Michael Pollan

I just love Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto- I return to it constantly. There are so many great ideas here, so much that inspires and aggravates me. Chapter One, From Foods to Nutrients, is an example of the latter.

Buying a side of beef is a great way to get great quality, locally grown food at a reasonable price. But is it practical for you? A whole lot of blogs and other sites can help. I've tried to pull a few of them together.

I think if I skpped the whole Minneapolis thing and just wrote about Michael Pollan, I'd still be a busy man. This is from the NYTimes.com Well page. In Pollan's words:

"Lawns as totalitarian landscapes"? This is a 17-minute presentation that Michael Pollan gave in 2007 entitled "The Omnivore's Next Dilemma." The video is available here (courtesy of YouTube.com), and also on the TED.com site, which has all sorts of terrific presentations from brilliant people.

A recent post on Organic Food Now entitled "How Much Poison Do You Want to Eat" provides a bunch of great information related to eating organic food, including whether it's really better for you or not and which foods are most chemical free. It's a discussion that has remained relevant for years, and has recently become even more heated due to the recent peanut butter recall that miraculously impacted several organic food companies (which had been buying non-organic peanuts, apparently).

This video is not new - in fact, it's just over a year old. Still, if you haven't had a chance to see Michael Pollan speak, this video provides almost 60 minutes of the author discussing "In Defense of Food", why it was written, the value of local and sustainable food, nutrients, and all sorts of other things. He's a great, compelling speaker, as you might have guessed. And his material is as compelling as he is.

Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau gives us yet another good reason to eat grass fed meat in this week's blog. Here's an excerpt:

The Foodcycles blog writes about a new film called Food Inc., featuring Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Sustainweb, a British site with the subheader: the alliance for better food and farming, provides these (slightly edited) guidelines for people who want to eat sustainable food:

Mention Michael Pollan in a crowded room (or in an elevator, at the dinner table, at work, etc) and you get one of two reactions:

Reaction One: the person rolls their eyes, remembering Pollan as some sort of a "Food Nazi" from a TV interview he gave over the past year, probably one where he said you should only eat things your Great-Grandma would recognize. Or maybe one where he discussed "edible foodlike substances," which are, according to Michael, often disguised as real food.

Reaction Two: An "oh my God"-like gasp, followed by vigorous head-nodding, a sense of brother- (or sister-) hood, and an in-depth discussion of how they selected their CSA, the size of their garden, and what's growing there this year.