Messianic Hopes and Politics in the Food Movement

By Nicholas Sabloff

 

What is at the end of your fork? To ask this question is to plunge into a search for answers that are difficult to discover, but if discovered, leave most of us wishing we had never bothered asking in the first place. Ignorance can be, if not bliss, then at least something that doesn’t ruin lunch. Yet for even the most indifferent eaters, the realities of America’s food production system are increasingly difficult to avoid.

The story of how dangerous, unsustainable, and even immoral the production and consumption of food is in America represents one of the most significant emerging social narratives of the new millennium in the West. Authors such as Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan—whose respective books Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) are groundbreaking, powerful, and essential works about the myriad flaws of America’s food system—helped establish what has since become a burgeoning industry of exposés, documentaries, and activism on the subject. The mission statement of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, with its emphasis on the globalized, interconnected nature of the problem, nicely captures the standard message that has taken hold: “The world’s most pressing questions regarding health, culture, the environment, education, and the global economy cannot be adequately addressed without considering the food we eat and the way we produce it.”

A heightened sense of awareness and anxiety about the way we make the food we eat has become a fixture of American life for a certain segment of the population. As Paul Roberts writes in his book The End of Food, “The very act of eating, the basis of many of our social, family and spiritual traditions—not to mention the one cheap pleasure that could ever rival sex—has for many devolved into an exercise in irritation, confusion and guilt.” There is a reason that the annual Food Issue of the New York Times Magazine, which published many of the articles that laid the groundwork for Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, is less a celebration of gastronomy than a sociopolitical survey of the current state of mind regarding our food dystopia.

Indeed, 2009 may come to be seen as the year that critical analysis of our food situation reached a critical mass. If Time magazine’s August 2009 cover story, “Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food,” indicates this subject has finally hit the mainstream. The article was notable not for what it said, all of which had been said previously, and better, by others, but that it appeared at all. It was a summary of how far the reformist food movement has come. Even the American Farm Bureau—the self-proclaimed “Voice of Agriculture”—whose interests are entirely opposed to the very idea of moving away from our current food practices, couldn’t help but concede begrudgingly, in an article on its website titled “Critics of American Agriculture Intensify Efforts,” that “this has been a good year for the critics of mainstream farming and ranching.” Alice Waters, Berkeley’s Slow Food movement pioneer and co-owner of the legendary Chez Panisse restaurant, showed up at the White House. Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden made headlines (we now have a president who knows the price of arugula). The University of Wisconsin distributed free copies of Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008) to its incoming freshmen, which caused a stir and backlash from farmers. All of this leaves one with the sense that awareness of the issue has reached a saturation point.

The dire state of our food system is now well understood, and its abuses have been amply documented. These include factory farms, synthetic products, harsh treatment of animals, well-financed agribusiness lobbyists, misguided farm policies, and a cornucopia of cheap, unhealthy goods that are doing a number on public health. And yet at the very moment when the food movement is beginning to cross over to the mainstream, it’s hard not to wonder whether it will succeed in building on the success it has had in raising awareness. Its bracing diagnosis has not been followed by an equally effective outline of a remedy. The movement, for all its successes, seems stuck.

There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them stands out, and here the trajectory of Pollan’s work, despite its many virtues and achievements, seems telling. Pollan has distinguished himself as the movement’s most eloquent and cogent thinker, and his books have, rightly, become the urtexts for those who seek to understand how America’s food system works and why it is ultimately destructive. He has established a powerful and lucid narrative about the system’s immense dysfunctions, and reading him leaves you with a clear picture of what is at stake. But there is also something absent from his work, and it is the very thing that appears to be absent from the movement as a whole. The food movement, for all its passion, is almost bereft of politics. Without politics, the movement inherently becomes more about style. It asks how we consume not as a society but as individuals. In this sense it purports to solve the food problem simply by helping consumers make more informed choices. This is demoralizing for the simple reason that remaking our food system is an enormous undertaking that will require far more than slogans, good intentions, and a sentimental attachment to whole foods and farmers markets. Sooner or later, politics, in all its incremental and often unappetizing details, will have to take a seat at the table if the food movement is ever going to serve up something greater than personal satisfaction for the few who can afford it.

