Web site says professors in 48 different courses will be incorporating discussion about the book in their curriculum. The program is targeted at freshmen, but other students also will participate.

The book is Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto." In the book, Pollan examines the modern American food landscape, where he says the deceptively simple question of what to eat has been muddled by the numerous and often conflicting claims of food producers, marketers and nutrition experts.