> > 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?
there was a side discussion about what motivates whole foods shoppers. Michael Perelman notes that his observation was that people talked about the superiority of the food at Whole Foods. The debate wasn't about whether or not their estimation of superiority was correct, but whether or not that was what motivated them to shop there -- or something else. I spoke to that discussion by drawing on quotes from Pollan. There was no sinister intent, merely adding some observations from Pollan's book.
> > 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?
I'm just quoting for reasons described above. I make no judgement on it. Although, I could probably work up some snark if you'd like. :)
> > 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?
I'm not sure what you are asking.
><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?
My argument is that he is not opposed to romanticization of nature -- which I *thought* you'd claimed. Perhaps I misread. My point, again: If you read that passage above as an indication that he is snarking at the romanticization of nature, I disagree. It sounds like he's making fun of the Whole Foods package rhetoric, supermarket pastoral. But he has no problem with the basic idea ""people coming together through organic foods to get back to the origin of things."
What he has a problem with is false advertising. It's when the supermarket pastoral uses images of cows grazing on pastures but doesn't raise grass fed cows at all, then it's to be derided because it isn't true. Otherwise, getting "back to the origin of things" through organic foods is just what the journalist ordered at the end of his book. I refer to my extensive quotation of Pollan's argument that we must get back in touch with the way our food is produced in order that the good life and the pleasurable life will be fused.
> > 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?
That passage wasn't used to support anything about romanticization. I was pointing out to doug that, while it might taste better, it isn't necessarily produced on farms that are much better than regular old industrial farms -- in terms of animal treatment than the industrial farms from which regular milk is produced.
>Have you ever tasted the
>ultrapasturized stuff?
Tell me something, is the food snobbery that follows just something you do naturally, or did you pick that up from reading Pollan?
Why would I want to drink something that has been heated to such high temperatures that it removes some of the nutrients.
I don't drink milk much, btw. But when I was a cook, we never used ultra pasteurized anything because it sucked for cooking, especially cream. Once, when we had to get cream from a grocery store b/c our supplier was out, we couldn't get the store bought to whip -- b/c it was ultrapasteurized, which we hadn't noticed when buying it. (restaurant suppliers don't need to wrry about shelf life, which is what ultrapasteurization is for: extending shelf life.)
as for whether I pass muster as someone who thinks about where their food comes from and is not "thoughtless" about what I eat, who gets "at one with nature" in my daily practices:
is drinking straight from a cow fucking good enough? Or will you just make a eeeuuuu yucky face and tell me all about germs and stuff? Grill me about whether it was pastured, organic, pesticide-free grain, antibiotic free, etc?
You are pretty presumptuous to assume you know what i do and don't eat or drink. The really annoying thing is: I've been eating most of my like precisely as this guy prescribes. I knew all about his crap about eating whole foods long ago. I knew all about the scam of low fat long ago. I knew all about not eating crap from packages with more than five ingredients in the 19 fucking 80s.
I knew all this, amazingly enough, from following SCIENCE.
And it annoys the living fuck out of me that, because I don't fall all over Pollan in massive praise that you assume that I'm a stupid fucking mindless person who doesn't care about what I eat or how I eat.
IT is truly annoying, especially since I was a godamned cook for years and the idea that I'm clueless as to the pleasures of good tasting food... just boggles my fucking mind.
And it is precisely this food snobbism that comes from readers of Pollan that us RFA. He may wish that this wasn't the case, but the fact is, he does encourage it through his writing. I'll get to that when I finish reading his coda: In Defense of Food.
> Or does it all taste the same to you?
I rest my case.
<...>
>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?
We talk about agency, at least I do, when people insist that they are brainwashed -- as, by the way, Pollan frequently does. He believes people eat what they eat because they are brainwashed by nutritionism, journalism (ahem -- which he, himself, includes in his article, "Unhappy Meals")
Others may raise the agency issue for other reasons. But to my knowledge, we are mostly raising it in defense of claims that, for example, people only read romance novels because they are mindless dupes of the patriarchy. The argument is that people exercise agency, _even_ when they are doing things that certain exemplars of what good and proper culture is wring their hands over what the poor dears put in their brains.
etc.
> > 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?
uh. exactly the opposite. the discussion was directed at doug's comment about the good taste of organic milk. I pointed out that, yeah, but. Which is exactly what pollan does. He talks about the superior taste and quality of food from Whole Foods (I've quoted him already, above) and then goes into a discussion of the problems with industrial organic. After that, he moves on to Polyface Farms where he contrasts their methods with 'beyond organic' methods.
btw, my experiment with organic v reg milk is that the reason why organic is so tasty is the higher fat content.
Readint the label on the side, although it says it contains the same fat percentage as regular, there is a calorie difference of 4 cals. Organic whole milk has more calories than regular milk. Scrutinizing the label, it obviously comes from the fat.
People think reg milk is 4% fat, but it only has to be 3.25 by law (or maybe 3.75. I've forgotten) Anyway, that's a well-known factoid, for me, from living in farm country.
My guess is that organic just has more fat because I really discerned little difference.