The Morality of Food

Ken Taylor
Hello, and welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW in San Francisco.

John Perry
Continuing conversations that began at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus.

Ken Taylor
Today: The Morality of Food.

John Perry
The morality of food? Come on, Ken—food? I mean, we’re the program that questions everything, but do we have to question food? I mean, people are gonna think: the philosophy of food? Food is food. We eat it. We need it. End of story.

Ken Taylor
Oh, contraire, John, the topic of food is fraught with philosophical implications. What people eat says a lot about their approach to life, their conception of the place of humans and the cosmos and their basic values.

John Perry
Well, tell me more.

Ken Taylor
Well, I mean, think about this simple question of let’s start with where you get your food. Most people don’t grow. They’re very much of their own food. So you go to the supermarket, but which supermarket market you can go to a market like Whole Foods or some other such store where you can get organic, chemical free food and eggs from supposedly free range chickens. Or you can go to Safeway with lower prices to be sure but more chemicals and eggs from chicken raised in small cages. Your choice of supermarkets says a lot about you.

John Perry
Well, I can get into this I guess I mean, you go to a restaurant you order beef, which tastes good but implicates you in the effects of steer flatulence on global warming, wanton use of hormones, stinky feedlots, and other inhumane practices? Do you order veal which which implicates you in animal torture? Do you order beef? Or do you avoid beef in order fish but which fish salmon from the sea which is overfished salmon from farms which pollute cat fish from sustainable farms where the catfish are typically harvested by electrifying a whole pond and gathering the electrocuted carcasses with a rake?

Ken Taylor
And there’s more John, there’s even more. I mean, do you eat food to enjoy it? Or is food for you just a bundle of nutrients is eating good food and intrinsic value, an end in itself are just a means to an end, you know, staying alive.

John Perry
You know, Ken, it sounds like by the end of this program, I’m gonna be a vegetarian or god forbid a vegan.

Ken Taylor
Well, even even that’s not so simple, John. I mean, most of the species we eat have co evolved with us and are dependent on us. Is it better for chickens to raise them humanely? Kill them painlessly and eat them? Or release them to the mercy of coyotes and watch the species die out? And do you consider just the lives of currently existing chickens? Or do you care about all the potential chickens that will have no life at all? If you if you go vegan?

John Perry
Ken, I’m getting depressed. We’re supposed to question everything, but I kind of wish we’d taken a pass on food.

Ken Taylor
Well, John, luckily, we won’t have that we won’t be left to our own devices on this one. Our guest is Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.” He’s an expert on this stuff. He’s thought about the topic of food inside and out and seems to have come up with a philosophy that allows him both to enjoy foo, and at the same time to feel good about himself.

John Perry
Can you guarantee me he’s not going to tell me I need to subsist on carrots and lettuce for the rest of my life?

Ken Taylor
Well, let’s wait and see what he says. I’m not gonna anticipate that. But here’s the structure of our show. We’ll start by getting a sense of how food habits have changed over the years, especially recent years.

John Perry
Then we’re gonna move on to see how the way we eat reflects our obligations to animals, the environment, and other people.

Ken Taylor
And finally, we’ll press Michael Pollan for his suggestions about how we can eat healthfully, ethically, and also enjoyably.

John Perry
First, our Roving Philosophical Reporter Julie Napolin, follows the latest food fad. She files this report.

Julie Napolin
In 2007, the New Oxford American Dictionary announced their word of the year: locavore, someone who only eats food grown within a 100-mile radius.

Margo True
here we have our tomato plants are growing five different kinds of tomatoes.

Julie Napolin
Margo True walks through the urban garden behind her office at Sunset Magazine.

Margo True
And here are what I think is the best cherry tomato on the planet, Sungold. Here taste one—oh, actually fell off, it’s so ripe.

Julie Napolin
This editor believes fresh local products are more nutritious and socially responsible way to eat. So she decided to take the locavore movement to the next level.

Margo True
Some of us were wandering around the campus one day and I noticed that we had figs growing and we had a kumquat tree a great fruit tree. We had all this food already here, just various and sundry and I thought, why don’t we just cut to the chase and do a one block diet.

Julie Napolin
Instead of eating food grown within 100 mile radius to design a one block feast where all the food comes from an area the size of a small backyard. Though they raise their own honeybees and egg laying chickens, the staff had certain limits—especially when it came to the wine.

