Coming Soon:
Jamie Oliver
Alice Waters
Bryant Terry
Anna Lappé
Nigel Walker
Nadine Burke, MD
Anim Steele
Ian Marvy

Michael Pollan is the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. He currently serves as the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

From the film Nourish: Food + Community


Food Culture

Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.

There is a lot of cultural wisdom in food. And indeed, that's how we knew what to eat for all this time. We didn't have scientists. We didn't have industry, hawking products at us. We had food culture.

Whether it's the Mediterranean diet or the French diet or the Indian diet — there are so many traditional diets around on which people live long, happy lives with very little chronic disease.

The one diet, so far, that we do not appear to be well-adapted to is the Western diet — the way most of us eat. This diet of lots of refined carbohydrates, lots of fat, lots of sugar. The diet that essentially has been invented over the last 50 or 75 years. We know we're not well-adapted to it. Why? Because it's making us sick. Four out of the ten leading killers are chronic diseases linked to food.


Toward Thoughtful Eating

If you're a food company, your goal is to sell as much food as possible. How do you do that? You've got to convince people to eat more food. One way is giving us our calories in liquid form. When you're drinking soda, you can drink more without getting full than if you were eating all that sugar in solid food form.

Since 1980, we are managing to pack away about 300 more calories per person per day than before 1980. And there's your obesity epidemic. And most of those calories — most — are high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup is a sweetener made from corn.

You probably don't realize just how much high fructose corn syrup you eat in a day. But if you spend some time looking at the labels in the grocery store, you would find that all the sodas, many of the baked goods, the jellies, the pickles, the mustard, the ketchup, and frozen foods — all sorts of frozen foods have high fructose corn syrup. It's a tool of food scientists to induce us to eat more because you will always sell more of something if you make it a little sweeter.

One of the earmarks of the industrial food chain is keeping us stupid about our food choices, not giving us information. And, you know, the story of your food is very, very important, because it is the beginning of thoughtful eating.