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Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma is the bible of what is often referred to as the good-food movement. Its power to convert should not be underestimated, and it has been compared to Rachel Carson’s landmark work Silent Spring (1962), the best seller that spurred widespread ecological concern. Pollan is a gifted journalist, and he has the enviable ability to synthesize an immense amount of information into a simple narrative without sacrificing complexity. At its core, the message about our food system is that it wasteful, brutal, destroying the environment, and slowly but inexorably, killing us. The system inevitably leads to overproduction and artificially cheap food; it raises animals in appalling conditions in what are known as Confined Animal Feed Operations, while feeding them food—corn as well as other animals—they were never evolved to eat; it burns an incredible amount of fossil fuels to produce this food; and it is contributing to an alarming rise in obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.

Pollan’s investigation into how our food system functions is groundbreaking, and his account retains, much like Carson’s work did, a very real moral gravity by virtue of the sense that it is a work dedicated to the public interest. Many readers have found their lives, or at least their eating habits, profoundly altered by reading the book, and I doubt they are the only ones. I would consider myself among those who, coming somewhat late to the conversation, found Pollan’s book revelatory in its ability to make knownthe true nature of an invisible system that you encounter every day without even realizing it. Between Omnivore’s Dilemma and its successor, In Defense of Food, Pollan has effectively documented the two spheres of concern in the food system: production and consumption. But it is worth revisiting the narrative that Pollan’s books helped establish in order to understand why there is reason to doubt the path the food movement has chosen to this point.

Pollan’s goal in Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is structured around the consumption of four very different meals—one from McDonald’s, one consisting of “industrial organic” products from Whole Foods, one from a small sustainable farm, and one that he secures from nature entirely himself—is to uncover “what it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.” This process of demystification—a true “naked lunch”—reveals just how alienated the average person has become from what sustains him, and even from nature itself. The truest sentence in the book may well be when Pollan observes that “what is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections.” He is correct, of course, unless the ability to have one’s basic needs met without any engagement with the processes of nature is precisely what one cherishes about modern life.

Our food system floats on a sea of corn and petroleum. This is not an overstatement. It is responsible for one-fifth of America’s consumption of fossil fuels. The overproduction of corn, meanwhile, is made possible by the government as well as by artificial fertilizers. The latter are needed because corn is now grown in monocultures, and these monocultures could not maintain their fertility without such chemical additives. These chemicals, in turn, damage the land and end up in our water supply. The Treasury Department spends up to $5 billion a year subsidizing corn to create what amounts to an artificial economy for the product. Agricultural subsidies end up costing the American taxpayer around $19 billion a year, but amazingly only benefit around three thousand farmers. The scale of the system is staggering: in 1990, American farmers produced 118 bushels of corn per acre; today that figure is 153 bushels per acre. Corn accounts for roughly 27 percent of the crops harvested in the United States. All of this excess corn eventually finds its way into just about every processed food imaginable, Pollan notes, most often by way of high-fructose corn syrup, an essentially useless calorie that has nonetheless (as a cheap substitute for sugar) become the “leading source of sweetness in our diet.” Humans didn’t taste high-fructose corn syrup until 1980; now, however, 17.5 billion pounds of it are produced a year to sweeten our food. Once you start looking for it on ingredient labels, you realize it is everywhere. As a Big Agriculture executive says mischievously in the voice-over to open Steven Soderbergh’s recent film “The Informant!” “You know that orange juice you have every morning. You know what’s in it? Corn. And that maple syrup you put on your pancakes. You know what makes that taste so great? Corn.”

