The November/December/January 2009-2010 issue of Organic Gardening magazine is running a special feature with award-winning author Michael Pollan. In the special exclusive interview, Pollan speaks candidly about what’s truly organic, First Lady Michelle Obama, what he sees for the future beyond organic, what’s missing from our food chain, and discusses the question, “Can organic feed the world?.”
If you haven’t checked out the issue yet here are some cool select quotes from Michael Pollan’s interview. with Organic Gardening:
Pollan on what’s truly organic…
“Organic is in danger of being co-opted. I’ve been on organic factory farms, and if most organic consumers went to those places, they would feel they were getting ripped off. I think organic risks a real crisis of perception if the values that they’re selling don’t accurately reflect the practices they’re engaging in. They’re organic by the letter, not organic in spirit.”
Pollan on First Lady Michelle Obama…
“The future is [people] really making the connections between food and energy and climate change, and food and health care. Watch what Michelle Obama is doing. That’s really important stuff: her emphasis on fresh food. She talks about organic, but she [also] talks about fresh. Basically, getting away from processed food is key. And if you’re eating produce, and it’s not organic, it’s a big step up from eating processed food. All these partial steps are very important.”
Pollan on the question: Can organic feed the world?
“…Even if you can’t feed the world organically, and I don’t know that you can’t—there are very good arguments that you can—even if you just feed half the world organically, you’d be doing so much for the land, so much for our health, so much for the atmosphere, that it’s well worth doing. So the fact that you might not be able to get all the way does not damn the effort to try. And so I don’t think people should be discouraged by that.”
“But ‘can organic feed the world?’ is a question really up for grabs. The honest answer is, we don’t know. I’ve seen research that suggests with really smart rotations and cover cropping there is enough nitrogen to do it. I also think that if we changed our relationship to meat, we probably could.”
Pollan on if he prefers local foods to organic foods…
“No, I don’t. I support local, because in my experience here in California, local is organic…But if I were a supermarket shopper I would, because you can’t meet farmers face to face and you don’t really know what they’re doing, so to the extent people depend on the supermarket and are not interested in the farmers’ market, we need organic. If people are willing to put in more time and like the farmers’ market experience—because it is more than food that’s on offer there—[then] local, definitely.”
The whole “Can organic feed the world question” is a big deal right now with recent slams on organic by the media and Michael Mack, chief executive of Syngenta, a Swiss agribusiness giant that makes pesticides and seeds. Mack noted, “Organic food is not only not better for the planet… it is categorically worse.” The piece on Mack was run in the New York Times and one of his issues was that organic can’t feed the world, which may have some truth to it, but is not 100% by any means and the theory hasn’t been tested. I like Pollan’s take on that – the whole we haven’t tried, and if we did it would so much better in the long run for the planet and our health and so on. Very cool.
Find the full article “A Conversation with Michael Pollen” in the November-January 2010 issue of Organic Gardening Magazine.
[image via stock.xchng]
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