It's all about the food

The grow-local trend has strong roots in this region, author Michael Pollan says

In his latest book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," environmental writer Michael Pollan paints a sobering picture of the way we eat in the 21st century. But when he takes the podium at two appearances in the Triangle next week, he plans to deliver an upbeat message based on a rapidly evolving national trend, one with particularly strong roots in this region.

"Given that I'm talking about sustainable agriculture and local food systems, I'll be talking about some of the good news I've seen," Pollan said from his home in San Francisco. "The movement is coalescing. It's about growing local fresh food, about getting out of the supermarket.

"It's one of the more hopeful things going on. People realizing that they do have choices with food."

Pollan's book, published this year by Penguin Press, is about its title: the plethora of food choices facing the typical American. In it, he traces the paths of four meals:

* an industrial-produced meal (McDonald's) consumed the way a fifth of all American meals are consumed, i.e., in the car;

* a meal made from organic ingredients purchased from the upscale Whole Foods;

* one relying on his own hunter-and-gatherer wiles (for the main course, he shoots and slaughters a wild boar);

* a chicken dinner from a Virginia farm practicing sustainable agriculture.

That industrial meal, Pollan writes, is behind what he calls our "national eating disorder." It's a disorder, he says, that not only fuels our obesity epidemic but makes us increasingly vulnerable to unpredictable supplies of foreign oil.

"Our food chain depends on cheap energy," Pollan says. "If cheap Arab oil is over -- when it's over -- we won't be able to eat this way."

Apples offer a good local example. North Carolina's high country grows some of the best apples around. Yet go to your neighborhood supermarket and your choices are from Washington state and beyond.

"There are so many negatives to buying apples from halfway around the world," Pollan says. "They're cheap at the register, but they're not nearly as fresh. And guess what: They're boring, but boring has become globally acceptable."

Paradoxically, our disinterest in food -- our obsession with carbs and fats rather than food itself -- is also helping to expand our waistlines, Pollan claims.

Unlike, say, the French or Italians, Americans don't have a strong food culture. This, he says, makes us more vulnerable to "the blandishments of marketers."

"We blow in the wind with every new nutritional device," says Pollan, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley and is director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. "Marketers now have more power than our mothers in what we eat."

History shows, Pollan says, that people tend to be healthier when they follow long-term eating traditions.

Part of the problem is that we lack a basic education in nutrition, an education that should start at an early age.

"We teach kids about sex in schools, it's a very important part of our lives," Pollan says. "It seems to follow that we would teach them about eating, too, doesn't it?"

As Pollan's first meal -- that drive-through dinner from McDonald's -- shows, such an education is not a simple matter. That meal, like much of the American diet, is corn-based. Pollan spends much of the industrial meal chapter following the nation's corn crop as it infiltrates its way into our diet with remarkable efficacy: Of the 45,000 items in a typical supermarket, Pollan writes, about a quarter contain corn.

A reliance on one foodstuff carries with it certain other liabilities. What if, say, a blight were to hit the corn crop?