The conversation about fixing our food system continues to move further into the mainstream. Last week, Oprah did a great show on Food 101 with Michael Pollan on Food Rules, Alicia Silverstone on changing her diet (including a funny exchange on poop), and excerpts from Food, Inc.
[UPDATE 2/4/10 - looks like Harpo Productions took the videos off YouTube and are making the Food 101 show available on DVD. A shame they won't allow this information to be distributed more freely, but at least they did produce great content. You can get more info on the Oprah site.
Just wondering - do you think Food, Inc. will get a share of the revenue from DVD sales of this episode that include excerpts from the film? Sure - they get great PR, but still..... ]
Here’s video from YouTube, in 5 parts. No additional commentary needed!
Mark Bittman posted a good piece by Russ Parsons. It addresses conflicting perspectives in the increasingly audible conversation about building a better food system. Parsons proposes a set of shared principles to anchor serious discussion about our shared problem. While I question the 20th century “agricultural miracle” to which he refers, and not everyone in either “camp” views the issues in such extremes, the article, published in the LA Times earlier this week, bears re-posting here.
Let’s not join one of the armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other.
The issues facing agriculture today are much more complicated than lining up behind labels such as “local” and “organic.” (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
One of the more pleasing developments of the last decade has been the long-overdue beginning of a national conversation about food — not just the arcane techniques used to prepare it and the luxurious restaurants in which it is served, but, much more important, how it is grown and produced. The only problem is that so far it hasn’t been much of a conversation. Instead, what we have are two armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other (sound familiar?).
On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there’s a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren’t purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of the environment.
Well, at least we’re thinking about it, so I suppose that’s a start. But the issues we’re facing are not going to go away, and they are too important to be left to the ideologues. What I’d like to see happen in the next decade is a more constructive give-and-take, the start of a true conversation.
With that goal in mind, I’d like to propose a few ground rules that might help move us into the next phase — fundamental principles that both sides should be able to agree on.