Margo True
We didn’t realize that we would have to get 600 pounds of grapes. So that was another one of our imports. We went to a local vineyard, a winery,syrah and we picked 600 pounds of straw, and we brought it back to sunset and we stopped it with our feet in the parking lot.

Julie Napolin
Editors became beekeepers, fact-checkers became chicken farmers. Everyone had a job making the feast happen.

Margo True
We’ve really started to feel a little bit like an old fashioned village, all sort of coming together to produce something. And it’s been just humbling to realize that none of this is new.

Molly Watson
To me, there’s no doubt that the whole connection to your food the more that you’re involved with the food earlier on, the more sad is like deeply satisfying it is to eat it.

Julie Napolin
Molly Watson writes on local food and design many of the recipes for the one block feast. Watson says local food grown by yourself or from a farmer’s market encourages people to cook for themselves. Food

Molly Watson
tastes better when it’s made with a lot of good intention. And when you cook, you do put something of yourself into the food. There’s something I think that people crave in homemade food. And I do think it is that there’s a level of intentionality and its preparation that comes across.

Margo True
When we were eating it, we just felt the pleasure of it. We literally felt virtuous, you know, it wasn’t an abstract. It was palpable, actually.

Julie Napolin
Sunset Magazine’s Margo True says the feeling of eating food you’ve made from scratch can change your sense of self,

Margo True
The kinds of work that we’ve been doing associated with this one block feast project. All of it is real gardening is real. sitting down to eat with other people is real, and especially when it’s food that you’ve grown. It’s just quiet and slow. And so much of it is unspoken, to in this super verbal culture that we have. It’s so lovely to feel something larger that you might not even want to articulate.

Julie Napolin
For Molly Watson, the main motivation for eating local food, whether from the grocery store or from your backyard, is that the food tastes better. Social responsibility is just icing on the cake.

Molly Watson
If you get people acting that way, and they’re eating really what the best tasting stuff is. So often that ends up being the more socially responsible, the more environmentally responsible, the more politically responsible, and that’s what’s gonna get people’s attention and keep them motivated, keep them eating that way is that the food in the first place is really delicious.

Julie Napolin
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Julie Napolin.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor.

John Perry
I’m John Perry. Today we’re joined by Michael Pollan, Professor of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.” Michael, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Michael Pollan
Thank you, John, glad to be here.

Ken Taylor
So Michael, how did you become so interested in what might be called the ethical and intellectual side of food? I mean, most of us like to eat it, but most of us don’t think that hard about it.

Michael Pollan
Yeah, well, I’ve been reading about nature and the human relationship to nature for a long time. And along the way, I had occasion to visit both a feedlot and a potato farm in Idaho. And what I saw there in both cases, and it was in the span of a few months, kind of shocked me, and made me realize I had no idea how our food was grown, and that it raised all sorts of really troubling issues. The feedlot was the one on i Five right here in California, I was driving to a driving south on I thought, to an interview and suddenly this this incredible stench assailed me on the highway, but I couldn’t see everything looked fine as he walked around. It was the as you as you looked around, it was your golden California hills. And then after a couple miles of the stench, I hit the feedlot and I saw this stunning black landscape black soil, which actually was manure, black cows, and a mountain, two mountains, one of corn and one of manure. And I had no idea this is how we were growing beef in this country. And then the other example was being on a very automated, huge potato farm in Idaho, where one farmer was was farming 10 or 15,000 acres fall automatic shooting fertilizer and poisons out of an irrigation pivot.

John Perry
The fact that that we get our food today from a big sprawling, global, automated food industry that that shocked you. And I guess that’s just something new. That’s not the way it was done for 1000s of years before. Can you give us a quick overview of how things are different with respect to food and, and why this may not be a good thing?

Michael Pollan
Well, yeah, I mean, the you know, the big change happens after World War Two. And that’s how we learned how to grow huge amounts of food with very, very few people. Now one American can feed 136 of us. What that means in practice is that none of us had been on a farm, and we don’t know farmers. So the reason I could be shocked by what I saw on the industrial food system is that the food chain has gotten very long. I’m very opaque. And we are all you know, at the far end of a system that that has very murky beginning.