Perhaps the most disturbing fact that Pollan uncovers in his research comes by way of a biologist who tells him that an analysis of corn-based isotopes in our flesh and hair suggests that “we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.” Pollan’s critique of this system makes clear that although we may have once admired America’s mechanization of agriculture for having liberated us from fear of hunger and the pain of toil, the cost has been severe, even disastrous, for both man and nature.

The growth of industrial farming in America came about after World War II and was more than anything made possible by the Haber-Bosch process, which gave us a method to synthesize ammonia directly from nitrogen and hydrogen. In Pollan’s view, this was something of a “Faustian bargain” when it comes to nature. He is not being hyperbolic when he observes that the consequence of ammonium nitrate fertilizers, which American farmers began using in great quantities after the war, was that “what had been a local, sun-driven cycle of fertility . . . was now broken.” In this postlapsarian world, farming no longer needed to abide by the limits of biology and could therefore be organized on an industrial model of efficiency, with monocultures of corn being one such result. Industrialization ultimately resulted in consolidation: the average farmer now feeds 129 Americans; in 1940, that figure was 19. In that same time period, the number of farms in America has declined from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million. Restructuring our production of food as a purely economic system is a problem, Paul Roberts writes in The End of Food, because “food itself is fundamentally not an economic system.” It was never quite made, he says, for the “modern industrial model.” As far as Roberts is concerned, it is not sustainable as currently conceived: the food production system, he argues, has “encountered its limits.”

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If the story of how we produce food can be summarized as a tale of industrial disaster, then the story about consumption can be understood as one of devastating paradoxes and absurdities. It can be hard to write about the food system, particularly from the perspective of consumption, without stumbling on countless ironies. There is what Pollan calls the American paradox: “a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.” Then there is the paradox, as noted by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, that “in the new world order it is possible to be overweight and malnourished at the same time.” While one billion people now suffer from obesity—a phenomenon that has come to be known as “globesity”—there are simultaneously, Paul Roberts writes, one billion people in Africa being left out of the “age of superabundance.” As Mark Greif writes in an essay in the journal n+1, our very anxiety about food in an age of abundance is such that “the more we are estranged from the tasks of growing and getting food, the more food-thought pervades our lives.” The grocery stores are teeming with goods that suggest a surfeit of variety, and yet, according to Pollan, the number of species in the human diet is shrinking. Two-thirds of the calories consumed in the American diet come from four crops: corn, soy, rice, and wheat. We’ve never, in the West, had more to eat, but as Pollan argues in In Defense of Food, “most of what we’re consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all.”

The manifesto part of Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto is simple enough: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This can be restated as: eliminate processed foods from your diet, and cut way down on meat. The average American now eats about 217 pounds of meat per year. We somehow manage to eat four times as much meat and cheese as the rest of the world. From an environmental standpoint, this is a disaster. As Mark Bittman notes in his book Food Matters, it takes forty calories of energy (read: fossil fuels) to produce one calorie of beef protein. Growing the world’s livestock generates more greenhouse gases than the transportation industry. The damage inflicted on our waistlines is just as great. We eat about 25 percent more calories per day than we did in 1970. The American farmer, for his part, now produces “500 more calories per person per day since the 1970s” with the aid of the government, according to Time magazine. And, yes, behind many of those consumed calories lurks high-fructose corn syrup. The evidence is there for all to see: as Elizabeth Kolbert reported in the New Yorker, “men are now on average seventeen pounds heavier than they were in the late seventies.” For women it’s nineteen pounds. As Pollan points out, this results in $250 billion a year in diet-related health care expenses. This is the “real cost” of cheap food.

But Pollan’s real target in In Defense of Food is what he calls nutritionism—or “the official ideology of the Western diet.” The idea behind nutritionism, as Pollan puts it, is that “the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health.” This strikes him as inimical to our well-being and completely at odds with our heritage:

We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology. That eating should be about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea—destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well.

