> 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?
I take him as somebody who basically doesn't romanticize nature. I think people think that out of sloppy reading.
As I've said before, twice, I do think he romanticizes the social side, at least where it encounters economics. There is your standard distrust of "globalization". There is a trust-the-small-businessman, we-don't-need-no-regulation thing going on, at least when he's writing about Polyface. Basically a Naderite thing. So fine, Pollan goes to a reeducation camp and Saletin goes up against the wall. You'll have to get into that argument with somebody else. I think local knowledge probably has real value at farm, but then I think it probably does everywhere.
> 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?)
I dunno. You ever hear of CAFOs? You cool with that? Not everybody is.
> 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.
If there are so many juicy quotes that make Pollan's romanticization/sentimentalization of nature indisputable, then let's see them. You took a lot of time transcribing to show what an asshole Saletin is, it should be easy.
By the way, to make is easier, parts of the book are on his website. Here is part of the "No Barcode" chapter. The phrase, lest anybody was unaware, is Saletin's.
<http://michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=76>
> 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: [...]
And your point is that it's not?
> 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)
And this is bad? Bullshit?
> 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.)
Is this all of it?
<http://michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=74>
Lemme get this straight: getting in the groove of the moment when hunting for the first time, or getting a thrill out of eating what you've caught and prepared with what sound like some real characters, suggests a generalized ideology of nature-romanticism? Do I have that right?
> 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 this romanticizes nature how? Have you ever tasted the ultrapasturized stuff? Or does it all taste the same to you?
> 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.
Again: how does this support what you claim?
>From earlier, redundancies snipped:
On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 12:00 PM, shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> and the part, earlier in the book, where he goes on about how important it
> is to be a self-sufficient community, producing your own food (because food
> is special and different). that was kind of wild, to me, for someone to
> write this:
>
> "And why *should* a nation produce its own food when others can produce it
> more cheaply? A dozen reasons leap to mind, but most of them the Steven
> Blanks of the world -- and they are legion -- are quick to dismiss as
> sentimental. I'm thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing
> that your community, or country, can feed itself....."
>
> p 256
>
> notice that, instead of addressing the charge of sentimentality, what pollan
> does is elide it by making the person who questions it into an ally of
> Steven Blanks. Pollan here _embraces_ the charge of sentimentality with a
> rhetorical "so? what's *your* problem?"
Could it be that he doesn't find this sentimental?
<http://michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=84>
[....]
But there's nothing sentimental about local food--indeed, the reasons to support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental--and deliberate--contamination. This is something the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do." The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. "The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry" make them "vulnerable to terrorist attack." Today 80 percent of America's beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy--and at the moment they are thriving--is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.
[....]
(Note: I'm not saying I necessarily agree with his reasoning here. But romanticism?)
> "So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond
> the individual's control -- what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the
> gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a
> little different. We can still decided, every day, what we're going to put
> into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in." (p 257)
I dunno, people on the list keep throwing around words like "agency", like it's something important. He may be snookered by an illusion of agency, but that's a different matter. And food's not different? I thought it was somewhere between breathing and sex. Is sex different?
> and what i find endlessly fascinating is that he begins all this with a
> critique of the Supermarket Pastoral as literary device at Whole Foods. But
> this entire section on life at Polyface farm *is* precisely the Supermarket
> Pastoral he derides. It is telling a narrative about food, that pushes a
> much higher value, that gets you to buy the stuff, *because* of the story:
>
> "Supermarket Pastoral is a most seductive literary form, beguiling enough to
> survive in the face of a great many discomfiting facts. I suspect that's
> because it gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for
> safe food, but for a connection to the earth and to the handful of
> domesticated creatures we've long depended on." (p. 137)
>
> as I said earlier, Supermarket Pastoral appears to be something Pollan's
> mocking in this section. But it turns out, he's not. He's perfectly well in
> support of it. As long as it is true. He judges the pigs at Polyface farm as
> happy, and so they are. Truth in advertising. Nothing wrong with branding --
> getting people to pay more for something because of the description, because
> we are buying an identity. That is all fine. As long as it is true that, if
> the label says pigs are happy, then they are. If your tribe agrees, then
> they are. Buy the bacon!
So basically you're saying that Polyface and "industrial organic" are identical in practice?
I'll get to the part where I lost patience later.
-- Andy