Ken Taylor
Michael, let me ask you about this, though you say that it sounds like this is driven by the economies of scale. You said one farmer can feed I thought it was 139 around and 29 Americans, 36 people, that’s a lot. That’s the vast economy’s economy of scale. But it sounds like it’s a partly a good thing economically and partly a bad thing. I mean, how is that how you think about it? Is there a good thing about this at all?

Michael Pollan
Yeah, there, there are some good things about it. But I would say the the bad outweigh the good. The only way you can do this and achieve these economies of scale, is by using lots of fossil fuel in place of sunlight in growing your food. It’s chemicals that allow you to save all that labor, chemical pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and machinery. You know, the net the good thing is, and it is arguably a good thing is that in America today, a person can go into a fast food outlet and have a bacon double cheeseburger, that’s a good thing. And french fries and, and a large coke for less than what he would earn at minimum wage and an hour. Now in the long sweep of history, that’s an astoundingly good thing, right? That so many people could have so much food by working, you know, mere minutes. So food is a very small part of our expenditures. And from certain perspectives, it is a good thing. And certainly from a political perspective, governments love cheap food, they sleep better.

Ken Taylor
Well, if you’re a poor person, Michael, it’s not just the government’s that love cheap food. If you’re if you have a subsistence wage anywhere in the world, is it cheap food, like a great boon to you?

Michael Pollan
The problem is that cheap food is not as cheap as it appears and or is not as cheap. You know, at the register, it’s very cheap. But it also takes a great deal of fossil fuel to produce a great deal of subsidies to produce and has an enormous cost to the environment. Not to mention the other species involved in the food system, not to mention the workers in the food system. So yeah, we’ve what we’ve succeeded in doing is making it very cheap at the register by externalizing. The real costs of producing this food this way.

Ken Taylor
Right, I was gonna use that word, the you there are in our food consumption and production, a great deal of what economists call externalities, right? Costs not paid by the by the parties to the transaction, they’re put on the rest of us. So they put on the environment and some and all that right, yeah.

Michael Pollan
And the great example, of course, is feedlot animal protein, milk and meat produced on feedlots. The only reason that it is economical to crowd animals into these vast animal cities. I mean, just put aside their their misery is the fact that one, the government underwrites this by not regulating these places the way they would regulate a real city that produced a comparable amount of waste, or real factory that produced a comparable amount of pollution. So they get a kind of free pass from a regulatory point of view, plus, the government allows them to use antibiotics in the feed, which has an enormous cost, which is to say, the rise of antibiotic resistant microbes. So that’s, that’s two factors that support that system, and that are not counted in the price. And the third, of course, is is subsidized grain. The fact that feedlots can buy grain cheaper than it costs farmers to grow it. And the only reason they can do that is the government is writing a check to the farmers for every bushel of corn or soy that they grow. So that’s another cost that we’re all paying as taxpayers to the tune of, you know, corn subsidies alone, or four or $5 billion a year.

John Perry
How about in California? Aren’t water subsidies and other—

Michael Pollan
Exactly. California farmers pride themselves on not receiving government subsidies. But in fact, they overlook, like most Westerners always have the benefit of federal federal water programs.

John Perry
So is there any hope of of, of making the system so that we still have inexpensive food, but that it’s truly inexpensive and doesn’t depend so much on on chemical fuels? Or if we give up if we give up the petro petroleum based and subsidy based nature of agriculture? Do we have to go to back back to backyard farming and never having out of season fruits and things like that?

Michael Pollan
Well, I don’t think we’re going, no one’s talking about going back. And I think it’s a myth about sustainable agriculture that it’s turning back the scales. I see it as really a post industrial agriculture. It uses some of the wisdom of traditional agriculture, which we’re learning had a lot more to teach us than we recognize during the 20th century. Will food be this cheap again? I mean, no, I think the era of cheap food just like the era of cheap oil is over. I think we will have to get used to the idea that spending 9% of your income on food, which we’ve been doing in America was an anomaly and historical anomaly underwritten by cheap fossil fuel. And we will all be spending more for food. This is going to be an enormous problem for people who don’t have more disposable income, but I think it will involve really a shift in our priorities.

Ken Taylor
Michael, just speaking of the big, organic food and all that I in your book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you say, you know, we think we’re going back to nature and all that, and there’s some truth to that. But the cost of producing this stuff, especially transporting it, once it’s produced, is still very, very high. Right?