There is no doubt a kind of Western narcissism in this obsession with health, but Pollan doesn’t take his argument much beyond the realm of food and into the provinces of, say, sociology. He attacks “nutritionism” for the way it has debased the very idea of whole foods. “Nutritionism,” he writes, “supplies the ultimate justification for processing food by implying that with a judicious application of food science, fake foods can be even more nutritious than the real thing.” If all that matters about a food is the sum of nutrients it contains, then it ceases to matter if it’s actually food at all. Assessing food this way has become the default position of the U.S. government, whose dietary guidelines are based not on telling Americans what foods to eat or avoid but instead on reporting what nutrients are beneficial or harmful. Hence, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), instead of recommending that you eat less meat—which was what it had intended when it was drawing up its Dietary Goals for the United States in the 1970s—tells you to limit your intake of “saturated fats.” This euphemism was the result of pressure from the meat and dairy lobbies. The Big Food lobby, whose power has hardly diminished since then, is as dominant an interest group as there exists in America, which is not surprising given that, for example, the agricultural giant Cargill is America’s largest private company.

It is only within this simulacrum of eating that such paradoxes as “whole grain white bread” and “heart-healthy” Frito-Lay potato chips can exist. In perhaps the ultimate semantic irony, Pollan observes that we should actually avoid products that make health claims: “Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food.” Even the generally feckless FDA at times find this irony too much to take: in October, many of the country’s largest food manufacturers, under pressure from the FDA, announced that they would begin phasing out the use of the industry-created “Smart Choices” nutrition label from the front of hundreds of products. The label, used to promote a product’s nutritional value, appeared on, among other things, boxes of Fruit Loops.

• • • • •

Governmental, industrial, environmental, international, ideological, commercial, corporate: the food problem encompasses all these categories. It is totalizing, as most serious problems in a global economy tend to be. The food movement has made its case for why we need change. But what change? It’s not clear, and here is where the cracks in the movement emerge.

One possibility would seem to be organic foods of the variety found at Whole Foods. But as Pollan argues in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, what he calls “industrial organic” has already lost its soul. The $11 billion industry operates on the same principles as any large-scale industrial model: it is not a mosaic of small farmers but instead dominated by a few giant corporations. Earthbound Farms of California, for example, produces more than 80 percent of the organic lettuce in America. Industrial organic doesn’t tend to mean local, or even sustainable. (That being said, one of the great conundrums of the food movement has been its inability to settle on a message about what should be the goal: are we better off going organic, going local, or going sustainable? It depends on whom you ask.) The Chilean asparagus that Pollan buys from Whole Foods comes metaphorically doused in fossil fuels. Organic lettuce from California is an environmental burden by the time it arrives at the Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn, New York. “Is an industrial organic food chain finally a contradiction in terms?” Pollan asks. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it is” Or as Samuel Fromartz writes in his book Organic, Inc.: “The path that agrarian idealists had taken in the 1970s—to farm in concert with nature and sell organic food outside the dominant food system—became compromised by its success. Organic food had become too popular to remain in a backwoods niche, morphing into yet another food industry profit center.”

Even then, it’s not as if industrial organic food, despite its rapid growth over the past decade, was poised to overtake processed foods anytime soon. Organic foods still account for only 2 percent of U.S. food sales. Of that 2 percent, not all of it is necessarily sustainable. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 1 percent of America’s cropland is farmed organically. Similarly, only 1 percent of America’s cattle are raised organically. If organic food could never quite compete when it comes to scale, then the one true advantage organic food should possess over conventional foods is its claim to health. But as Fromartz explains, the industry bargained away this advantage in order to grow. To ensure passage of the Federal Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, which helped legitimize the emerging movement by regulating it, the industry allowed organic agriculture to be defined only as an “ecological system of production.” The question of whether organic food was better for us than conventionally produced food was now off the table, rendering it just an alternative mode of production. “The young organic food industry won legitimacy, but only by distancing itself from its core idea of the connection between soil, food and health,” Fromartz says.

