Pollan Identifies Problems, Offers Wrong Solutions
By Guy Adamson @ 9:16 AM   
Author Michael Pollan is interviewed by Newsweek around the upcoming film Food, Inc. Pollan does identify real problems in our food "system".Gostin: Why is it so terrible that cows eat corn?
Pollan: Because it makes them sick when they eat it in large quantities. A little corn is not going to kill them, but when it's 80 to 90 percent of their diet, it deranges their metabolism. They are evolved to eat grass, that's what they're good at; when you put corn into that amazing organ called the rumen, it acidifies it and creates an environment where acid-loving bacteria such as E. coli 015787 are able to evolve. What's beautiful is a rumen has a very different ph than a human stomach; whatever bacteria live in the rumen would normally get killed by our stomach acids, but if you make the cow's digestive system more like ours, any bugs that evolve there will survive their transit to our stomach and go on to possibly make us sick. That's really the E. coli story, but there are other problems, too: To keep the animals healthy on that corn diet, you have to give them lots of antibiotics, they just wouldn't survive otherwise.
He even correctly identifies government intervention as the source of the problems: It's not an accident that fast food is so cheap. This is what the government underwrites. Factory farming does not exist without subsidized corn, it doesn't exist without it being legal to give important human antibiotics to cattle, it doesn't exist without basically regulatory indulgence.
Unfortunately, his solution is shifting the regulation, not removing it. If the government would put those kinds of resources into underwriting healthy and real food, whether that's grass-fed beef or organic produce, then the healthy calories could compete more effectively with the unhealthy calories. The solution is a truly free market in agriculture so individual consumers can choose which foods they want and have the choice to eat healthy or not.
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1 Comments:
I can't even begin to describe how infuriated I get when my government proposes yet another rule that makes it harder for me to find healthy food. I could swear they're consciously trying to make us all sick by forcing us to consume Monsanto-friendly foods.
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