Michael Pollan
Yeah, I mean, the the amount of oil we use to move food around is just absurd. I mean, we’re catching salmon sustainably in Alaska, shipping it to China to be filleted and then bringing it back to the west coast to beat.

Margo True
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Our subject today is the morality of food. Our guest is Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”

Weird Al
It doesn’t matter if it’s boiled or fried, just eat it.

Ken Taylor
Is food merely a matter of eating? This is Philosophy Talk, and we’re discussing the morality of food. Our guest is Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and also most recently “In Defense of Food.” I’m Ken Taylor.

John Perry
And I’m John Perry. Michael, I want your help in forming a personal food philosophy. Now, my vegan friends typically are very concerned about the ethics of eating, which is fine, but I’m not sure they really enjoy food. My gourmet friends love their food and wine, but they really don’t want to get involved in thinking about factory farms and goose torture involved in tasty potties. Now, you seem just judging from your books to enjoy eating, and yet be very alive for the ethical issues. What are the guidelines? What’s your point of view? How can you help us help us achieve this this kind of resolution of issues that you seem to have done?

Michael Pollan
Well, yeah, I don’t think that that conflict is, is quite the way you frame it. I mean, I know lots of gourmet, who actually do think a lot about where their food comes from, and that their pleasure in eating is is inflected by the knowledge of where their food comes from, for better or worse, and that you know, food is not just chemicals on our tongue, it really is the story and and when you learn that this was a you know, a wild caught salmon from Alaska, and not a farm salmon from from Chile, it really does taste better. So I think that the that there is not a contradiction between pleasure and responsibility in eating today. Just because we have these options. The contradiction is between pleasurable responsible eating and money. The fact that it costs more to eat this way.

Ken Taylor
Do you eat ethically? Do you enjoy your food? Are you a nutrition nuts? Share your perspective on food and its philosophical implications?

John Perry
The number is 415-841-4134. 415-841-4134. And you can email us at comments@philosophytalk.org.

Ken Taylor
Michael, I want to ask you about about a definitional question. You say in defense of food, and that’s an odd thing for a book to be about in defense of food, how could you have to defend? How could you have to defend food but I take it you have a certain understanding of food, the concept food, what is food, in your view?

Michael Pollan
Well, you know, food needs to be defended, because it’s under attack from two quarters. I mean, one is from the industry, which is bent on taking perfectly good foods and complicating them beyond recognition, to make more money from them. I mean, the stores now are full of things that I don’t think we should call foods that are edible food, like products that evoke food like but that sounds ugly, when you see something like you know, no fat sour cream or something like that, look at the ingredients, and you will find that there is no cream in it. So that there is a whole lot of stimulation going on in food that I think is not very helpful in terms of our health. And so what I’m suggesting is getting back to a more traditional definition of food where you’re not allowed to use words like sour cream, if you don’t actually have sour cream in your product is a good thing. So you’re talking about need to attach words to things.

Ken Taylor
Are you talking about truth in advertising? I mean, it’s food something that comes from nature only. It’s any synthetic thing—is any synthetic thing food?

Michael Pollan
Well, I don’t know. That’s a good question. In general food is the collection of of plants, animals and fungi that we’ve been eating for a long time. There are some new things that we have invented and and there are novelties that are, you know, I suppose are okay. But in general, I think we’re better off with foods that have been around for a while, that I really do believe that that you know, culture has a certain Darwinian process of sorting out the good from the bad At the things that are healthy from the things that turn out not to be healthy, and a lot of the innovations we’ve come up with have turned out not to be so healthy margarine being a great example. Right?

Ken Taylor
Right, It was asked to be the guide Hunter, right. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about the morality of food, you can join our conversation. 415-841-4134. That’s 415-841-4134. And we have a caller on the line now, Dave in San Francisco.

Dave
Good morning, gentlemen.

Ken Taylor
Welcome, Dave.

Dave
I have a question about trying to total total, in agreement with Mr. Pollan about his conclusions about food production and consumption. But I have a concern, that if we tried to be cleaner and greener and, and use less petroleum, that we’re likely to end up with less food, and less food is going to be very hard on people who barely can afford it now. And I don’t mean mostly Americans, I mean, worldwide. And if we have to cut regulation by 25%, to get by on the amount of food we can effectively raise, who’s going to deal with the politics of that?

Ken Taylor
That’s a very good question, David. Michael, what do you think?

