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Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 2007
President's Message:
An Open Letter to Michael Pollan
Dear Mr. Pollan,
Let me start with congratulations. Your best-seller, The Omnivore's
Dilemma, is a brilliant exposé of modern farming and food
production practices; your description of the industrialization of organic
agriculture will motivate all of us, myself included, to order more
of our produce from CSAs and make more trips to farmers' markets; your
account of the week spent on Joel Salatin's pasture-based farm will
inspire many other farmers to adopt his elegant alternative; and your
analysis of the arguments for vegetarianism provides much ammunition
against this unsustainable, unnatural lifestyle. All this is presented
to us in your masterful writing style, making The Omnivore's Dilemma
a delight to read.
And yet... after this feast of words, the reader is left strangely
hungry. That's because you promised us more, more than just a description
of what many of us already know, of a food system gone wrong and making
us very sick. You promised to throw light on that burning question:
what should we have for dinner, what should we eat to have a healthy
life? You note that "whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed
about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety" and hint
that returning to the "quaint and unscientific criteria [of] pleasure
and tradition" may leave us healthier and happier than the dictates
of conventional nutritionists.
Perhaps the lack of cohesive answers in your book provided the motivation
for your subsequent article, "Unhappy Meals," published January
28, 2007 in the New York Times. After your best-seller extolling
the virtues of a system wherein animals are raised outdoors and allowed
to express their biological distinctiveness—their chickenness,
pigness or cowness—a system that provides our best solution to
the problem of CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations), soil depletion
and global warming, here's the crumb you give us: Eat food. Not too
much. Mostly plants. "A little meat won't kill you," you tell
us, thereby dismissing the whole system that Joel Salatin has so valiantly
pioneered. If a lot of meat is going to kill us, as you imply, why bother
with meat at all? If the solution to the health crisis is to eat more
plants, we'd better get to work monocropping more broccoli.
What's so disappointing about your conclusions is the fact that after
revealing the dark side of the industrial food system, and blasting
the vegetarian argument out of the water, you end up dishing up the
food industry's tired old anti-saturated fat, plant-based-diet propaganda.
What you've done is present your health-conscious yuppie readers with
the prudent diet dressed up in designer clothes and introduced your
foodie readers to food Puritanism in a silk gown. She looks lovely and
slim, she's popular with all the right people, but the shocking secret
that emerges on the honeymoon is her frigidity; the girl in green turns
out to be barren, unable to provide us with the thing we most desire—a
healthy productive life.
In retrospect, your inadequate prescription is not surprising because
you actually show your hand right at the beginning of The Omnivore's
Dilemma, where you tell us that foie gras and
triple crème cheese are "demonstrably toxic substances"
and that bread and pasta are "two of the most wholesome and uncontroversial
foods known to man." You describe yourself as an investigative
journalist, so we are justified in asking: have you found any science
proving that foie gras and triple crème
cheese are "demonstrably toxic?" These delicious traditional
foods are not demonstrably toxic to the French, so why would they be
toxic for us? And have you interviewed even one person among the millions
suffering from carb addiction or celiac disease, or stood in the bread
aisle and read the labels on what passes today for bread, the stuff
made from plants that we are supposed to eat six to eleven servings
of every day?
Because you are such a persuasive writer, people believe you when you
say that saturated fat is bad, that lean meat is healthier than fatty
meat, and that vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters. You repeat
these ideologies, these "shared but unexamined assumptions"
as you call them, without examining them at all, passing on to your
readers many of the malicious dietary falsehoods put together by the
industry you claim to dissect. Your endorsement of the McGovern Committee
recommendations—at least of its original recommendations to cut
back on meat and dairy products—is truly perplexing given that
a quick search of the internet reveals the former senator's marriage
to corporate agriculture, a system that would much rather we consumed
plants, especially processed plants, than animal foods.
It's interesting that you make corn your focus in the chapter on industrial
agriculture, and not soy; and that you follow the carbohydrate branch
of the corn processing tree, not the one that leads to the production
of oil. For it is impossible to understand fully what has happened to
our food supply without following the river of vegetable oil—first
corn oil and then soybean oil. Just a little digging will reveal that
it was the edible oil industry, the industry that gave us polyunsaturated
cooking oils, margarine and "pure vegetable shortening," that
spawned the anti-saturated fat propaganda, the fiction that butter is
bad and cream is toxic. Instead you have fallen for this industry lie
hook, line and sinker. There's not a bit of butter to bless yourself
with in your four meals, not even on Joel Salatin's delicious heritage
corn. It's obvious that your answer to the question you raise in the
very first pages of The Omnivore's Dilemma, "The trans
fats or the butter or the ‘not butter'?" is the "not
butter." In "Unhappy Meals" you remind us that margarine
was "one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more
healthful than the traditional food it replaced," as though you
can't even bring yourself to mention the B word. You've figured out
that margarine is a fraud but are still doing the industry's work of
belittling her competition.
Your book gets off to such a hopeful start as you refer to "native
wisdom" and "deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and
eating." But you don't tell us much about native wisdom, for example
the native wisdom that always sought out the fattest animals and never
ate meat without the fat; the native wisdom that ate the organ meats
first, the foie , the gras of the intestines and the
triple crème marrow; the native wisdom that, with few
exceptions, honored plants as food for animals and animals as food for
humans. Health, you tell us, depends on reading biological signals such
as smell and taste—except, apparently, the biological signals
that make fat so appealing. These must be suppressed, say the gurus,
and you've bought into the dogma.
