The Food Police

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This is the most pernicious aspect of the analysis by Pollan and others. If junk food is everywhere and people are naturally drawn to it, those who resist it must have heightened powers. When Pollan waxes poetic about his own rarefied, distinctive eating practices, the messianic, self-satisfied tone is not accidental. In describing his ability to overcome King Corn, to conceive, procure, prepare, and serve his version of the perfect meal, Pollan affirms himself as a supersubject while relegating others to objects of education, intervention, or just plain scorn.

Even if it were true that obesity is a public health threat, even if it could be proven that it results from fast-food consumption, and even if we didn’t care about stigmatizing obesity or treating fat people as objects, is Pollan’s way the way out? At the end of a book whose biggest strength is a section that lays out the environmental history and political economy of corn, his answer, albeit oblique, is to eat like he does. The meal that he helped forage and hunt and cooked all by himself, as he puts it, “gave me the opportunity, so rare in modern life, to eat in full consciousness of everything involved in feeding myself: For once, I was able to pay the full karmic price of a meal.” To what kind of politics does this lead? Despite his early focus on corn subsidies, Pollan does not urge his readers to write to their congressional representatives about the folly of such subsidies, to comment to the Food and Drug Administration about food additives, or, for that matter, to sabotage fields where genetically engineered corn is grown.

Indeed, he makes no suggestion that we ought to alter the structure of the food system so that all might come to eat better. Pollan betrays himself in his admiration of Joel Salatin, a beyond-organic farmer who denounces federal regulation as an impediment to building a viable local food chain.

Unfortunately, this antiregulatory approach to food politics has taken hold. I have read countless undergraduate papers that begin with the premise that the global food system is anomic and that “if people only knew where their food came from,” food provisioning would evolve to be more ecological, humane, and just. Many of my students have strong convictions that they should and can teach people how and what to eat, as if you could “change the world one meal at a time” without attention to policy.

I worry that Michael Pollan reinforces this privileged and apolitical idea and reinforces the belief that some people—thin people—clearly must have seen the light that the rest are blind to. Pollan is a damn good writer and a smart man, which makes The Omnivore’s Dilemma a compelling read. But I can’t stomach where it leads. In a funny way, it makes me crave corn-based Cheetos.

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