Michael Pollan
Well, it is the big question, can we feed the world sustainably? Or can the world feed itself sustainably? And I? The honest answer is I don’t know for sure. But I can tell you, we’re not feeding the world the way we’re doing it today. With lots of fossil fuel and oil, we still have over a billion hungry people on this planet. Even though there is plenty of food, there’s three or 3000 calories for every human being. Why is that? Well, access to food is as important as yield. The other thing to consider is that when we talk about agricultural yields, we’re really talking about commodities, not food, we’re talking about corn and soy, which are really industrial raw materials that people don’t eat as food, half of the food we’re growing. We’re feeding to animals,

Ken Taylor
Right we’re feeding to animals. That’s your book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” is an eye opener, we’re feeding this corn to animals that aren’t evolved to eat it, and it makes them sick. And then we have to feed chemicals to keep them healthy.

Michael Pollan
So, you know, simply by ration. And then the other thing is we’re feeding. I don’t know exactly what the figures but we’re feeding another five or 10% of this so called food to our cars in the form of biofuels, ethanol. So there’s a lot of slack in the system, and we shouldn’t overlook that and we shouldn’t be stampeded by companies like Monsanto telling us we have to double agricultural yield over the next 30 years to feed a hungry population. This may not be true.

Ken Taylor
But Michael, but I do think there’s a part of Dave’s question you haven’t addressed. You’ve sort of tiptoed up to it. You said there’s lots of food and some of it isn’t really food, but there’s lots of food, there’s enough food to go around. So there’s a bad distribution system.

Michael Pollan
That’s right. That’s right.

Ken Taylor
So that’s one thing to attack the distribution system. It’s another thing to attack food itself. I mean, you really want to reform our attitudes toward food itself, as well as this distribution thing. Am I right about that?

Michael Pollan
Yeah. Well, you know, I think we have to look at issues like land reform and, you know, interesting rotations as as important technological breakthroughs potentially as genetically modified seeds or other tricks to to boost production. But yeah, I mean, I’m what I’m arguing for is not one particular way to eat. I think people need to resolve that for themselves. What I’m arguing for is being more conscious about our eating. I think when people simply perform the mental exercise of thinking about where their food comes from, how do they feel about eating from such a food chain, they will make better decisions without being told by me what what decisions to make, I think the biggest problem in our food system is that we are ignorant of where our food comes from, and therefore oblivious to the to the ethical, moral, environmental implications of our food choices. So you know, it’s probably a point in Oh, journalists faith, that knowledge will produce better behavior, but my sense is, and what I’ve observed is that that is true.

John Perry
One thing about being ignorant about how where food comes from is a lot of people don’t realize how simple it is to have food. I mean, it’s not that hard to raise chickens. The only problem with raising chickens is it’s usually illegal within any kind of city. And they you know, and they eat bugs for the most part you don’t need to give them that much food and it’s not hard to grow vegetables so wouldn’t a lot of the distribution problem be solved if we just encourage people to go back to doing the simple things that they described in the robbing philosophical reporter and get get as much of their food they can from from from chickens and vegetables they can raise in their own backyard?

Michael Pollan
Well, look, I think in this country, we have this tremendous resource which is called the front lawn and the back lawns of America 25,000 square miles I think some some figures ridiculous figure That is all, you know, collecting solar energy and wasting it. And if we could harness this if we could rip out these lawns, and start growing some food in our cities and our suburbs. Yeah, that would make a tremendous contribution during the victory garden movement. And during World War Two 40% of America’s produce was grown in victory gardens. And so I think, you know, I don’t think that that’s a trivial solution. I think there’s a lot of food we could all be growing, it would be the cheapest, most local, most fresh and nutritious food you could possibly have.

Ken Taylor
We’d love to know what you think we’re talking about the morality of food 40158414134, that’s 415-841-4134 or email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. Janet in Berkeley is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Janet.

Janet
Good morning. I’m calling to address the conundrum of eating to live or living to eat. And one resolution of seeming opposition is the Chinese approach to food, which states that if you don’t enjoy what you’re eating, you won’t get all the benefit from it that you might.

Ken Taylor
Okay, Janet,

Michael Pollan
I think that that’s true. I mean, I think that pleasure in eating, you know, we now we have science that suggests that your ability to extract nutrients from your food depends on your mindset when you sit down to eat. And if you’re happier, and looking forward to what you’re eating, you will produce more enzymes that will allow you to more efficiently digest it.

