Bestselling author Michael Pollan, a vocal advocate for change in America’s food systems, spent the day at UVM Oct. 30, visiting classes and speaking with faculty and students. Pollan's book Cooked was required reading for this year's incoming first-year students as part of the Summer Reads Program.
He culminated his visit to campus with a lively Q&A on the Ira Allen stage, moderated by Amy Trubek, UVM associate professor of nutrition and food science and director of the food systems graduate program.
Read on for some of the highlights from the talk.
Michael Pollan on Cooked and his goal for the book:
“What I was trying to do was to write a book that would excite people about cooking, that would make people understand that it’s this amazing process. It’s alchemy. It’s everyday magic available to all of us,” Pollan said. “You cook bread once, even, and you learn something about bread, and you consume bread in a different way. And — and this is really important, I think — you have a respect for the people who do this work, who we don’t respect enough. And that goes for all my writing about agriculture, too. That if you can see what’s involved in being a great farmer and the understanding of soil and plant and animal that it requires. I’m not expecting people to go out and become a farmer … but to appreciate the work, and to value it and to pay a fair price for it. If I can help these craftspeople to win that sort of respect, that is very gratifying.”
On culture and nature:
“I’ve always been very interested in teasing out this American sense that culture and nature are opposed terms, I’m uncomfortable with that opposition,” he said. “My whole career has been about finding other places to explore our relationship with nature other than where Americans typically go, which is the woods. Nature is on our plates, it’s in our clothes.”
On the cost of food:
“We’ve driven down food prices to an extent that Americans spent less on food than anyone else on the planet — anyone else in the history of the planet,” Pollan said. “This great achievement, which we know comes at quite a cost, nevertheless coincided with the collapse of wages in this society, and it probably cushioned the decline in wages we’ve seen since the 70s. That’s why people could put up with the decline in wages — as they were going down, food was getting cheaper.
“To do what we need to do to make agriculture sustainable, we have to remove some of the externalities, like antibiotics in livestock and hormones, certain chemicals. All of these things will make food more expensive, so no politician’s going to support that. All of which is to say, you can’t fix the food system merely by attending to the food system. It’s all connected, and that’s the key lesson with food: it’s not a discrete subject. So as we make these changes, we’re going to have to increase the minimum wage; we’re going to have to give people enough money to afford to pay the real cost of food.”
On how he approaches the subjects of his books:
“All my work, I think, is really about multiplying perspectives. I mean, I really like to take the first person perspective, then add to it the historical perspective, and then the scientific perspective. They’re all different vocabularies that get at the truth. I don’t privilege any one of them. I don’t think science has the last word. There are many subjects where the poets got there first,” Pollan said. “I really like bringing as many lenses as possible to a subject, and that’s when they become alive to me.”
On UVM:
“You’re so lucky to have a minor in food systems and a graduate program in food systems here,” Pollan said. “This school is pioneering some really important work in this area, and I think some of the leaders of this movement will emerge from this place. It’s one of the reasons it’s a real privilege to speak here.”