pollan

Last night most of us in the Food class as well as a number of other Colgate students, faculty, and staff attended a lecture by Michael Pollan in Syracuse.  As Grace noted in her post prior to this one, the talk was excellent---funny, engaging, and thought-provoking.  As someone who has read his books and articles in the NYTimes, most of the talk was familiar territory---no big surprises---but he did a nice job of synthesizing a lot of his ideas into one talk that was easily accessible to anyone, regardless of their background.

Some observations/criticisms about the talk:

1. Good sized crowd at the Syracuse OnCenter, but also very white and middle class.  There was another performance at the center last night as well, a play inspired by a Tyler Perry character.  The crowd waiting outside for the Parry show was nearly 100% black and the crowd for Pollan looked to be very white.  Well, looks can be deceiving, but it wasn't hard to notice the contrast.

2.  More on the class angle---Pollan began his talk by walking out on the stage with a couple plastic shopping bags full of groceries he had purchased from a local Tops store.  He spent the first few minutes taking things out of the bag and talking about them and how they were examples of what he calls "edible food-like substances."  They included some of the likely suspects---Go-gurt tubes, fruit roll-ups, soda.  Many of them, as he pointed out, make weird nutritional claims, such as the ginger ale-green tea hybrid that promoted antioxidants or the lily white Wonder Bread somehow made from whole wheat (extra fiber!).  As he took each item from the bags and made jokes about them, it wasn't hard to miss his contempt for the processed food and for Tops as a grocery store.  People laughed heartily at the food-like cornucopia he laid out, and it made for a good demonstration of his points.  Still, I couldn't help feeling a little uneasy as all these people of means laughed at the food as though it was beneath them.  Pollan said many times that this kind of processed food and all its added salt and sugar is leading to an epidemic of diabetes---well, who is getting all these cases of diabetes?  It's largely the poor, and I don't think you're going to gain a lot of traction by making fun of what they eat.

3. Pollan was hard on nutritional science---he made a hilarious comparison between current research on nutrition and the state of surgery in 1650---primitive, messy, and something you wouldn't want to trust too much.  He noted that a lot of nutritional studies lack good evidence since they rely on self-reports of consumption, and in many cases these reports ask one to go back three months and list all the foods you've eaten.  But then Pollan also cited a number of nutritional and epidemiological studies to support his points about the perils of the Western Diet and the high incidence of disease associated with it.  It wasn't clear how he distinguishes between good and bad science, and it seemed overall like he was cherry picking the studies that supported his points.  Then again, I guess no one came to the lecture to hear him talk too much about methodology for an hour...