Ken Taylor
But Michael C, but human culture has played a trick on evolution. You know, we like the sweet stuff, because the sweet stuff in nature is bound up with these complex fibers and stuff that, you know, don’t taste all that great, but are good for our systems. But now we’ve learned how to separate the sweet stuff from the fight, but we enjoy the sweet stuff tremendously. Right? But the taking pleasure in the sweet stuff won’t do you any good if you extract it away from its natural setting?

Michael Pollan
Well, I think that there are different kinds of pleasures. I think there’s simple, the simple pleasures of fast food. I mean, look, there are pleasures to fast food, there are pleasures to those hits of sugar and salt and fat. But they are fleeting pleasures, and there are deeper pleasures that are founded on a fuller knowledge of what you’re eating and a greater complexity. So you know, there’s pleasure, and there’s pleasure.

Ken Taylor
So we got another caller on the line. That’s Philip in San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Phil. Hi.

Philip
Thank you. Two questions. One was, do you guys think that we as a culture at an Indian states are really so like, distanced from our food that in the sense that I mean, if we had to, I think people should mandatorily basically have to, you know, to eat cow, you should have to slaughter a cow, you have to spend time on a farm or wherever, and slaughter a cow or slaughter pigs? Like would that bring us closer to our food? mandatorily if people have to do that. And the second thing is, have you guys all seen Soylent Green? And do you think of it as prophecy in some sense, like, prophetic or just 70s? Kicks science fiction? That’s it.

Ken Taylor
Michael, take those questions in whatever order you want.

Michael Pollan
Let me combine them. I think everyone should have to slaughter some tofu before they eat it. No, I think, you know, I did go through this process of of slaughtering some chickens and hunting a boar. And when I was writing Omnivore’s Dilemma, because I did feel it was important to reconnect with what was at stake.

Ken Taylor
So to speak—steak.

Michael Pollan
whether I’m prepared to ask this if everybody else or not, I don’t know. But I think I think I recommend it. And I think if you if you can’t get your head around doing that, you should rethink your, your, your freedom, eating meat. In terms of Soylent Green, you know, there is a I haven’t seen the movie, but I kind of know the premise, there is a move in the industry to essentially replace food with edible food like substances and the and now you’re hearing a lot about in vitro meat. You know, the idea that and many animal writers are very comfortable with this notion that you would simply clone muscle cells of chicken or beef or whatever, and grow it in a petri dish or on some kind of substrate in the laboratory. And that that would relieve you of having to kill animals. You know, it makes a certain kind of logic. I’m not that interested in eating that stuff, however, but some people are. So I think that’s an interesting moral question. I mean, if you are a vegan or vegetarian and you are offered this cloned meat like substance, does that solve your problem with eating.

Ken Taylor
John, you got a comment over there?

John Perry
Yeah, I mean, just you could, you could you could imagine someday we’ll just have this this this big, you know, half mile long chicken breast in Kansas that gets harvested with not attached to any brain so they just take it off, package it and let it grow back with out hurting anything? I mean, in a way that does make sense. But but as from some point of view, I’m not convinced that that the old system where people raised chickens and they had a I mean for a chicken pretty decent life, you know, what do we now call free range chickens, and then butcher them in the way you do on a farm, which is, you know, pretty quick was such a bad system and I think I would prefer that than just having no chickens and, and a big chicken breasts in Kansas, I think it’d be better for chickens to. On the other hand, what I think people should be exposed to is is not field dressing a moose, we’ve got a president or we may soon have a president who can show them how to do that a vice president, but they ought to see what actually happens in the, in the stockyards in Omaha or wherever, where where cows are killed today. And they ought to say, Gee, that’s not the way to do it. You don’t need to raise meat and kill him. But we shouldn’t do it that way.

Michael Pollan
I think one of the I mean, one of the thought experiments that I suggest in Omnivore’s Dilemma is what if the walls of all the slaughterhouses What if we required them to be glass? You know, we don’t have to regulate this, let’s just, you know, shed a little light on it. I think that would very quickly change people’s meat eating habits and the way that corporations go about processing meat. So I think transparency could do a lot for making people sort of face up to the issues and also, you know, these abuses take place because they’re hidden from view. And they aren’t Make no mistake there. You know, there is horrible treatment of animals. But as you suggest, John, we have to understand if we started eating from that giant breast chicken breast in Kansas, there would be no chickens left.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re shining a light on the morality of food with the author of the best selling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and most recently, In Defense of Food—that’s Michael Pollan.

