Rod Dreher interviews Michael Pollan

DREHER: I mention Slow Food in my work and find it ironic that it was started by an Italian Marxist…

POLLAN: Communist.

Rod, you shouldn't find it ironic that Marxist/Communist anti-capitalist forces support these kinds of ideas. Communism and community share a common root. Wendell Berry, Stan Cox and others are very critical of what capitalism has done to agriculture. I recommend Stan Cox's book "Sick Planet" to anyone sympathetic to Pollan's work.

Pollan: Industrial agriculture is a Faustian deal.

I think that one line alone succinctly and accurately summarizes everything.

Fresh, wholesome delicious food obtained locally and lavishly prepared to perfection is a sensual end in itself without sin that everyone can and should indulge in every day. There's just no good reason anymore to be second class about such things.

I like fresh veggies and organic food as much as the next person. That's why I've started a garden. However, I'm really not that into elaborate or fancy meals that take lots of time to prepare. I'd rather be gardening, running, playing with my children or just about anything really than working in the kitchen.

But fixing nutritious food (i.e. lean meat and fresh veggies, plain and simple) doesn't have to be complicated or time-consuming. There are alternatives other than McDonalds or fancy food that takes hours to prep and cook.

Fancypants foodies can gravitate towards organic and local food choices, wonderful--nothing is a stretch for them because food is one of their chosen hobbies.

"Fancypants"? I grilled a chicken bought at the farmer's market this weekend. Nothing on it but salt and pepper. Grilling chicken is fancypants?

For dinner these last couple of high-summer weeks, I usually have a salad, sometimes with meat. My salad consists of fresh East Texas tomatoes and cucumbers, bought at the farmer's market, and dressed with salt and pepper. Fancypants?

Every once in a while I have the time to cook a meal you would describe as "fancypants." Mostly I get home at the end of the day and Julie and I are too busy feeding the kids and putting them to bed to make a complicated dinner. Mark Bittman's wonderful cookbooks are mighty helpful in this regard. I love Italian cooking so much because it's about simplicity of preparation, using fresh ingredients.

"Fancypants," you are wrong when you write "It's just never going to happen a big cultural change where everyone is all into beautifully prepared, top quality food as a sensual indulgence. Certainly, we could benefit from more time to eat and from more family meals together, but even back in the old days there were families who always ate the same things, families where the wives didn't go to great lengths for any special occasion meals, people who chose to shovel it in mindlessly and people who were too interested in just about anything else to spend time paying much attention to what fueled them at the table."

You are wrong for a couple of reasons: it seems as if you are saying that local food will never succeed on hedonic grounds, because people care more about convenience than they do about pleasure. This seems intuitively false to me; when you look at the way most Americans order their lives, it seems as if we care a great deal more about pleasure than they do about convenience. It is simply the case that we have forgotten about the great pleasure to be had in simplicity, and are pursuing pleasures that are short-lived and destructive (to our bodies, to our souls, to our environment, to our society) because these pleasures do not require us to make the sorts of sacrifices that simplicity would. (Oil and gas prices will soon start to compel those sorts of sacrifices, though.) Good food is hedonic, and any reform movement must emphasize the hedonic aspects of good food over industrial food, if it is to attract people.

Second, it seems to me that you are looking at food through a thoroughly modern mindset of fast-paced convenience; you conclude that unless "good food" (i.e., local, fresh produce and ethically raised meat) can match industrially prepared food for convenience, it will never succeed. This seems circular: good food cannot match industrially-prepared food for convenience because it would perforce cease to be good food if it did. As Pollan notes above, many of the costs of convenient food are not reflected in the sale price: if they were, a 99¢ cheeseburger would cost a lot more than it does. If instead of working five minutes to pay for the cheeseburger you had to work an hour, would it still be convenient? When the costs of industrial food are internalized, good food is a lot more attractive from an economic standpoint, if nothing else.

Third, a lot of people seem to set up this straw man that time spent cooking is time they couldn't spend doing things with their children. This is utter nonsense. Kids, in my experience, LOVE to cook, and love to spend time helping out in kitchens. If being in the kitchen separates you from your family, bring your family into the kitchen.

Finally, I believe you are wrong on the historical point that people in "the old days" mindlessly shoveled their food into their mouths. I think, again, that you are looking at the past as though it were the present only with horses. It wasn't. Food was proportionally a much greater portion of a household income a hundred years ago than it is today, and that income was often measured not in dollars but in man-hours (and woman-hours). Read the descriptions of dinner in, for instance, Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "Farmer Boy" and then tell me that "even back in the old days there were families who always ate the same things, families where the wives didn't go to great lengths for any special occasion meals, people who chose to shovel it in mindlessly and people who were too interested in just about anything else to spend time paying much attention to what fueled them at the table."

East Texas tomatoes and cucumbers, bought at the farmer's market, and dressed with salt and pepper

Mighty tasty, I'll admit.We've got about 6 tomato plants in the backyard right now, loaded down with Better Boys and First Ladies. We have more than we can eat and give away, so we dry the rest.

Watch your salt intake. Every other East Texas I know has high blood pressure, and sodium is a major culprit.

I would say that the Earl of Sandwich qualifies as a person who wanted a quick meal with no fuss. Unfortunately for the anti-Crunchy forces, this was supposedly done to facilitate his compulsive gambling, but I suspect even Wendell Berry eats sandwiches today.

Anonymous who used the term "fancypants": I would say that there is about a 99% chance that Rod was actually offended. I actually agree with you that one of the chief flaws of Crunchy Cons was its zig-zagging between a gourmet attitude toward food and a spartan attitude toward it, never really coming down in favor of one or the other, but he has heard and rejected arguments of this type so many times that further posts on the subject are likely to futile.