‘What Should we Have for Dinner?’: An interview with Michael Pollan
Pollan, a speaker at the 2004 Food and Society Confernece, speaks with Food and Society Update editor, Katie Eukel, about his new book, working with the media, and telling effective stories.

Michael Pollan

In 2003, Pollan moved from Connecticut to Berkeley, California to become the Director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s also publishing a new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, in April 2006. The book explores a very simple question—what should we have for dinner?

KE: What exactly is the omnivore’s dilemma?

MP: The omnivore’s dilemma is basically the existential predicament of creature who can eat just about anything; it doesn’t have a specialized diet that it’s been given by its needs. Over the years, we evolved a lot of systems to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma, to help us understand what we should eat, culture being the most important. Our culture tells us ‘eat that mushroom, don’t eat that mushroom’. You know, eat at a table with people, eat communally in other words. Don’t snack…well, they used to tell us that! You know, cook your meat, don’t eat this part of the animal, eat that part of the animal. All the rules we have for eating. That’s kind of helped us navigate this basic dilemma. But that, in our own time, has kind of broken down. The culture, especially in America, is falling apart. I mean, the family dinner is ending, the marketers are convincing us to eat in our cars--20 percent of American meals are now eaten in the car--nutritionists are confusing us every day with new scientific advice.

So we find ourselves back where we were in a funny way, you know, as primitive creatures confronting a bewildering landscape. Full of great things to eat and poisons-- things that can kill you. And here we are again. So it’s really a book about how we got there and how we might reacquire some sanity about eating. And I do it by looking at food chains, the food chains that we’re a part of, industrial, organic, local, and hunter-gatherer.

KE: What were your food chain explorations like? What did you learn from those experiences?

MP: Well I start [out] macro and move to the more intimate or the smaller, so I start with the industrial food chain and I end up with the hunter-gatherer food chain. Each chapter starts with some species of nature in a meal that I either cooked or ate out, and so I traced the meal all the way back to the earth. I spent a lot of time figuring out why this is true and the role that policy plays in this.

The book is a lot of food detective stories where I follow a food back to figure out how it’s made and where it actually came from.

I worked on a small farm in Virginia, what I take to be probably the most sustainable farm in the country; it’s called Polyface Farm. So I spent a week working there and learning everything about how to take care of animals, slaughter chickens, sell locally. Then I prepared a meal from that farm--all food grown on that farm.

I wanted to learn about the omnivore’s dilemma at the most basic and primitive so I had a meal that I hunted, gathered, and grew myself. For that, I learned how to hunt, which I’d never done before, and shot a boar. And learned how to gather mushrooms, morels and chanterelles.

So I actually went through that whole process of learning how to identify safe food and dangerous food, just confronted the real basics of feeding ourselves. You know, are we within our moral rights to take the life of an animal, how do we feel about it when it happens, when you actually watch it happen, and how do you turn an animal into a good meal? You know, how do you pass through the disgusted attempts at butchering and cleaning to actually turn it into food that you can actually enjoy. Which I did!

The book looks at the question in many different ways. It looks at it from a policy point of view, from a psychological point of view, from a biological point of view, nutrition, and I really bring a lot of different lenses to it. It was a fascinating education for me and it certainly changed the way I eat.

KE: What originally brought you to this topic? Why do you think it’s important to explore this dilemma now versus at any other time?

MP: Well, I think we’re really confused about what we’re eating. We get a lot of conflicting advice, we’re besieged by marketers who are telling us that, you know, if we eat this cereal we’re going to lower our cholesterol or our blood pressure. And that if you’re a menopausal woman you should eat that cereal, and kids are being marketed to. So I think the result is that we get a lot of conflicting messages about food.

KE: Since you’re working with young journalists, what would be some of your advice for someone who is trying to explore these issues in a larger context?

MP: Well, tell stories. Stories are very powerful ways to connect with people, and one of the problems with our food is that the stories have been removed from them. The stories of how they were made and where they came from, to the extent that you can restore people’s knowledge that there is a connection between what they’re eating. That even the Twinkie originally was a species growing somewhere. So if you can tell a story how food came to be made, that will be very interesting. When people are empowered with that knowledge, they’ll make better decisions about what they’re buying. So telling stories is part of it.

And make connections. Think like an ecologist. Journalism and ecology have a lot in common, it’s about finding connections, finding the causes of things, finding the relationships between things. So I think teaching journalists to think more like ecologists is very powerful.

KE: Do you have any advice for nonprofits who are trying to tell their stories to a broader audience?

MP: Think in terms of stories. People are very interested in how things work, and trying to think like a reader does is a good way to do it. The beauty of the food issue is that it connects very directly with people. Everybody eats. You know, we face a plate of food three times every day. Food opens up onto lots of other issues. So it’s a way to get people to think about the bigger systems in our lives, everything from energy to the land…and again, food gives you something where you can follow a line that takes you back to something people might not know they care about or should care about. But they do care about what goes in their body and what it does to them. So to the extent you can connect with people at a very intimate level, a very basic level, I think that’s true for lots of issues. And health is a wonderful way to do that. Food is another.

One key thing I’ve found; this is a small thing, but I think it’s very important. Talking to people about food, not agriculture. It’s remarkable how few people realize that they’re the same thing and that agriculture is of interest to them. Really, people in the cities have learned to think of agriculture as something that happens way out there, it isn’t part of their lives. They’ve heard farmers complaining for years and years about crop prices and weather and everything, and they just feel completely disconnected from agriculture. They do not feel disconnected from food. When I started selling articles in New York about these issues, I realized very quickly that if I went and pitched an article about agriculture, it was over. But if I pitched an article about food, I had an editor’s attention.