I haven't read McKibben -- suggestions for the article most representative of his style would be welcome.
As a consequence, I'm not really sure why Pollan is acceptable and McKibben is extreme. In other words, I'm not really sure what is meant by an unacceptable romanticization of food and nature (McKibben), and what is a supposedly acceptable romanticization (Pollan)? As Dorene might say, I will soldier on ignorant of the distinction...
Andy, I apologize if I'm dense, but I am having a hard time parsing the sentence. Are you saying that you don't understand why people think Pollan romanticizes nature? That you took him as someone who doesn't? Both? Neither?
Taking Pollan at his word, he does seem to trade in the alienation from nature thesis. He acknowledges that we probably can't live the way he thinks is best: directly interacting with nature to gather and cook our own food. So, he'll settle for food from the likes of Polyfarm and sometimes industrial organic that'll allow him to open a can of stock rather than make it from scratch.
But the whole point of the ominivore's dilemma is that we can eat so many different kinds of things that we are also more likely than a koala bear (koala's only eat one thing) to happen upon something that is bad for us -- makes us ill or kills us. We are removed from the small scale mechanisms that would allow us to be perceive the potential dangers out there -- not to mention revel in all the pleasure of food in all its variety. We are alienated from nature by the bigness of modern ag practices, and that is what is wrong with it all. It's so big, we are not attuned to the rhythms of nature -- which is why we end up making stupid decisions, protected as we are from the "discipline" of nature -- but also the market, as both Saletin and Pollan explain (more below).
The point of transparency at Polyface farm is that you can go there and see for yourself what is happening with your food. It is "clean" food. The focus on community, as Joel Saletin's explains, is not a departure from capitalism, but a vital to it - at least to a localized capitalist market economy. And this point is echoed in histories of the development of capitalism, where it's pointed out that, in part, what was crucial was the development of trust between buyers and sellers -- either through informal mechanisms (buy from Brother Stockton, he is obviously a man of god: frugal, keeps a clean bakery, does not gouge...) or formal state mechanisms (to enforce trust).
It's about trust for Saletin -- for a successful capitalist market economy: The rise of a capitalist market system meant the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker could be trusted not to screw you over.
The glass abattoir is to see for yourself how the chicken is killed, gutted, plucked. You can also see for yourself that the animals are raised in ways that contribute to chicken happiness. (chicken happiness! Chicken Happiness! Chicken! Happiness! No matter how many times I type or read that; I don't think I can ever do it without pausing to dwell on the way Pollan defends so much else in that book, but hardly ever seems to ask himself: won't people think it's weird to consider the happiness of chickens and pigs so taken-for-granted, that i don't have to bother to explain it or defend?)
"Imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as Polyface's ... So much of what happens behind those walls -- the cruelty, the carelessness, the filth -- would simply have to stop." (p 235)
Sure.
I thought about that applied to my own workplace, and wondered if we'd have better software products if the process was transparent to the public. Would it matter if the people who used the product I made met me and the rest of the team, could walk in and shuffle among our cewbs, looking over our shoulders, examining the code, or tut tutting at the liberal enjoyment of youtube? Would they worry if we were happy in our conditions? Our pay? Our career path? Maybe we could, like chickens, be plucked out of the cold water bath, for our customers to select: we pick that team over there to develop our web-based CRM system!
But I digress. Speaking of CRM software, (*snort* geddit? Customer Relationship Mgmt software) Saletin calls his sense of community and trust "relationship marketing". For Saletin, and clearly for Pollan as he reverts to this idea repeatedly in the rest of the book, "the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye, something few of us ever take the trouble to do." (p 240)
Basically, Saletin (and Pollan) don't believe people are capable of integrity on their own. It has to be guaranteed! No one would, on their own, produce clean food. They need the discipline of the market! A buyer needs to be able to look them in the eye and the enterprise has to be transparent. Integrity only happens when someone might look over their shoulder and notice some carelessness on the job or maybe a shoddy job of slicing a chicken's throat.
It is endlessly amusing, to me, that this chapter title is, basically, "The Market" -- with a colon followed by an amplifier, "Greetings from the Non-Barcode People."
Because, of course, (and not that anyone thinks otherwise), this chapter is a *tribute* to a market economy, not an argument against it.
Just like Saletin's pigs ruttin' after alcohol-laced corn buried in cow manure, everything has a *utilitarian* purpose -- toward the end of pursuing individual freedom and profit. The pigs, pursuing their pigness like an acorn inevitably pursues its oak treeness, end up becomingly unwitting workers on Saletin's farm: they turn the compost pile that is the floor of Saletin's cattle barn. It is functional, it is useful, it *works*, it saves Saletin money.
It is efficient.
It is not surprising, then, that Pollan follows all of this with a discussion of "sentimental communism". Basically, his rhetoric is, "If you think *I* am sentimental, check out the commies! Holeee Crap, was Lenin a romantic fool. Capitalism and Communism are two big (geddit?) baddies: they both demand "an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain tings we value...we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time. As Lenin put it, in a sentiment the WTO endorses...every day, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Perhaps it is no accident that sentimental communism foundered precisely on the issue of food. The Soviets sacrificed millions of small farms and farmers to the dream of a collectivized industrial agriculture that never managed to do what a food system has to do: feed the nation. By the time of its collapse, more than half of the food consumed in the Soviet Union was being produced by small farmers and home gardeners...." (p 256)
So everything that is wrong with it is that it is Big, not small. A big, alienated, impersonal market is bad, it's what causes all the problems: It's Teh Bigneth, stoopit. It's not a problem with the market system of exchange, reducing everything to price and value (instead of values!).