John Perry
We’re gonna delve into some of the practical implications we omnivores face. We’ll start with political questions. The yearly farm bill passed by Congress has a huge influence on how we eat not only in America, but around the world. What are the effects of the Farm Bill? And what should farmers and Congress be doing instead?

Ken Taylor
We’ll get to more calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

William Bolcom
Shrimp salad tossed with chocolate sauce and garnished with a leek.

Ken Taylor
Is the food we eat mostly a creation of the food industry, and assembly of chemicals and nutrients that defies description as actual food? I’m Ken Taylor, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry, and we’re discussing the morality of food with Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And in defense of food, we’ve got email here from Fred, Fred says, You say that we currently waste a lot of money transporting food using fossil fuels. If we could transport food using renewable forms of energy, what would that do to food prices?

Michael Pollan
Well, it’s only you know, the way that fossil fuel ends up in your food is there several ways, it’s not just moving it around? And I think, yeah, using renewable fuels to move food around to be a good idea. Unless those fuels of course, were ethanol, which doesn’t really solve the problem, because it basically takes as much fossil fuel to make ethanol as you replace with using it. But fossil fuel gets into your food through the fertilizer, which is made from natural gas through the pesticides, which are made from petroleum, through the the use of diesel equipment on the farm, and then the processing that adds about nine calories of fossil fuel energy to every calorie of food, when you take, say, a simple grain and turn it into breakfast cereal, very energy intensive process. So there’s a lot more involved than just, you know what we’re gonna what we’re going to put in the truck gas tanks.

Ken Taylor
So it’s a big complicated equation. I mean, and you really think so we’re stuck with fossil fuels, you really think with this problem, all the environmental degradation and the ethical implications really just go away if we grew our food locally and ate locally, like in our own philosophical report?

Michael Pollan
No. I mean, I think it would help. I mean, I think I think in a way the solution is big and very simple. And that is essentially to take this fossil fuel based system and put it back on a basis of contemporary sunlight. You know, the great thing about food and the reason it can be reached solarized more easily than other parts of the food economy is that every calorie you have ever eaten, is the result of photosynthesis. We have this free lunch and that is sunlight, hitting leaves and chloroplasts taking taking water and carbon dioxide and turning it into food and oxygen. It’s an amazing system and it still works. We we just for some reason decided that it wasn’t quite efficient enough for our purposes.

Ken Taylor
Well here’s here’s a question. The way we decided, we decided, was it free market capitalism that decided was it the government that decide, I mean, they’re the farm bill that I know, kind of warps the market. But what what made this happen, you know, Local Decisions happening locally or some top down bureaucrat or what?

Michael Pollan
There were policies for most of the 20th century that were designed around, increasing the output of certain commodity crops, using fossil fuels to do it. I mean, the government really pushed us in this direction, they, they encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry after World War Two to make fertilizers, it’s the same thing. Ammonium nitrate is in bombs, and it’s in fertilizers, they encourage the conversion of nerve gas research into pesticides. So they were definitely pushing this us in this direction. And they were doing it for a good reason, from their view, which was to essentially make farming more efficient, and allow us to drive people off the land and into the cities where of course, during industrialization, we had a great need for labor. So one of the things we wanted to do, and there’s a whole history of government efforts to essentially shrink the number of farmers in this country for political as well as economic reasons, has been to make each farmer more efficient. So you could take this whole pool of labor and you would always take the best students in rural areas and you send them off to college and then to the cities and leave people on the farms who you know, still love to farm maybe weren’t the brightest bulbs, and and then you would basically help them out by giving them these high tech solutions.

Ken Taylor
Right, we got a lot of callers on the line 415-841-4134. That’s 415-841-4134 and Charles in Richmond on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Charles.

Charles
Yes, I just wanted to say that I used to live in Los I’m an East Bay grown and raised boy, whenever but I used to live in Los Angeles, I went up and down Highway five, quite a bit. And there is some transparency, which I guess is absolutely correct. If you saw a sausage being made, would you eat it sort of thing. But you go down by Harris ranch. And there’s a big feedlot there right off to the left atrium going south. And when I would go south, a very nice restaurant just past that. I had no appetite after smelling coming north, I would stop and have a nice steak or whatever, then, you know. But transparency is absolutely what’s needed in sausage and in financial systems.

Ken Taylor
Thank you, Michael, you gotta comment—and thanks for the call, Charles.

Michael Pollan
I agree. And I you know, it’s always struck me that Harris Ranch is the is the feedlot I was describing earlier as kind of starting my interest in the subject. But it is kind of amazing that there’s a little Steakhouse in the midst of that. And the idea that you could look at that feedlot smell that stench and then say, Hey, nice ribeye is just what the doctor ordered. But I think that’s true. I think in one direction. You don’t get the smell before you get to the steakhouse. Yeah, the next step is to make that the slaughterhouse they’re more transparent as well as the way they’re feeding the animals.

John Perry
With respect to feedlots, I don’t want to defend feedlots. But there is this empirical question. They’re clearly offensive to the people on Highway five. And we look at them and we think that the, the cattle must really hate them. I think there is some, some research now it may have been supported by the National Herford council or something no doubt. That that suggests that cattle actually don’t mind feedlot so much. However, when it gets to the to the way they slaughter them. That’s a different story.

Ken Taylor
Cattle, their consciousness is probably kind of simple. But I got I address that. Well, I want to I want to take it in a slightly different direction in the short time we have left, because what does this I’m thinking about our relationship to nature? And what John Stuart Mill derisively called the wisdom of nature because he thought, no need, it seems like we’re trying to improve upon nature, through you know, the scientific production of food and all that stuff. Are we wise enough actually to, to improve upon nature? Or should we learn to listen to nature, you know, all this nutrition stuff, often get it wrong, it becomes gospel for a day and then boom, it’s wrong?

Michael Pollan
Well, I think we overestimate our knowledge of these systems, we overestimate our knowledge of what is going on in food, what is going on in, in human digestion, I think we do need to be a little bit humbler about that. There’s nothing wrong with improving upon nature, people have been doing that for a long time. They’ve done it successfully and disastrously. And it argues for, you know, looking at models that have worked in the past, it argues for using ecology as your model when you’re designing a food system rather than the model of the factory, which is essentially what we’ve done applying that model to nature has proven to be a disaster. But there are ecological models of growing food that do represent improvements on nature, that leave the animals much happier and are highly productive. So it really is just kind of what mental construct we take when we are improving nature, right? Good and bad ways to do that.

Ken Taylor
But you rail in your books against reductionist nutrition science. So you’re not I mean, at least the way Maybe the science is gone. You’re not really a fan of that science. But no,

Michael Pollan
I think that they have taught us very, very little. And all the public health advice we’ve gotten about food for most of the 20th century, has actually turned out to be not very good advice. I mean, the whole low fat public health campaign has, you know, coincided with the rise of obesity and turns out to have been based on a really poor understanding of both fats and carbohydrates in the diet. I think that the move to get everybody off of animal fats and onto vegetable fats in the form of margarine, which which became sources of trans fats in the diet was a public health disaster. So I think that the science of nutrition is to put it charitably, young, it’s kind of where, you know, surgery was in the year 1650. It has some promise, but I’m not ready to, to get up on the table.

Ken Taylor
Michael, on that kind of sobering note I’m gonna have to thank you for joining us. It’s really been a pleasure.

Michael Pollan
Thank you very much.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Michael Pollan, professor of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and also “In Defense of Food.” So John, you old foodie, what did you learn about food today?

John Perry
Well, I learned what I suspected that when you get into this topic, it’s fraught with, with with difficulties that will threaten to change your your habits. But I guess that’s okay. That’s, that’s why we do philosophy so we can learn more about the world. But but it is puzzling exactly what we should do. And so so I like, like most of our programs, I’ve just learned to be more puzzled.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. You know, I mean, I think I wish we had time to talk more about food science. Michael has some really enlightening things to say about the state of Food Science, and it does make you think we don’t really know anything. And I do think one message is maybe we should have less epistemic hubris, you know, more epistemic humility about what we know and what we think we know. But you know, there’s lots of more ground we could cover this conversation continues. As always on our blog, the blog dot Philosophy Talk dot O R G, where our motto is Cogito ergo Blogo, I think therefore our blog,

John Perry
And you can download podcasts of our program from our website as well.