How surprising that a PhD from the mean streets of Berkeley would hold the position that the answer to agribusiness and poor eating habits in the US is that "people just have to dig down in their pockets and spend more for food" and "reacquaint themselves with the kitchen." Nothing out-of-touch and liberal candy land about that idea, no sir. How is it that cash-strapped working class families who work long hours didn't think of this already? Send these rubes a copy of this book!

Forgive me, Chihuahua, but I think that's a knee-jerk response. The fact is that everyone in this country, the hardscrabble working class included, pays less for food (as a percentage of income) than anyone else in the world and than at any time in our history. The argument that it's elitist to spend more for food ignores, among other things, the fact that we are simply accustomed to cheap food, just like we're accustomed to cheap gas for our cars. But just because something's a habit doesn't mean it's desirable, nor does it mean that it's unchangeable.

Furthermore, the cost of eating lousy food gets paid by those working class families in plenty of other ways. It's a lot more expensive, for example, to buy clothes at the fat kids' store. Doctors and meds cost money. And -- somewhat more contentiously -- a diet made up largely of processed sugars and starches makes kids' blood sugar levels soar and then crash, leaving them lethargic, with little ability to concentrate on school work. In other words, leaving the physical issues aside, it could be argued that feeding your working-class kid crap food is a good way to ensure that the kid stays working-class.

There are a lot of things that should be done to improve America's eating habits. Some of them can only be accomplished by the government, and are likely to be accomplished, if at all, very slowly. Some of them have been accomplished and will continue being accomplished only at the societal level: When I was a kid in the 60s, lettuce came in two flavors -- Boston and Iceberg -- tomatoes were uniformly tasteless and hard as rocks, and the rest of the fresh-vegetable spectrum was rounded off by onions, potatoes, carrots, and celery. That really was it, and I grew up in Manhattan. But over time grocers came to understand that there was a market for a broader spectrum of fresh vegetables, and I can now buy arugula and napa cabbage and shitake mushrooms even at the lousy supermarket down the block. And more recently, of course, people have hollered for even fresher, better produce, and farmers' markets have sprung up in response.

But none of that will make any real difference unless individuals start to pay more attention to, put more value on, what they eat. And part of that process does involve paying more for it, in part because stuff that's better for you -- and usually tastier -- costs more to raise. Those bulletproof tomatoes I grew up on, saturated with all kinds of chemicals and lacking in any flavor except a vague sense of wetness, are cheap as hell to produce. They've been bred to grow quickly, so the farmer gets more harvests out of the land, and they're almost no waste from shipping, because those babies are so hard that no amount of knocking around in a truck can damage them. But they taste like drek, so choking them down is a chore, and when you buy them and feed them to your kids, you've reinforced their belief that vegetables are revolting. And, as mentioned above, over time that becomes an extremely expensive belief.

That last comment was as good as the whole article.

Couldn't agree more with Michael Pollan about food. I live this daily only at the other end of the pleasure & health scale. I live in a small city in southern Italy where everything I eat (and more importantly my son eats) is grown or raised within a 50 mile radius. If I had a mind to I could go visit the source of every bite of food I put into my mouth. Oddly enough, it's the elderly (a generation that grew up in poverty and is still technically poor) that eat the best. you can see them at the central marketplace -- the old stooped former peasants taking the bus home with kilos and kilos of greens. They'll cook them with some onion and tomatoes and add rice or pulses. They eat the best because it's time consuming to wash and cook vegetables. They often do the work for their busy daughters and grand-daughters and on Sundays you see them going over to their childrens' houses with the Sunday lunch in a big cloth-covered pan and enough home-cooked food to last several days. Gifts are often food. My husband is a physician -- the old fashioned kind who will make house calls for free because it's very often friends of friends or someone who is poor and elderly. I get the most amazing thank you gifts. Five liters of delicious home made wine. Twenty truly free range eggs. Wild asparagus. Crates of oranges and lemons with no pesticides.

it's a truly wonderful way to live and eat and I feel sorry for people for whom this is a lost way of life.

best,Elizabeth Jennings

Ha! not in your lifetime. You will live and die in your suburban ghetto

Not to get too personal, here, and I'll concede that I live well below the mean, but I spend about 25% of my very limited income on food each month. And I'm a very, very careful shopper, who buys fresh or minimally processed (frozen) foods, usually on sale. I cook all of my own meals, from scratch, about 90% of the time.

It is insulting to have some snob preach to me about how profligate poor people are, always wasting their money on "snack foods." That disgusting image is right up there with Cadillac welfare mothers, for absolute ignorant gall!!

Six dollars for a dozen eggs? Well, then I guess we stupid poor folks will just have to eat dirt!