Words for the Day - 2/3/11
2/3/11
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Michael Pollan is one of my favorite writers. His books (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A History of Four Foods, and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) are some of the most accessible and interesting books out there on the topics of food and agriculture. In addition he recently consulted and co-starred in Food, Inc., writes for the New York Times, and has given talks for TED talks, the Long Now Foundation, and FORAtv (some links are at the bottom of the page). The following is an excerpt from The Omnivore's Dilemma...
"When you think about it, it is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price. Look at any supermarket ad in the newspaper and all you will find in it are quantities–pounds and dollars; qualities of any kind are nowhere to be found. The value of relationship marketing is that it allows many kinds of information besides price to travel up and down the food chain: stories as well as numbers, qualities as well as quantities, values rather than “value.” And as soon as that happens, people begin to make different kinds of buying decisions, motivated by criteria other than price. But instead of stories about how it was produced accompanying our food, we get bar codes–as illegible as the industrial food chain itself, and a fair symbol of its almost total opacity.
Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring–to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn’t very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories–”dolphin safe,” “humanely slaughtered,” etc.–about how they were produced. The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values–and not just “value”–will inform their purchasing decisions."
As promised...links!
FORAtv Slow Food Nation (some amazing people in this one -Wendell Berry, Carlo Petrini, Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, Alice Waters, and Michael Pollan) Part 1 and Part 2.
Michael Pollan's Website
A talk at Google
"When you think about it, it is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price. Look at any supermarket ad in the newspaper and all you will find in it are quantities–pounds and dollars; qualities of any kind are nowhere to be found. The value of relationship marketing is that it allows many kinds of information besides price to travel up and down the food chain: stories as well as numbers, qualities as well as quantities, values rather than “value.” And as soon as that happens, people begin to make different kinds of buying decisions, motivated by criteria other than price. But instead of stories about how it was produced accompanying our food, we get bar codes–as illegible as the industrial food chain itself, and a fair symbol of its almost total opacity.
Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring–to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn’t very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories–”dolphin safe,” “humanely slaughtered,” etc.–about how they were produced. The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values–and not just “value”–will inform their purchasing decisions."
As promised...links!
FORAtv Slow Food Nation (some amazing people in this one -Wendell Berry, Carlo Petrini, Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, Alice Waters, and Michael Pollan) Part 1 and Part 2.
Michael Pollan's Website
A talk at Google
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