DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Some interesting, nonconventional thoughts on vegetarianism from “food chain” expert Michael Pollan:

I looked at the environmental issues and I realized vegetarianism wasn’t necessarily the answer. If we were all vegetarian, it would still require a huge industrial food system because there are parts of the country where you can’t grow fruits and vegetables. For example, there are certain landscapes, like the rocky landscapes of New England, where animals are the best way to get protein from the land, not row crops. If you really want to conform food chain to place, meat has to be a part of it. We should be eating less meat, especially with 70 percent of our country’s grain going to feed animals. Yes, we’d be better off with more vegetarians, but I’m not going to be one of them…

We don’t need one kind of food chain; we need 10. Monoculture is as much of a mental problem as an agricultural one.

I think I have that mental problem. I do tend to think in absolutist terms. I embrace complexity unwillingly.

Even so, I believe vegetarianism will never achieve even 10% penetration in the US. Look no further than the Atkins diet for proof — millions of people would willingly eat no vegetables, in spite of the risks, in spite of common sense.

That would be an interesting survey: are there more Atkins dieters or vegetarians in the US?

Anyway, getting back to Pollan’s statement about the environment, I think Pollan does vegetarians a disservice when he says “vegetarianism [is not] necessarily the answer,” because it’s clearly part of the answer. I’d like to know what another eight food chains are that could break up the current beef monoculture and solve the problem of the food industry trashing the environment.

As you might expect, Pollan also has some interesting things to say about “cheap food,” which is the output of the big agribusiness and fast food industries:

The industrial food chain does produce food more cheaply, in terms of the price you pay at McDonald’s or the supermarket, but the real cost of cheap food is not reflected in those prices. You’re paying for it in your tax dollars because you’re giving farmers $20 billion a year in subsidies. You’re paying for it in public health costs. These subsidies make unhealthy food cheaper than healthy food, and so our country is facing an obesity epidemic. The antibiotics you need for your son’s illness don’t work anymore because we’ve squandered them all on farm animals. We can’t take fish from the Gulf of Mexico because of the nitrogen runoff from agricultural fertilizers. The people of Des Moines, Iowa, have to drink bottled water in the summer because their water is poisoned. Those are all costs. The phrase I use is “the high cost of cheap food.”

Here’s the whole article: The High Price of Cheap Food: Mealpolitik over lunch with Michael Pollan