‘Our food safety regime is broken’

When he wanted to get inside the meat industry, journalist and educator Michael Pollan bought a calf.

Then, improbably, he followed it from a ranch in South Dakota to a feedlot in western Kansas.

“I wanted to learn how the industrial food chain transforms bushels of corn into steaks,” he wrote in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” one of the books that has made Pollan into the most trenchant, readable commentators on food and American culture.

Pollan will speak about the impact of industrial farming, about food safety and about the answer to the seemingly simple question, “What should we eat?” when he visits Atlanta this week for the 12th annual Georgia Organics Conference and Trade Show.

In addressing this group, including representatives of the Slow Food movement, he’s preaching to the choir. His followers, who have been lining up for $250 tickets to have dinner with Pollan, are what Georgia Organics coordinator Michael Wall calls “rabid.” Some of them promoted Pollan as a choice for secretary of agriculture in President Barack Obama’s Cabinet.

“I would have been awful,” laughs Pollan —- and not just because he once grew marijuana in his yard, and wrote about it in “The Botany of Desire.”

From his home in Berkeley, near the University of California campus, where he teaches journalism, Pollan spoke about America’s precarious, psychotic relationship with food, and how it can be mended.

Q: What did you have for breakfast?

A: Half a banana, some blueberries that I’m embarrassed to admit came from Chile —- hey, I’m not the only person here [in my house] who buys groceries —- some yogurt and a little granola on top of that.

Q: What does Georgia’s salmonella outbreak tell us about our food system?

A: That our food safety regime is broken. There are 16 agencies that have some responsibility for food safety, including the CDC, and they don’t talk to one another.

Q: You champion a decentralized food system.

A: The fact is that decentralizing our food system doesn’t guarantee food safety but it does guarantee when there are problems, they will be contained, and they will not go national.

Q: Isn’t our nutrition better than it’s been in the history of the species? Don’t we live longer than ever?

A: To a certain extent, having more food correlates with better health, but we’re past that point. We’ve learned that quantity isn’t the only issue. Fifty percent of us will suffer from chronic diet-related disease. Those diseases are probably what will kill you, and they don’t need to. … I don’t think nutrition contributes to our longer life spans. It’s heart medicines and bypass operations and dialysis. We’re getting people sick and concentrating on figuring out how to keep them alive.

Q: You’ve been invited to speak to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention while you’re in Atlanta. What will you say to them?

A: I want to talk to them a little bit about how the government talks to us about food and health. Since the ’70s the government has talked to us about how to improve our diets, and they have utterly failed. … That’s the same time that the obesity epidemic began.

Q: In your books you suggest many painful solutions to the problems of contemporary food production —- breaking up factory farms, paying higher prices for food, eating less meat. Which one will raise the most protest?

A: Probably the meat one. … We’re going to have to find out a way to live without cheap fossil fuel whether we want to do that or not, and the same thing applies to [cheap] food.

Q: You say the food industry is the number one producer of global warming gases.

A: If you want to look at how you can reduce your own carbon footprint most dramatically, give up meat one day a week. If the whole country did that, it would be equivalent of taking 40 million cars off the road.

IF YOU GO

Georgia Organics Conference. Thursday-Saturday, Agnes Scott College and other locales. Includes a farm tour, workshops, displays by vendors and evening meals. Saturday keynote address from author Michael Pollan. Some events are sold out. For information and tickets, and to hear a podcast interview with Pollan: www.georgiaorganics.org.