Rod Dreher interviews Michael Pollan

My feature-length Q&A with Michael Pollan is now up on The American Conservative's website. I think y'all will really like it. Hope so. Here's an excerpt:

POLLAN: ...I always saw myself as being to the Left of center, although whenever I write about food or nature, I feel like I am actually to the Right. Somebody just sent me a blog post from the Tory Anarchist--you're mentioned in it, too--that says, "You might call it the Wendell Berry-Michael Pollan Right." I had not seen all those words strung together before, but it points to why this issue mixes up the usual categories--and it should.

I think that this movement will find trends on the Right. You see signs of it in Matthew Scully's work coming at animal welfare from the Right, which makes perfect sense as soon as you start reading it.

I think a lot of the problem is with the cultural signifiers, the fact that the movement's DNA comes out of the '60s. I wrote about this in Omnivore's Dilemma--the counterculture and its discovery of organic food--but you go back a few decades and organic food is very much a Tory issue in England.

DREHER: Well, among conservatives this discussion usually sparks an angry response, curiously enough based on class, this idea that to criticize the way Americans eat or even to propose thinking critically about it is elitist. The most angry letters I've gotten about my work are from fellow conservatives who say, "You're just an elitist. You want to go to Whole Foods, and that's good for you, but don't criticize the way we eat."

POLLAN: I get it from the Left also--"you're promoting the kind of foods that average people can't afford." And the fact is, eating healthy, carefully grown food in this country does cost more. But I think the focus has to be less on that than why the other food is so cheap. The reason is that it's unfairly subsidized--from direct government subsidies in the form of crop subsidies to the kind of support of agribusiness that I was describing earlier to the fact that the companies growing this food are not required to pay the cost of the environmental damage they do. Did you know that if you've got a feedlot and you're polluting local streams, the government will pay you to clean up your mess? That seems deeply unfair to someone trying to do it right.

Obviously, all the public-health expense that goes with lousy food is also not borne by the people producing the food. If you could really internalize all the cost of that 99-cent double cheeseburger at McDonald's, you would be astounded at what an elitist food it is. It's a $10 burger when you add in all the real costs.

When you pay for that supposedly elitist expensive grass-fed hamburger, you are paying the real cost. You are not depending on illegal-immigrant labor. You are not depending on government subsidies.

You could produce a lot of cotton with slave labor, and it was a great deal. But if I'm selling cotton that I paid people a living wage to grow, and it costs 10 times more than your cotton, am I the elitist cotton seller? I don't think so.

Read the whole thing.