Austinist Interviews Michael Pollan, Author of The Omnivore's Dilemma

And it really is very complicated.

It took me 450 pages to try to answer it. But that’s kind of the point: that such a simple question would require so much investigation and reporting.

Before I could figure out what I should eat, I had to figure out what I was eating and even that wasn’t so simple because so much of what we eat is so opaque. What’s in a Twinkie? Where does industrial meat come from? That’s when I figured out that I needed to follow our food back to the source, back to the corn or the grain.

While reading your book, we started questioning our own eating habits. But you don’t provide straight answers about what we should be eating.

I think the book is full of answers, but it’s arranged in such a way that readers should come to the answers themselves. In way, I think part of our food problem is that people want journalists to tell them what to eat, but that’s as bad as asking food marketers what to eat. In the book, I hope to give people the tools to decide for themselves. I don’t like to give recommendations. I’m not a waiter in a restaurant.

I also think a lot of it comes down to your values. How do you choose between organic or local food? I can tell you what I would choose, but it really depends on your values. Which is more important to you: not using pesticides or the care of the animals and reducing fuel used in transportation? I don’t know what your values are, but I think I give you the information so that you can plug in your values and know exactly what you should be eating. For example, in discussing eating meat, I came out of everything I did still eating meat. But others might take that information and decide that they want to become vegetarians.

The key is to be conscious about what you are eating. I firmly believe that if people eat in full knowledge of where their food comes from, they will be better for it. I could have at the end of the book had a laundry list of what to do and what not to do, but I don’t like being told what to do and I don’t want to tell others what to do. One thing that I would say is don’t eat anything that your great-great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. That gets you in touch with the novelty of what’s in the grocery store. Your great-great-great-grandmother wouldn’t know what to do with yogurt or a Twinkie, because they aren’t foods.

Before reading your book, we thought we were on the right path by shopping at Whole Foods and buying organic products. But it seems that isn’t necessarily the better choice.

Again, if your concern is with reducing pesticides, then you are doing the right thing. But if you’re concerned about the welfare of animals or the local landscape, then shopping at Whole Foods isn’t so good.

I think Whole Foods is doing a good thing by getting people used to paying more for their food and by showing people that there is great pleasure in making food a higher priority in your life and that buying better food rewards you in many ways. That’s a lesson that people take out of that store. But the products aren’t always what they seem to be. When you read between the lines, you realize that there are organic factory farms, three words I never thought I’d see together. But there is no doubt that as organic has gotten bigger, it has become industrialized. And organic has gotten big. Now Wal-Mart is going to be offering organic food.

Is that going to be a good or a bad thing for organic food?

I think it’s going to be both. It’s not either/or. On the plus side, they’ve announced that they will keep the premium on organic food to 10 percent or less above their regular food. That means that organic will no longer be an elitist food. People who are concerned about pesticides but haven’t been able to afford organic food will have that option. Wal-Mart should be applauded for that.

But the question is, how will they drive the cost of organic down? Conventional food is irresponsibly priced. We don’t include the true price: the price to the environment, the cost of the fossil fuels, the cost to public health, the cost to taxpayers. The true price of conventional food is incredibly high. How are you going to sell organic food for only 10 percent above irresponsibly priced food? It may mean that they’ll have to import food from China or other countries. They’ll have to buy only from the biggest suppliers. And then there will be pressure on those suppliers to cut costs, which may mean cutting corners. And there will be pressure to ease organic regulations. That pressure will be irresistible.

This is a moment of both opportunity and peril for organic food. I hope that Wal-Mart will realize that the word “organic” means something and that there’s a reason people will pay more for it. I hope that they wouldn’t do anything to make organic lose its meaning.

You are rather critical of Whole Foods in your book. Now you’re coming to their backyard.

I’m going to visit the big store while I’m in Austin. [Whole Food’s] response has been to engage me and to invite me to come and learn more about them, which I’m eager to do.

The success of Whole Foods is a very important business phenomenon. It expresses a deep-seated desire for change in our food system and to get away from industrial food. People look to Whole Foods for alternatives. And those alternatives aren’t always everything people think they are, but that so many people shop there shows that change is coming and that customers know that industrial food is failing us. People may not always be aware of it when they go through those doors, but there is a politics implicit in shopping at Whole Foods.

And Whole Foods is only part of the movement; it is by no means the only front. Farmers markets have been growing at a fast rate. There are almost 200 Whole Foods stores, but there are about 4,500 farmers markets in the country.

How have your own eating habits changed since writing this book?

They’ve changed quite a bit. I don’t buy industrial meat anymore. Whenever possible, I get out of the supermarket to do my shopping—out to local producers and farmers markets. And I’ve joined a CSA [community supported agriculture], which is basically where you subscribe to a farm and a farmer picks your produce for the week. It’s a really interesting way to eat because it forces you to give up on being an industrial eater. A big problem with our food system is our expectations. We want our strawberries year round and we want our lettuce cut up for us and bagged ready to eat. At the end of the industrial food chain is an industrial eater. We aren’t going to see a real change in the food system until we change how we view food and break from that. And it’s not going to be for everyone. I happen to think that getting and preparing food is one of life’s great enjoyments. But we’ve been sold this idea of convenience, that purchasing food and preparing it is a hassle. There’s no money in selling whole foods; the money is in processing the food. So the food processors persuade us that we need this convenience.

That all sounds great, but some of us are still trying to figure out how to make a potato without setting the microwave on fire.

Have you ever put an egg in the microwave? I thought that would be a great way to cook an egg. But it explodes in a thousand little pieces equally distributed on all the surfaces. It’s impossible to clean out!

When we talk about this culture of food that is deteriorating, part of it is that kids aren’t learning to cook from their families. We don’t teach home economics in the schools anymore. It’s interesting to me that we have sex education but not food education. Eating is easily as important as sex and has tremendous public health implications. Kids seem to be figuring out the sex part okay, but they can’t make a healthy lunch.

Aren’t you causing enough trouble in schools? [A school board member from a Chicago-area school has included Pollan’s A Botany of Desire: A Plants-Eye View of the World on a list of books she is attempting to censor. Full story.]

I wonder, What took them so long? They’ve been teaching this book that has a chapter on cannabis. I know lots of people who give this chapter to their kids to help them think about this topic and think about the real consequences of drug use. I’m not surprised that it’s being challenged, though. I’m gratified that it’s being widely taught, but it does have some controversial content. It doesn’t exactly mesh with the traditional D.A.R.E. message. Teaching people that drug use is going to happen regardless of the law probably isn’t going to sit well with some people.

What’s up next for you?

I get to go home after Austin. I’ll be writing some articles for the New York Times Magazine, but I don’t have any book ideas and I don’t feel compelled to right now. This book took a lot of time and effort. So I’m going to enjoy my summer and do some gardening and cooking.

Michael Pollan will be reading from The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals at BookPeople, tonight (May 25) at 7 p.m. For more information on the book or sustainable eating, visit the author’s Web site at www.michaelpollan.com.