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119 comments on Grist Interview with Michael Pollan

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Yankee on June 1, 2006 - 11:38am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You make an important point about eating lower on the food chain, but I don't think Pollan is wrong when he writes about the subsidization of high calorie, highly processed foods. He's not really blaming the obesity problem on the subsidization of corn, he's just using it as an example of our out-of-whack priorities. In the column called Why Eating Well Is 'Elitist', Pollan discusses a trend that has been documented in many places: the food that is inexpensive in this country is garbage like Cheetos and Coke with 120 calories per serving. If you can get your family a meal at McDonalds for $10 for 4 people (and that's what you can afford), why would you buy $30 worth of organic foods at Whole Foods for a dinner for 4 people (numbers very approximate)? I can buy a cheap (store-brand) 10oz bag of potato chips for $1.50, but the 8oz. bag of baby carrots (pre-processed, but at least healthy) is $1.99. (These numbers are true for my corner grocery store.)

This column does raise a touchy issue, and one that ultimately must be addressed if we want the US population to be eating better. It's like Pollan says: "We're not subsidizing the growing of carrots and broccoli." This point has merit, and I don't think we should dismiss it in favor of simply calling Americans fat and lazy.

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Berkeley on June 1, 2006 - 2:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I've eaten a vegan diet right out of the chain grocery store for years.  It's as cheap as McDonald's, but it's not very interesting.  Lots and lots of corn and beans.  You just have to read labels and exercise discipline.  I can't afford the natural food market, it's true.  It seems like there's a elitist markup for just going into those places.  Actually, in terms of work, I can feed myself on about one wage-hour a day (and these are crappy wages, too) which makes modern America far and away the most affluent civilization that has ever existed.  It feels like cheating to be poor here.  People aren't fat because there's a conspiracy.  They're fat because it's adaptive in hunter-gatherers to level out good times with bad times, and we've just missed the bad times lately.
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goritsas on June 1, 2006 - 3:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
This was a most wonderful post. I think you've said all that needs to, and could, be said.

I thank you. :)

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JimK on June 1, 2006 - 5:52pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I generally eat vegan, except for the occasional meal out with colleagues, at conferences, etc. For me it is more like beans and wheat - and peanut butter. But hardly any corn.

How do you eat corn? I can hardly imagine living on sweet corn from the cob. Cornbread is great, but too much work for lazy me. Do you make a gruel-like bowl, like grits or something?

I've heard that corn needs to be treated with lye or some such to make the protein available. Isn't that what grits are about?

Anyway, I always like to extend my diet, so I would love to hear how you buy & prepare corn to make a part of your staple diet.

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jim burke on June 1, 2006 - 11:27pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Try corn tortillas. Better yet, make them yourself. Get the corn masa (quaker oats makes great masa, really cheap), pat it flat, put it on the skillet for a couple minutes, smear whateve you want on it. It's delicious! And hardly costs anything. Freshness is everything.
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odograph on June 2, 2006 - 9:46am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I grabbed an aluminum tortilla press a few years ago, one of those things I should have done so years earlier.  Tacos in fresh tortillas are oh, so, good.  (Store dry masa in the freezer if you don't use it fast.)
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SocraticGadfly on June 3, 2006 - 2:39am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Here's my approximate recipe for corn bread, and lye is not the only alkali you can use to treat corn.

Approximately 35 percent corn meal, 25 percent masa harina (lime-treated corn used in tortillas) and 40 percent whole wheat flour. Add about 3-5 percent soy flour for additional protein, more complete balanced mix of amino acids in the total protein content, and additional fiber; add a little wheat bran and oat bran for their obvious properties.

No white sugar. Use a mix of honey and molasses to sweeten. Baking power, egg, and bake.

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SocraticGadfly on June 3, 2006 - 2:43am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I eat semi-vegetarian. I eat about 1 serving (the official 3 oz serving) of meat a day, of various types. I eat a lot of casserole-type stuff, with a mix of brown rice and boiled whole wheat berries, sometimes with whole oat or rye groats as well, as the base. Whole Foods has those all in bulk, and often for less than a regular grocery, if they're available. Some items are cheaper here in Dallas at Central Market.

I throw in frozen veggies from the traditional grocery store. I usually use an equal mix of frozen corn, frozen green beans and frozen mixed veggies. Sometimes I use other, specialty mixes.

I then fry diced chicken breast, or the 98 percent lean grass-fed hamburger beef I find on sale, along with any garlic, onions, etc. I'm using. Then comes additional oil, water, teriyaki, tomato sauce, whatever, is going to be the basis of a broth/stock/sauce.