• • • • •

Instead of industrial organic, Pollan envisions a food system built around small, sustainable farms that view raising food as a holistic process determined by the rhythms and resources of nature. The hero of this kind of local farming in the Omnivore’s Dilemma is Joel Salatin, a colorfully rustic character—he’s become something of a folk hero since Pollan’s book—who runs the remarkable Polyface Farms. Salatin raises all kinds of animals on his farm in Virginia, where he is able to remain entirely self-contained and sustainable by organizing his grass farm around a symbiotic process whereby everything works in harmony under the sun. Salatin’s method of farming comes across as morally unimpeachable—he also only sells his food locally—but as a model for the future of farming in America it is hard to believe it can ever be made to reach the appropriate scale. Pollan’s account of life on Polyface Farms certainly confirms the notion that polyculture farming is not only more labor intensive but also, as Paul Roberts puts it, “thought intensive.” We are, of course, not a country of agrarians anymore. In 1900, 41 percent of the American population was involved in agriculture; today that figure is 2 percent. I imagine most people, regardless of their feelings about food, prefer not to be on the farm. Beyond some well-intentioned liberal-arts graduates, it’s hard to see anyone rushing back to work the land. The difficulty of achieving of a small-scale system of food production is not lost on Pollan:

By definition local is a hard thing to sell in a global marketplace. Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy, as well as a new agriculture: new social and economic relationships as well as new ecological ones. . . . A successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of a food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than the chore.

Nonetheless, for me this is roughly the point where, despite all my admiration, sympathy, and respect for the food movement (and desire to participate), I think Pollan’s argument begins to sound slightly unrealistic. An earnest defender of the Slow Food movement, he argues that the movement rightly “recognizes that the best way to fight industrial eating is by simply recalling people to the infinitely superior pleasures of traditional foods enjoyed communally.” This cherishing of the traditional, with its implicit nostalgia for a simpler, more wholesome era, is a frequent feature of Pollan’s writing. At times he seems to hang much of its authority on such an appeal. As he writes in In Defense of Food:

So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.

As comforting as this sounds, it’s hard to imagine what common sense and tradition—let alone familial wisdom—Pollan expects people to draw on, given that most of us have been eating, almost exclusively, off the industrialized menu of processed food for the past fifty years. He is not wrong that it’s going to take a new kind of “eater” to help remake our food system; where he seems mistaken is that this new “eater” will necessarily hold the same values and relationship to food as those who came before him. Pollan is looking back in hopes of recapturing something we’ve lost that, even if it could be restored, may not be appropriate, or even sufficient, for the present moment. Modern eaters will need to reclaim the lost connection with the food they eat, but that connection will have to be founded on something more than cultural memory and returning to some lost Eden.

