Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, appeared on Bill Moyers Journal on November 28, after Obama was elected President but before he appointed Tom Vilsack to be the Secretary of Agriculture. PBS has now posted the video (in two parts) on YouTube.
If you only have time to watch one part, and you're already quite familiar with Michael Pollan's open letter in The New York Times Magazine to the Farmer in Chief, be sure you at least watch part 2. That includes a short piece about a neighborhood farmers' market in New York, discusses the difficulty of finding fresh produce in low income areas, and talks about the strong correlation between cooking and health.
Here's an excerpt from part 2:
BILL MOYERS: What else? Give me a list, quickly, of what we can do to make a difference in this reforming the food system.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, plant a garden. If you've got space, and if you don't, look into a community garden where you might rent a little bit of space, like we saw in East New York.
Cook. Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals, and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved. You will find that you are supporting local agriculture, because you'll care about the quality of ingredients. And you know, whether you're cooking or not is one of the best predictors for a healthy diet. It's more important than the class predictor. People with more money generally have healthier diets, but affluent people who don't cook are not as healthy in their eating as poor people who still cook. So, very, very important. If you don't have pots and pans, get them.
Now people say they don't have time, and that's an issue. And I am saying that we do need to invest more time in food. Food is just too important to relegate to these 10-minute corners of our lives. And you know, even if you would just take, you know, we watch cooking shows like crazy on television. We've turned cooking into a spectator sport. If you would merely invest the time you spend watching cooking shows in actually cooking, you would find you've got plenty of time to put a meal on the table.
The points he makes about cooking are, I think, extremely important. I know that one of the biggest hurdles to my eating more fresh, local food last summer was lack of knowledge about how to cook some things and a (perceived) lack of time to do so. (Of course, then we started house hunting, packing, moving, etc, and the lack of time became very real!) One of my goals this year is to be more organized in the kitchen, more prepared, and more "daring" at actually trying stuff. Practice, practice, practice!
Part 1:
Part 2:
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