Michael Pollan: “Our Food Is Dishonestly Priced”

http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/03/michael-pollan-our-food-is-dishonestly-priced/

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I recently connected with Pollan to discuss equitable food pricing, farm worker rights and industrial agriculture’s role in casting the food movement as elitist. (What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.) I began by asking Pollan about his evolving personal interest in the plight of food workers.

“I’ve been really paying more attention to it over time than I did at the beginning,” he said. “When I wrote my first book about the food system, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I didn’t talk in detail about labor. It was much more from the point of view of the eater than the person behind the counter.

“But the food movement is all about connecting the dots,” Pollan continued. “Both the farm workers and the fast food workers are very important in the food system. I think Eric Schlosser did this better than anyone in Fast Food Nation (2001), where the focus was very much on food workers, slaughterhouse workers and farm workers. I think he’s helped to sensitize a lot of people in the food movement who perhaps weren’t paying as much attention to this part of the puzzle as they should have been. You definitely find the interest spreading and accelerating as social inequality has gotten so much worse in the last few years.”

Why, I wondered, is there this impression of the food movement as an elite venue? And why is it that the only people who can afford local, organic options are generally those who don’t have to worry about their pay?

“Although there’s a kernel of truth in that image [of a foodie elite],” he responded, “it’s also a part of the rhetorical strategy used by the [agricultural] industry to fight the food movement: that it’s elitist; that this kind of food can’t feed the world; that only industrial agriculture can get the job done and put lots of cheap meat in front of us. It’s a bludgeon used in a very serious ideological battle.

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