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Unfortunately, a focus on food culture—and the way things used to be—has become more and more central to Pollan’s work. In a cover story for the New York Times Magazine this past summer called “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” (its slightly more ponderous subhead on the front of the magazine was “What Take Out and Top Chef Are Doing to Our Lifestyles, Our Health and Maybe Our Essence”), Pollan ruminates on the irony that the average American spends only twenty-seven minutes a day on food preparation—which is less than half of what he or she spent fifty years ago—despite the proliferation of television programming about food. It’s easy to sympathize with his puzzlement over this paradox, and he is right to interpret it as symptomatic of the alienation and passivity from actual experience that is a feature of contemporary life. Given that food is so integral to survival, something has surely been lost in our estrangement from preparing it. In The End of Food, Paul Roberts go so far as to predict that “the future of food is as an accessory.” There are broader sociological and economic reasons for this change, as Pollan is keenly aware—Americans work longer hours, more women are now in the workforce, and so on. But in the end he can’t help but make the faith-based assertion that we can or we should “put the genie back into the bottle.” Pollan continues, “Once it has been destroyed, can a culture of everyday cooking be rebuilt? Let us hope so.” The fate of reforming our food system, as far as he is concerned, depends on it. And he is no doubt right to insist on its importance. However, the more plausible conclusion, one fears, is the one offered by the veteran food-marketing researcher who disagrees with Pollan’s optimism because “we’re basically cheap and lazy.” Pollan, like the food movement itself, also still seems trapped in a tendency to rely on slogans—eat food, cook more, buy local—that can seem oddly anodyne in light of how significant and profound a change is necessary to achieve a full-scale transformation of the food system. As Jane Black, a food writer for the Washington Post, pointed out in an op-ed last year, one of the movement’s biggest weaknesses is that it still didn’t have a clear message. “Whether you're Detroit . . . or the International Sleep Products Association,” Black wrote, “the key to success is focus. By contrast, the sustainable food movement is asking for a fundamental overhaul of the entire U.S. food system—and everybody has their own ideas of how to begin.” Among these ideas she mentions as being promoted by chefs such as Alice Waters are organic gardens in schools across the country, a mandate that gastronomy be taught in schools, and mandatory disclosures on genetically modified foods. What is missing from all these, as valuable and noble as they are, is any sense of a broader political agenda. As Black notes, “Raising awareness is only the first step. The second, crucial one is to call for specific action.” And it is the latter that is still too often absent from the food movement. This is not to say that supporting local vendors, joining a food co-op, shopping at a farmers market, or participating in one of the emerging food-policy councils that seem to be gaining traction is not a form of action. But like Pollan’s call for us to cook more at home, which is no doubt important if not essential, these things should ultimately exist as small parts of a much larger strategy to remake the food system in America. And yet too often they are most of what the food movement has going for it.

The reason that it is discouraging to see Pollan focus so much on the individual eater—a “new kind of eater”—is because the more the movement talks about the individual consumer, the further away it drifts from concrete politics. This is also where it tends to run into charges of elitism. There is something both noble and overly rarefied in Pollan’s desire to imagine re-creating a world of eaters for whom food embodies spirituality, a communing with the natural world, and an expression of our identity. Pollan’s odyssey in The Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he forages for his own dinner so that he is able, for once, to “pay the full karmic price of a meal,” comes off as both enlightened and indulgent: it’s the kind of behavior that is all too easily lampooned as a yuppie affectation, which to some degree it is. In this way, Pollan’s vision of our relationship with food can at times seem overly idealistic as well as vaguely paternalistic. Gene Kahn, the founder of Cascadian Farms, serves as something of the embodiment of the compromised soul of the organic movement in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, having gone from radical farmer to General Mills executive, while selling his organic business to the corporation along the way. But what he tells Pollan about his experience, depending on whether you interpret his motives as honest or self-serving, carries a relevant message for those promoting the more idealistic aims of the food movement: “We tried hard to build a cooperative community and a local food system, but at the end of the day it wasn’t successful. This is just lunch for most people. Just lunch. We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it’s just lunch.”

If Pollan is truly trying to reach the average America with his message, this level of aestheticizing the experience of eating seems mistaken. But is he trying to reach the average American? Evangelism of this nature is tailored to an educated class for whom a mark of refinement is experiencing food more holistically; similarly, much of his food advice—eat wild foods, join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)—is hardly for the everyday eater. Judging by Pollan’s most recent book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual—note, not a “eater’s manifesto” but a “manual”—he’s trying merely to write diet books for people who normally avoid diet books, or at least for those who want their diet books to contain a certain amount of moral awareness.

Yet if he is serious about remaking the food system, he is going to need everyone on board. In the case of organic food, as Fromartz notes in Organic, Inc. , two things will need to happen for our food system to change: “First, consumers unconvinced of the benefits of organic food will have to come into the fold. Second, those already buying organic food will have to buy more. Whether either development will take hold is an open question at this point.” Pollan is ultimately too supple a thinker to get caught making the perfect the enemy of the good; I don’t doubt that his vision of a new food system accounts for all different kinds of experiences or that it can accept those whose experience with food is far more shallow and expedient. But his immaculately cultivated vision of the eater, when it becomes a default position in the food movement, does lend some credence to such critics as Paul Roberts, who argues that “alternative agriculture suffers from an ideological purism: a kind of my-way-or-the-highway attitude that brooks little dissent or compromise.”

