Letters to the Editor

• Pollan, good work; Leonard, not so much

  [Read the article: The omnivore's new dilemma]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  First, Pollan is a UC Berkely Journalism professor (says so right in the third sentence of the SF Chronicle Article cited by Leonard). I wonder, then, if he might be able to offer some pointers to aspiring journalists about how to write a short article such as the one Leonard has supplied. And, if so, I would advise Leonard himself to pay attention to whatever Pollan might have to say. Unfortunately, the evidence before me suggests that this may be harder for Leonard than it may sound. Pollan's Omnivore’s Dilemma does say some of the things Leonard says it says. But the text itself isn't as blinkered as Leonard makes it out to seem.

  It is true that one of the arguments that Pollan deploys in his analysis of trends in North American diets has to do with the economics of corn production. As Leonard is aware, Pollan argued that because corn supply was high, demand and prices were low. But because of peculiarties in the subsidy system for US farmers (artificial interference in the macroeconomics of agriculture), the response historically was not to back-off on the supply but, bizarrely, to grow more corn. This, of course, further depresses both demand and global corn prices (and constituted an unfair advantage to US corn farmers that, understandably, pissed off Brazil and other countries that are capable of producing corn without currently needing to subsidize it in order for farmers to achieve a reasonable standard of living relative to others in their respective countries).

  But, here's where Leonard begins to miss the point. Pollan says that this system encouraged the US to find ways to continue to use up more and more of an artificially bloated surplus of corn. So, we began feeding it to cows, replacing sugar with HFCS, developing an industry of processed foods that put corn in just about everything we eat, and, most recently, finding ways simply to burn it in our cars!!!

  Now, it is true that Pollan did NOT happen to predict that, once enough plants were built to convert corn to ethanol and once the US federal government began to mandate that gasoline consumption in the US include certain percentages of ethanol, the consequence would be a correction against the artificial interference with the macroeconomics of US agricultural production, i.e., that demand would once again play a vital role in setting global corn prices. So, no, he didn't predict that, but this does NOT mean that what's happened since 2006 in any way "turns some of Pollan's basic themes upside down." It does nothing of the sort! The book wasn’t in any way about the question of what would happen if we really did find a way to burn up corn much faster than we could grow it. In fact, although Pollan does discuss ethanol in several places in Omnivore's Dilemma, even a quick glance to the index will confirm that it’s hardly one of his basic themes.

  There does seem to be a situational irony about Leonard’s misinterpretation of the book that is worth mentioning. Pollan correctly pointed out that we were trying to find ways to consume as much corn as possible whether that meant eating it or not And, guess what, he was right! Now we finally have gotten to the point where we really can consume corn in a way that outstrips the supply… by burning it!

  But the point that we were trying to consume corn by means other than eating is, in fact, tangential to the book’s dominant concern. Remember, the point was that the strange economics of corn production in the US created a situation that compelled us to seek ways to exploit such a seemingly cheap commodity. Thus, Pollan's point in the first third of the book isn't to draw conclusions or make predictions about what would or would not happen to the economics of corn production in the future. Rather, Pollan is simply arguing that a bizarre feature of agricultural economics in the US contributed to bad dietary habits (“bad” in terms of ethics, ecology, political consequences, AND nutrition) by making corn so central to it. But even if corn is to become de-coupled from the food industry as prices stabilize in relation to global demand (and, as a bonus, reduce or eliminate the need to subsidize corn farming in the US), this wouldn't necessarily resolve any of Pollan's ethical, ecological, political, and nutritional concerns about our diets. And, by the way, this point is made even clearer in what is, in fact, Pollan's most recent book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (and it really is, after all, a “manifesto” in spite of what must surely be the ironic posture of that subtitle), the very book that is being discussed in the San Franciso Chronicle article that Leonard mentions at the end of his piece (an article that can at least be said accurately to interpret Pollan’s basic thesis where Leonard has failed—in which case, I have to wonder not only whether Leonard read either of Pollan’s two recent books in their entirety but also whether he even read the article he’s cited).

  Permalink Saturday, February 2, 2008 11:48 AM