Me and Mike

(and yes, I know his name is Michael. I like to think I’m intimate enough for a pet name) 

If you change the way you eat, you’re going to change the way you live.

- Michael Pollan, 10/11/07, to me (and lots of others)

There’s plenty that’s already known about Michael Pollan — a Google Search alone offers almost 700,000 results. Without too much effort, you can find out that he likes Crackerjacks, or that he can skillfully use the words “natural gardening” and “crypto-Fascist movement” in the same sentence, or what he orders at Chez Panisse. I’ve talked about him lots on this blog (ad nauseum some might say) — like here and here and here and here.

What can I add to that? You don’t want me to rehash all that, do you? I mean, you’ve already read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, right? (You haven’t? Oh, do. Really. You must). So, after spending the evening with the man (and, okay, lots of other people, though I’d prefer to remember it as a quiet evening, just the two of us), I can now share some things about Michael Pollan that you won’t necessarily find in all of those other places:

1. He looks people in the eye when he talks to them. I mean, he’s not doing that glance-around-to-see-if-someone-better’s-nearby. He’s really there.

2. Sometimes he uses naughty language, like “crappy” (regarding his alma mater’s library), and “f*cked up” (regarding politics), and “piss off” (regarding ethanol production and what it doesn’t do to special interests).

3. When he was a kid, he had a pet pig. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that he lived in Manhattan at the time.

4. His entire head blushes when the word “pornography” is brought up in conversation (wasn’t me, folks, I swear), or when someone gushes over him a little too extremely (see below).

5. Sometimes he lacks confidence, just like the rest of us. Once upon a time, he started down a career path in magazine editing, because he simply didn’t believe it was possible that he could ever become a writer. Let that sink in a moment. Michael Pollan, the guy whose books launched a revolution, once thought that a career as a writer wasn’t open to him.

I’ll also add this: When Michael Pollan asks the address of your blog and you find yourself spewing words like “Okay, I’ll write it down, but I have to warn you that sometimes it says things like ‘I heart Michael Pollan,’ and at one point I confess to being a little in love with you, but really, I swear that I’m happily married and my husband reads my blog, and I’m not a stalker, I mean, I’ve never stalked anyone before, not yet anyway, but, I mean, well, this is just really darned embarassing and I don’t know why I’m talking so fast all of a sudden. And loud. Am I speaking really loud? Because I feel like I’m speaking really, really loud” (and when this whole monologue prompts the head of the local Slow Food chapter, who is standing nearby and was about to hand you his busines card, to widen his eyes slightly and quietly place the card back in his pocket), Pollan smiles graciously, and laughs, and autographs your book anyway.

Finally, anyone who has seen him talk knows this: The man doesn’t disappoint. If you get a chance to hear him speak, you should. In the meantime, I thought I’d sum up literally 7 hours of Michael Pollan-ness with some notes about what he wants from you, and me, and all of us:

He wants you to pay more for your food. Some of you can’t. Most of you can (do you pay for television? Ever pay more than a buck for your coffee? Yeah, then he probably means you). As a percentage of household income, Americans are now spending less than any other nation (including wealthy ones) on food, less than any people in the history of humankind. But don’t think this food is inexpensive. It’s true that since Pollan was a kid, our spending on food has gone from 18% of the household budget to less than 10%. Unfortunately, our spending on healthcare has more than tripled — from 5% to 16%. One of the main reason our healthcare is so expensive is our low-nutrition diets. And then there all those other things that make our “cheap” food so darned expensive — subisidies, ecological dead zones, climate change, decreased community, more food-borne pathogens, etc.

He wants you to cook more. You don’t get to go to a farmer’s market and come home with heat-and-serve meals. Eating real food means cooking. The good news is that if you start with quality ingredients, you can do some very simple things and make great meals quickly. Virtualy any vegetable can be made delicious with olive oil, garlic, and lemon. He also recommends Alice Waters’s new cookbook, The Art of Simple Cooking.

He wants you to voice your opinion. Know why McDonald’s doesn’t serve genetically modified potatoes anymore? Because ordinary people called McDonald’s to say “is it true you’re serving those things?” Somebody told Pollan once that a mere 25 different calls to McDonalds (not as a part of a campaign, mind you, but just ordinary folks) is enough to get that topic on the agenda of the McDonald’s corporate board. Same goes with grocery stores: If you ask your butcher for grass-fed meat, they might actually sell it. If you ask your produce manager for locally grown fruits and veggies, they might just start offering them.

He wants you to be skeptical about ethanol: You’re going to hear more — possibly much more — from Pollan this topic. Ethanol, he says, “is not a serious solution.” Yet because it offends the fewest interests (the car industry, the farmers, the oil companies, the politicians), it is the one we are treating most seriously. “Every farmer in America is planing corn right now,” he says. “Putting our energy economy in competition with our food economy is a very dangerous idea.” He cites as evidence research that 600 million more people in the world will become food insecure if ethanol really takes off. Seriously: you’re going to hear more from him on this one.

He wants you to have hope. Perhaps the most powerful moment in the night was where he talked about Joel Salatin’s farm, and how Salatin produces a really staggering amount of food…but because he is tuned to the entire ecosystem, he is able to produce that much and wind up with MORE topsoil a the year’s end, not less. Pollan notes that we have assumed that agriculture is a zero-sum game — to get what we want from nature, we think, we must diminish nature. His experience on Salatin’s farm taught him otherwords. “It is the best news I found in all of my journalism career,” he says. “It’s just stunningly hopeful.”

Hopeful indeed.

By the way, when you eat dinner with Michael Pollan, you eat really, really well. Everything was local, everything was delicious. Here he is with the farmers that grew the food we ate and the chef who prepared it:

And here, my friends, is the money shot: