Food Heroes Shake Confidence
Sometimes we find heroes. Not often, but sometimes people push their way to the front. Expel wisdom. Shake confidence. And sometimes their name isn’t even Cecilia.
Anyway…
This person is Michael Pollan. He might not always be right. Or first. Or the best. But this dude’s got ideas. And I’m willing to listen.
For example, he tells the Washington Post’s Tim Carman:
We’ve gotten really good at it, but it turns out…that cheap food has enormous costs. In the same period of time that we went from spending 18 percent of our income on food to under 9 percent of our income on food, we’ve gone from spending 5 percent of our national income on health care to 17 percent of our income on health care. So we’re paying for that cheap food with our higher health care costs.
While he acknowledges low food price isn’t the full reason we’re struggling as a nation, he does consistently give valid points about our current life in food. And, he chooses to converse with Tim Carman, a wonderfully, metaphor-friendly writer, who knows a fucking thing about our collective relationship with food.
Mark Bittman had some interesting stuff about this recently, too, about how the whole “people eat fast food because they can’t afford quality food” isn’t really true.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-food-really-cheaper.html?pagewanted=all
god bittman is good.