It's true that we've lost this native wisdom, this instinct for what
we should and shouldn't eat. In this phase of our evolution, we can
only turn to science to guide us. But you are not very happy with the
science either, referring sarcastically to the study of nutrients in
our food as nutritionism. What's fascinating is the fact that good science—not
food Puritanism masquerading as science—validates traditional
wisdom. Good science has discovered vital nutrients in the fats and
organs of animals, especially of grass-fed animals, nutrients like vitamins
A, D and K, which are critical for normal growth and reproduction; and
good science also validates the need for cholesterol and saturated fat,
which likewise support normal growth and play key roles in the function
of the brain, lungs, kidney, immune system and reproductive systems.
Native cultures did not know the names of vitamins, but they understood
the concept of nutrient-dense foods and taught these concepts to the
younger generation. In fact, every food choice and preparation technique
in traditional cultures aimed to maximize the nutrients in the foods
they consumed—not to provide them with puny Recommended Daily
Allowances but nutrients in superabundance. Thus the choice of organ
meats over muscle meats—liver is at least ten times richer in
most nutrients than steak and a thousand times richer in nutrients than
fruits and vegetables; the liberal consumption of animal fats; the daily
use of bones to supply calcium, usually as bone broth; the fermentation
of fruits and sap and infusions to make condiments and beverages bubbling
with nourishment; and the careful preparation of grains and legumes
to neutralize substances that block the uptake of nutrients and to increase
nutrient content—like the liver-steak ratio, the level of nutrients
in fermented grains and legumes can be increased an order of magnitude.
Thus the Native Americans processed cooked cornmeal by wrapping it in
corn husks and letting it ferment for two weeks. When we compare industrial
foods with native foods, we need to realize that the comparison is not
of foods impoverished by processing with the parent food, but of foods
impoverished by processing with the parent foods greatly enriched
by processing—a difference that is more likely to be one
hundredfold rather than a mere tenfold.
More than anything, traditional cultures valued the fats and organ
meats of animals on green grass—and it is the recognition of the
benefits of these foods, more than a desire to eat local or opt out
of industrial agriculture, that will drive consumers to farms like Joel's.
The nutrients lost when we move animals from grass to CAFOs are the
very nutrients that protect the arteries from calcification, prevent
arthritis, cure cancer and confer that greatest of gifts—children
who are healthy, strong and happy.
So the prescription for good health is not to eat more plants, but
more butter—butter from cows eating lots of green plants—and
to imbibe that quintessence of green grass, the gift of the sacred cow,
whole, unprocessed milk; and to eat egg yolks and gras and
foie from grass-fed animals, and to feed these sacred nutrient-dense
foods to babies, to start them off and truly nourish them during their
period of growth with the richest, most nutrient-dense foods that science
can reveal to us.
You wonder whether farms like Joel Salatin's have any future on a planet
on which the industrial food system seems to have a vise-like grip;
not only do these farms have a future, they are our future,
our only future, because only those with the wisdom to support
these kinds of farms and eat the nutrient-dense foods and fats of grass-fed
animals will produce healthy offspring in future generations.
These offspring will not suffer "stresses and anxieties"
over their food because they will be well nourished. Stress and anxiety
are signs of fat deficiency; the unhappy meal is a wrong-fat meal or
a lowfat meal.
Allow me to offer some suggestions to turn your angst-producing meal
to one that leaves you satisfied and content. We'll focus on your hunter-foraging
meal, which is the one that comes closest to the precepts of nutritional
wisdom. Dispense with the fava beans and double the pâté,
pâté accompanied with traditionally fermented pickles,
which help the body digest rich foods. Sauté your morels in butter,
lots of butter, and serve them with a cream sauce—forget the fettuccine,
it's just empty calories. Use plenty of reduced bone broth on your meat—and
not just for this meal but all your meals. Spread your wild East Bay
yeast levain with butter, butter so thick it leaves teethmarks
when you bite it. Place a dollop of raw whipped cream on your Bing cherry
galette and wash down your meal with a traditional lacto-fermented beverage
like root beer or cream soda. These suggestions, followed in principle
at all your meals, provide a surefire remedy for anxiety and a recipe
for good health.
One more thing: why not devote your next book, or at least an article,
to the Weston A. Price Foundation? You mention us in The Omnivore's
Dilemma, but don't accurately describe our message. Come to our
next conference where you will learn about traditional dietary wisdom,
soak up our enthusiasm and taste real sodas. Visit some of our chapter
leaders and find out how they are reconnecting thousands of consumers
to grass-based farms that produce not only meat but raw milk. Find out
why our members have jars of strange bubbling concoctions on their kitchen
counters. Help us celebrate our rejection of industrial misinformation
couched as science and our embrace of traditional fats, starting with
the deep yellow butter of grass-fed cows. Apply your fine journalistic
skills to describing this nascent movement, a movement that will return
food happiness and good health to the industrial age. And then tuck
your toes under one of our nutrient-dense traditional meals, loaded
with good fats, velvety stocks and satisfying condiments. Watch that
angst dissipate, replaced by a sense of oneness with the natural world.
The omnivore's dilemma is not in fact a dilemma at all, but a construct
of false nutritional doctrine. We need investigative journalists like
you to help us clear away the misinformation. Please accept our invitation
to a meal.
Sally Fallon
President
The Weston A. Price Foundation
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Healthy Baby Gallery
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