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The cult of the eater also too closely resembles the false promise perpetuated by so many causes in America: that of the transformative power of the consumer. Voting with your wallet is the easiest form of action there is, and it is the only one available to the person whose entire relationship with the movement consists of purchasing food. There is a very real downside to the fact that instead of being collective, it is an entirely individualistic vision of to create a new food system. It is both apolitical and lacking any sense of sacrifice or compromise. Finally, it is all about a better you. Plenty of people who write about good food try to emphasize this cheery narrative for their readers, which makes the whole experience seem not painless but effortlessly transformative. “And while you are doing your part to heal the planet you’ll improve your health, lose weight, and even spend less at the checkout counter,” Mark Bittman promises in Food Matters.

Yet the solutions most certainly won’t come that easily. It is all too easy to mistake a good feeling for actual change. It is fine for Pollan to encourage his readers to “vote with their forks for a different kind of food,” but purchases are not a substitution for politics when it comes to the movement as a whole. For it to succeed, people’s involvement can’t end at the cash register. Consumers, after all, are fickle: in the end, even committed consumers of organic food, Fromartz writes, are rarely consistent in their purchases. A movement centered on moral persuasion of individuals will inevitably suffer from inaction, the default setting of most humans. Awareness, no matter how widespread, is by itself inadequate: the truth sets no one free. The movement will need a more reliable partner than the American consumer if it’s going to change a system that includes the vested interests of the corn lobby, Cargill, and the U.S. government.

• • • • •

And what of those who can’t vote with their forks or wallets? The good-food revolution is happening primarily among those with the income and desire to buy in. Pollan mostly ignores this unpleasant reality in his books, only pausing once in In Defense of Food to note that “not everyone can afford to eat high-quality food in America, and that is shameful: however, those of us who can, should,” before he blithely resumes discussion of the health benefits of eating better.

The ability to eat high-quality food is a luxury, and until that changes, it’s hard to believe that those of more modest financial means with families to feed will be persuaded to forego the convenience and price of, say, McDonald’s in favor of a healthier approach. The superiority of the good-food movement’s arguments is not self-evident when stacked against the realities of limited resources. Ethical and nutritional appeals alone are not enough to overcome the structural advantages of Big Food. For the movement to take the next step forward, it will have to find new and effective ways to reach people beyond the aisles of Whole Foods and bring them into the fold.

The U.S. food system is too global, too all-encompassing a network to be overhauled by one approach. It will take many incremental changes and varied strategies, and it will take politics. This will require playing politics the way it is typically played: with money, with lobbyists, with carefully disciplined strategies, and with targeted messages. An ability to live with compromises, and a realistic understanding of how inert something as institutionalized as food will be when it comes to actual change, needs to become part of the movement. It is encouraging that there have been recent signs of a move toward more concrete and broader political goals. In a New York Times op-ed piece in February 2009, Alice Waters proposed a significant expansion of the National School Lunch Program and called for tripling the program’s budget from $9 billion to $27 billion. Whether or not this particular initiative stands a chance of being realized, it is a step in the right direction.

Similarly, Michael Pollan, in an op-ed in the Times in September, suggested that health care reform could finally provide the food movement with an ally in its fight against intractable agribusinesses. Under present circumstances, health insurers benefit handsomely from our chronically unhealthy food system. “One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry,” Pollan writes. But should health care reform pass, he says, this equation may change in the food system’s favor: “When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system—everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches—will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it has never had before.”

Pollan’s idea strikes me as a perceptive, and more important, as a pragmatic idea. It’s a reminder of how shrewd a thinker he can be. Partnering with the much-vilified health insurance industry is the kind of political calculus that the movement will inevitably need to make. Alliances with less-than-appetizing interests are a necessary way forward. Progress may well mean sacrificing the movement’s pristine image. How the sausage gets made, after all, isn’t quite an organic process. •