It's Teh Bigneth, stoopit!
Keep it small, where we can check the integrity of the baker by looking him in the eye with disapproval or approval, not to mention the ability to see if he's sweeping his floors and washing his hands.
"PRESIDENT BUSH: I will answer the question. I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue."
I digress.
The question of Pollan's romanticization/sentimentalization of nature, it doesn't seem disputable to me. There are so many juicy quotes to choose from. I mean, just because he mocks his own fall into the abyss of hunter porn, it doesn't follow that he is inoculated from the problem by irony. He clearly thinks we are alienated from nature: the point of getting closer to it is so that we will be closer to the perils and pleasures of our omnivorous nature. we need to suffer for our errors in nature, the better to revel in the pleasures of food gathered, hunted, and cooked as close to nature as possible. And we must engage in these activities sparingly so as to enjoy them. If we did them all the time, it'd get old.
(Little girl: protect your special flower!)
As for the question of the superiority of food and whether the organic food buyer is motivated by that. Well, superior in what? I think these quotes, below, capture it. They think the food tastes better, is cleaner, fresher, happier, chickenier, and you get more for less, etc.
If superior means better than something else, then clearly these folks think the food they're buying is better than the food they could buy at the Krash and Skarry Food Market:
Pollan quotes the people buying the chicken and eggs. They pay a premium because:
"tastes like chicken" "don't trust the...supermarket" "eggs (that) ... slap you in the face!" "fresher chickens" "comes from happy animals" "clean meat for my family" "I trust the Salatins more than... Wal-Mart." (and "Keeping my money right here in town.")
(BTW, now I understand where the ridiculous phrase "artisanal" emerged from, after seeing it used so often... "artisanal economics" -- from Allan Nationa's 'Stockman Grass Farmer' -- following on the theories of a Harvard B School prof, Michael-Porter.)
Saletin follows this with Joel's own rant on the superiority of "his food." Later, in the chapter, 'The Market: Greetings from the Non-Barcode People,' Pollan quotes the chefs in Charlottesville restaurants who say, "a chickenier chicken," the chickens "taste cleaner," "you never need as many (eggs) as (my recipes) call for." (p 252)
Later, Pollan writes that the local food movement was promoted by chefs like Alice Waters (the Cheese Penis) who has "done much to educate the public about the virtues of local agriculture, the pleasures of eating by the season, and the superior qualities of exceptionally fresh food grown with care and without chemicals." (p 254-55)
Earlier, Pollan quotes the marketing folks at Whole Foods who say that people are motivated by fear and pleasure when they shop at Whole Foods.
The popularity and fortunes of organic food has always followed the food scares associated with industrially-farmed food. The big booms in organic have always been proceeded by scares. So fear seems a big factor -- and is encompassed in some of the comments above:
"One of the company's (Whole Foods') marketing consultants explained to me that the Whole Foods shopper feels that by buying organic he is "engaging in authentic experiences" and imaginatively enacting a "return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact." This sounds a lot like Virgilian postoral, which also tried to have it both ways. ... Whole Foods offers what (Leo) Marx terms "a landscape of reconciliation" between the realms of nature and culture, a place here, as the marketing consultant put it, "people will come together through organic foods to get back to the origin of things" -- perhaps by sitting down to enjoy one of the microwaveable organic TV dinners ... stacked in the frozen food case. How's that for having it both ways?"
Now, you can walk away from that paragraph assuming that Pollan is opposed to the romanticization/sentimentality of Supermarket Pastoral. But he's not opposed at all. A read of his very last pages, as he talks about eating a meal he hunted and gathered himself, is simply a much longer version fo what the marketing consultant says above about "people coming together through organic foods to get back to the origin of things." (His entire blast of pages on Ortega y Gasset's "what is" comes to mind, also.)
Pollan is not opposed to this view of the world. Quite the contrary: he is opposed to false advertising, which is why he spends a considerable number of pages showing you all the lies you are sold when you buy industrial organic.
Organic milk may taste better, but it suffers from the same pitfalls of industrialized conventional agriculture:
"Some (certainly not all) organic milk comes from factory farms, where thousands of Holsteins that never encounter a blad of grass spend their days confined to a fenced 'dry lot,' eating (certified organic) grain and tethered to a milking machine three times a day. The reason much of this milk is ultrapasteurized (a high-heat process that damages its nutirtional quality) is so tha t big companies like Horizon an d Aurora can sell it over long distances." (p. 139)
And the whole section on Petalum Poultry kept reminding me of Jordan Hayes, who about 4 years ago, pointed to this inevitable conclusion: organic would be a meaningless term. Pollan shows how free range organic chicken and eggs is often a ridiculous phrase as well.
Petaluma Farms turn "out to be more animal factory than farm. (Rosie the chicken) lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosies, who, aside from their certified organic feed, live lives little different from that of any other industrial chicken. Ah, but what about the "free-range" lifestyle promised on the label? True, there's a little door in the shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five or six weeks old -- for fear they'll catch something outside -- and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later."