More on Will & Pollan

Columnist sips the Pollan Kool-Aid
3/9/2009
By Steve Cornett

Did you see that George Will has bought into the Pollan Premise? (Click here to read it.) Will is usually a careful thinker and reporter. His column last week is testimony to just how persuasive Michael Pollan’s arguments are.(Click here to read Pollan's views on food policy from the New York Times magazine.)

Somebody better get busy presenting the other side of this story, because now we have both our new president and a leading conservative thinker playing footsy with a most radical concept.

Michael Pollan is the teacher, writer and “food activist” who is pushing a premise that holds that food is too cheap in the United States. He says that cheap food is a bad thing because we eat too much of it and get fat and unhealthy and that is a big part of the health care problem. And, by the way, the way we farm produces a big carbon footprint.

He summed it all up a couple of years ago with this bit of advice in a New York Times piece: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

His primary target is subsidized corn, but to get at corn he likes to say mean things about “factory farm” feedlots and how cheap corn makes cheap meat and, ergo, we’re all fat slobs because of cattle feeders.I’ll let the corn guys take care of themselves on this. I’ve read both ways on the science behind the anti-corn syrup argument and don’t pretend to know the answer. But you can’t blame red meat for this obesity problem, and especially not the explosion in diabetes.

Here, after just a bit of Google research, are a couple of graphics that ought to make anybody—much less somebody with George Will’s intellect—question that premise. Read More

I shared the original article that George Will wrote earlier this week. Here is Steve Cornett’s take on it. He makes some very valid points, with the research to back them up. Not just a feel good idea that Pollan likes to share with everyone. Pollan is not a sacred cow, his ideas need to be criticized because they will not work.