Then comes the HERBS/SPICES. This is how you eat vegan/vegetarian/quasi-vegetarian without getting bored.

I make Indian and Pakistani curries, starting with Central Market, which carries three or four different types. Or I'll make garam masala. Or something Thai with peanut sauce. Or pesto. Or alfredo. Etc., etc.

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Vintermann on June 2, 2006 - 3:36am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Read labels and excercise discipline... I wonder about that. To be a responsible vegan, you have to be conscious about things like soy protein, B vitamins. And my impression is that to make tasty food with vegan ingredients takes more skill. It's not that it's impossible, on the contrary, I think fancy vegetarian food is generally much better than fancy non-vegetarian food.

So I wonder about vegan food being inexpensive. How do you manage that?

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Rajiv on June 1, 2006 - 2:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yankee,

The post you replied to is not correct. The fats you put on come from carbohydrates, and not necessarily from the fats you eat. If your blood sugar stays above a certain level, the body converts it to fat, and stores it as visceral fat -- hence the pot bellies seen in different kinds of pathological obesities.

Normally, complex carbohydrates are better than sugar, which is better than corn syrup. The reason is the time span over which the conversion to glucose and fructose occurs. Glucose and fructose is the form in which the body absorbs calories. Sucrose and complex carbohydrates cannot be absorbed by the body without being broken down into glucose and fructose.

The problem with corn syrup is that it is a glucose/fructose syrup, and has a very rapid absorption profile, and leads to very high peak blood sugar levels. High peak blood sugar levels lead to insulin resistence, and a poor metabolism of sugar. This leads to the excess sugar being converted by the body to stored fat.

So Pollan is right in saying that corn syrup is a major factor in early obesity, and in the currently occurring diabetes epidemic.

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LJR on June 1, 2006 - 3:55pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Thanks for bringing this to light.  Apparently veganmaster isn't very well grounded in the biochemistry of digestion.  He seems to think big old greasy fat molecules just ram their way through the intestinal walls and seek out a hospitable skinny cell where they can take up residence.
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veganmaster on June 1, 2006 - 5:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I understand what you are saying, and I agree: excess sugars increase the chance that a fatty diet is deposited on your ass and elsewhere :) But the fat that is deposited is the FAT YOU ATE.  Scientists can and have taken fat samples from people, and just from that they know what foods they have been eating.  This is because fat goes right into storage, and is not chemically changed by the body.  You failed to respond to the China Study: sedentary Chinese workers eat hundreds of more calories a day, yet stay thin because they eat a low-fat, high-complex carb diet.  I suppose we aren't even disagreeing, assuming you admit the obvious, that fatty diets are the true culprit in weight gain. If you disagree with this, you are on the opposite side of the scientific studies, IMO!
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Rajiv on June 1, 2006 - 6:09pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The biochemistry of carbohydrate to fat conversion is well known and is well documented to occur in the human body.

Yes traditional diets in "poor" rural China are extremely high in carbohydrate, AND these Chinese are thin, with little abdominal obesity. The same has been shown to be true in rural India. The same is not true of either urban India, or urban China. The diets are still almost the same, still carbohydrate rich. But the rate of diabetes is tripled, and it is six times in the Chinese and Indian population in UK and US.

So what is the difference. The answer lies in the antinutritional factors that are there in the diet. Rural diets have many more "antinutritional" factors than occur in urban diets. In particular, amylase inhibitors and sucrase inhibitors are a part of the diet. These "antinutritional" factors have been greatly reduced in the urban diet through "food processing"

Thus vegan diets that are uncooked or poorly cooked, and rich in WHOLE grains and WHOLE legumes, have amylase and sucrase inhibitors, that greatly reduce the conversion of these carbohydrates to glucose and fructose. These carbohydrates mostly pass through the intestinal tract unabsorbed after being only partially broken down.

The term "antinutritional," should be considered a misnomer, as the human body has evolved to live on these traditional diets, and is probably most happy when these factors are present.

