Thursday, January 7, 2010

Michael Pollan, food writer, journalist, activist, in Spokane-Pullman area


Michael Pollan, Wed. 13th, in Pullman, WA -- WSU Campus


His book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, was chosen as a common reading text for Washington State University. The president, Mr. Floyd, pulled the program, due to some booster's disregard of free speech and the research and message of Michael Pollan. Luckily, an alum and food safety attorney and former Board of Regent put up $60,000 for the books and for Pollan's visit.


"The Omnivore's Dilemma" author Michael Pollan will present a lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 13, in Beasley coliseum. He also will participate in a question-and-answer session with students only that day, 3-4 p.m. in the CUB auditorium.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" is the Common Reading selection at WSU Pullman for 2009-10.

Pollan will lecture on the "Sun Food Agenda." About 10 questions will be taken as part of the presentation. Submit questions in advance to cindyw@wsu.edu.

In "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us - industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves - from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating.

The sun food agenda has to do with Pollan's advocacy of weaning the food industry from fossil-fuel-based support (fertilizers, pesticides, gasoline/diesel vehicles) and returning to a (technologically enhanced) reliance on the sun's energy.
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Read the post below regarding the WSU decision to cut the common reading program and Pollan, BEFORE he got back onto WSU's agenda:

In a revealing irony, from which cowardly university officials everywhere may have something to learn, the decision by Washington State University (WSU) officials to cancel Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma as the common reading assignment for freshman orientation next year is raising the book to new heights of notoriety and importance in that university community.
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Reports today in the Spokesman-Review and the Chronicle of Higher Education (pay site) make a plausible case that pressure from Washington agribusiness interests may have been behind the cancellation. One faculty colleague, who asked not to be named in connection with this controversy, told U.S. Food Policy that WSU has its own Pacific Northwest character that distinguishes it from traditional agricultural universities in other regions.

That said, WSU Regents include politically powerful farmers and ranchers such as former Regent Peter Goldmark who ran for U.S. Congress in 2006 and is currently Washington State Commissioner of Public Lands. With extreme budget pressures, I understand how this could happen, but I don't like it.I imagine this foolishness will triple the number of incoming students at WSU who read the book.In any case, it was never going to be possible to suppress engagement of these issues at Washington State.
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A different faculty member, economist Trenton Smith, just this semester shared a provocative and ambitious essay (.pdf) about market power and information economics in industrial food production.
An excerpt:

[O]ver the course of the last century, the U.S. has witnessed a dramatic shift away from traditional diets and toward a diet comprised primarily of processed brand-name foods with deleterious long-term health effects. This, in turn, has generated increasingly urgent calls for policy interventions aimed at improving the quality of the American diet. In this paper, we ask whether the current state of affairs represents a market failure, and—if so—what might be done about it.
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In a way, Trent's essay is an economist's reflection on the issues raised by the tradition of food industry criticism exemplified by Pollan.
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A while ago, when I reviewed Omnivore's Dilemma for the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, I encouraged professional colleagues to read the book in exactly this spirit -- to wrestle with it, criticize it, and be inspired by it to work on novel economics questions that have been neglected by the mainstream literature.
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Regarding today's controversy, Smith says, "I have discussed (and will continue to do so) Pollan's work in my undergraduate food / commodities marketing course, and it would have been great to expand the discussion to the rest of the student body." He adds, "I also find it ironic that this was all happening around the time I issued a working paper on the insidious influence big business has historically had on consumer access to information about food!"

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