The Michael Pollan Prescription: How to Eat Better and Avoid the Industrial Diet
(Page 4 of 6)
Nov. 4, 2008
By Betsy Model
As you move around the country, are you getting the sense that people are returning to self-sufficiency? That they want to produce some of their own food and be a little less reliant on outside and often unknown providers of their produce, their meat, their seafood and so on?
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I am seeing a bit of that, but people aren’t making the connection nearly enough. I’ve been talking quite a bit about gardening. People talk a lot about the carbon footprint of their food and obviously the food with the lightest possible carbon footprint is food you grow yourself! There really is a free lunch [laughs] from a carbon point of view, even from a monetary point of view. It’s in your front yard. I think gardening is an important part of the solution in a great many ways but people don’t always connect the dots. They don’t connect the dots between their garden and their health and they don’t connect the dots between their gardens and climate change. But they will and in this generation. As oil becomes precious, the reasons to garden will multiply and somehow it will come under the umbrella of ‘local food.’ It’s the most local food there is.
My wife and I have a garden. We had a front lawn and we took it out and put in vegetables and it’s very productive. There are a couple of artichokes bearing right now, a couple different kinds of chard, kale, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. There are peas and radicchio. It’s incredibly productive for such a small space. There’s a persimmon tree, a fig tree and a Meyer lemon tree and, once these seedlings are big enough, lettuce.
You’ve got a 15-year-old son…does he participate in the garden?
He participates by eating what comes out of the garden. He’s not particularly interested in gardening at the moment [laughs] but he’s definitely interested in food and he understands the qualitative differences, too. He’ll ask ‘Where are these carrots from?’ and he knows the names of the local farms. He knows where his food comes from.
Forging a Food Culture
So for parents with kids, how easy is it—and how important is it—to provide that kind of information?
I think it’s very important to take your kids to the farmers market so they meet farmers and see food when the roots are still attached to it and the leaves are still attached to it, and they understand that carrots are roots! A lot of kids think that carrots are pinky-sized bullets, and they’re shocked to discover otherwise.
Also, at farmers markets there’s the chance to try things; there are little dishes of five different peaches or all the tomatoes that are available. It’s a very low-cost way for them to try things, and committing for kids is really the big issue when they’re little and they’re trying a new food. And, you know, there’s an energy at a farmers market that’s very different from the energy at the supermarket. Kids will always look for the sweetest thing wherever they are and at the farmers market it will be a carrot. At the supermarket it will be … well, you know what it will be: Cocoa Puffs! And you’re going to relent eventually, so it’s better to be at the farmers market.
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