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JMG on June 1, 2006 - 6:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The other component of this is the metabolic energy being expended in hard physical work. When I grew up in a rural community about all tractors provided was traction power so much of the farm work involved a lot of manual pitching, chopping, shoveling and lifting all day long. The men ate huge meals of fairly basic foods three times a day. During the winter they often poured bacon grease on foods to increase their caloric intakes. Most of the time they were outside on foot, on horseback or on open tractors and the work clothes, particularly for winter, weren't nearly as good as now. Most of those men were not carrying any extra weight, most looked 10 years younger than their town cohort and most lived well into their 80's.
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alistairC on June 2, 2006 - 4:09am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Fascinating stuff Rajiv -- can I re-phrase it thusly :

* A diet based on refined foods (white flour etc) is more efficient in terms of calories absorbed. (but is likely to be lacking in all sorts of vital trace stuff)

This casts an interesting light on the sociology of whole vs refined grains. In Europe, and presumably in other bread-based cultures, and until recent decades, white bread was a status symbol, and ordinary folk ate mostly whole-grain bread (often rye or barley, where they were cheaper than wheat). In modern times, everyone migrated to white, wheat bread, because they COULD (this coincided with overconsumption of meat, for the same reason).

Now, the status has inverted somewhat, and eating whole-grain breads is pretty much confined to the "elite".

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Jack on June 2, 2006 - 6:00am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Now, the status has inverted somewhat, and eating whole-grain breads is pretty much confined to the "elite". "

We are finally starting to correct a centuries old mistake - removing the most nutritious part the grain.

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Jussi on June 2, 2006 - 8:31am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
In northern Europe stuff like rye bread have remained the basic food, and here in Finland lots of people don´t really consider white bread proper food at all. Similarly, when Finns go abroad (meaning further afield than just Sweden or Russia), the thing many miss most about Finland is decent bread (and, naturally, the sauna...)

It is strange how people in most places have bought into this "white bread as a status symbol" thing, not only is it not nutritious, it´s pretty tasteless as well. Fortunately it seems wholemeal is making a comeback, although, as you point out, it appears to be a kind of elite choice now.

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SocraticGadfly on June 3, 2006 - 2:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
NO, NO, NO.

Either you're reading pseudoscience or not understanding actual science that you read. That's the only way I can understand your non-unerstanding, veganmaster.

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porsena on June 1, 2006 - 6:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
From my perspective, and I'm city folk, the biggest problem with the food system is that food doesn't cost enough. Too many farmers have a hard time just surviving. From the USDA:
Small family farms account for most of the farms in the U.S. but produce a modest share of farm output. Average farm household income has been at or above the average for all U.S. households in recent years, with farm households receiving most of their income from off-farm sources (my emphasis).

If the family farms go under, what will the price of food be then?
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tate423 on June 2, 2006 - 9:10am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
From a pure economic standpoint...this would imply that there is simply too much food (which is true of at least corn) and not enough demand.  Now reading through the various posts it's pretty clear that many people, the majority?, believe that we are over capacity as a people on this planet (6.5 Billion right?).

So how can this happen then?  We have too many people, yet we have all this food over here that farmers can't seem to sell to maintain a decent standard of living.  I suppose you could argue that the geographic dispersion of people with higher concentrations of people in smaller countries that are farther away has something to do with it.

But how in this globalized world can people go starving, while we have an over abundance of food?  Is the free market failing these people who need the food and the farmer who is willing to sell it?  We do export a lot of food, but not enough to feed everyone?  

This is a curious economic condition that shouldn't exist with the basic problem that people are starving and plenty of farmers want to sell their crops, but for what reason keeps the prices very low?  Is there anyone with real operational knowledge of how a family farm works at the micro level?  I wonder how all the micro decisions influence the macro environment that appears to be in a kind of paradox.

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Oilrig medic on June 2, 2006 - 9:17am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Tate,
  People starve in todays world because of politics. See Somalia Ethiopia etc....It is the lack of a free market.  Warlords prevent trade and seize foreign food shipments.
Matt
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tate423 on June 2, 2006 - 2:38pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hmmm...so again you are saying that's its not that we don't have the food, it's more that people choose to starve others.  So how is it that we are over populated when we have more food than we know what to do with and those who sell it can't seem to get enough money for the basic needs of life?
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Oilrig medic on June 2, 2006 - 8:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Tate,
  I am saying that we have too much land in the US suitable for growing food easily for an open market to allow stable prices.  A good year for corn means too much corn for market and its price goes so low that the farmers sell for less than it cost to produce.  Enter Gov paying farmers not to grow corn or setting a minimum price.  If I opened a factory for sparkplugs and churned out 1 billion a year would the government bail me out?  So the subsidies provide promised profit and big business starts making lots of corn.  R&D and PR people start coming up with real or contrived uses etc etc......

I never said we are overpoulated.  I do believe we will be someday soon and when PO hits the downslope it is possible we are already.  I think the 6+ Billin people will not be city dwellers in the future though.

matt

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