Michael Pollan on What's Wrong with Environmentalism

By Kate Cheney Davidson, Yale Environment 360. Posted July 8, 2008.

It's easy to think of Michael Pollan as a food writer. After all, his most successful books-- including his most recent, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto-- focus on food and the implications of the choices we make about what we eat. But Pollan's work also delves deeply into the environmental effects of those choices-- from the impact of America's corn-based agriculture on its ecosystems to the carbon impact of industrial-scale farming. And Pollan, who serves as Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has emerged as a staunch advocate of buying local food, growing one's own produce, and generally making the kind of individual lifestyle choices that could lead to society-wide change in consumption habits.

San Francisco-based journalist Kate Cheney Davidson recently interviewed Pollan at his home in Berkeley, California. In a wide-ranging discussion, Pollan talked about the need to cut back U.S. ethanol subsidies, why victory gardens worked, and why environmentalism needs to shift its focus from preserving wilderness to creating sustainability.

Kate Cheney Davidson: In your book An Omnivore's Dilemma, you explore the environmental, ethical, and political implications of our food system. Increasingly you hear people talk about the environmental or "carbon" impact of food. Do you think the footprint of our food has gotten any smaller since that book came out a couple of years ago?

Michael Pollan: I don't think there's been any significant change. There are basically two food chains that we have in this country, one a lot bigger than the other. First is a heavily fossil fuel-based food chain, the industrial food chain. The other is a more solar-based food chain, and in that I include things like organic agriculture, pastured meat production. To me, that's kind of the key distinction. The fossil fuel-based food chain takes about ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy. So it's highly reliant on petroleum, and as a result is largely responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production.

The other food chain is not innocent of an impact on the atmosphere, but it's a whole lot smaller. It's still essentially relying on photosynthesis, on solar collection by grasses, on sequestering carbon in the soil through feeding it with compost and things like that so its impact on the climate is much smaller. That solar-based food chain is growing, and this is where a lot of interest in agriculture is today, but it's still tiny. Organic represents less than two percent of the food economy. Local is probably well under one percent. So I don't think we've made a huge dent yet. But the models are there, and the models are becoming more popular.

KCD: What sorts of models?

MP: You can compare conventional beef production to a grass-based system of beef production, which is how we used to produce beef. Cattle are evolved to eat grass-- they have rumens so they can digest it. So when they [cows] are getting grass, you have a really exquisite and sustainable food chain-- where the sun feeds the grass, and the grass feeds the ruminant, and the ruminant feeds us. They are not competing with us for food, and it doesn't take vast amounts of fossil-fuel fertilizer to produce that food. It takes none, until you start trucking the animal off of the ranch.

The problem with that system for the marketplace was that it's a slower way to produce beef, and it takes more skill. It's a lot easier just to put them on a feedlot, give them lots of corn, give them antibiotics so they can survive the corn, give them hormones to speed up their growth. Suddenly you take a two-year process and get it down to 13-14 months. Time is money, so we moved that way.

But now the economics are changing because fuel is so expensive, and fertilizer is so expensive that the economics of grass-finished beef are starting to look a lot better. Certainly from a sustainability point of view it's a thousand times better. Grass is the original solar technology. Every blade of grass is a little solar collector. That's the free lunch-- sun growing grass, and feeding grass to animals you can eat.

KCD: Climate change is already disproportionately impacting the people who can least tolerate it: the poor. One of those manifestations, it's feared, will be massive food shortages due to things like changing weather patterns and the demand for biofuels. We may have already begun to see this, as prices of staples like corn and rice skyrocket and people begin to riot over food they can no longer afford. What do you think can be done on a global scale to alleviate what may be the beginning of a food crisis on a level we've never seen before?

MP: From one level, it's very simple. Grain is the basis of the diet for most of the people in the world, and grain prices have suffered this surge in prices over the last year that's unprecedented. That's because we began making this huge investment in ethanol and subsidizing ethanol production. That led to a spike in corn prices because we were making corn-based ethanol. But when you have a spike in one grain's prices, all the farmers rush to produce more of that grain. So you had wheat and soybean farmers getting into corn and out of soy and wheat, so that reduced the supply of wheat and soy and the prices there went crazy too. So that's the big cause.

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