Beth Nollner (Left) and Sam Anderson (Right) with author Michael Pollan
On March 24, the advice Michael Pollan offered to the packed hall of Tufts students, faculty, and alumni will be familiar to anyone who has read his latest book, In Defense of Food: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Nothing that your grandmothers (or for those of us in our twenties, great-grandmothers) wouldn’t recognize as food.
The majority of Pollan’s book and his speech at Tufts was spent railing against the destructive and failed ideology of ‘nutritionism.’ Pollan charges nutrition science with allowing the understandable and unavoidable limitations of its field, particularly in attempts to quantify a food's 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' components, to be co-opted by the food industry – resulting in a flood of “edible food-like substances” in our supermarkets. Pollan's point of view drew mixed reactions from the audience, which included a large group of students and faculty from Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition. However, while some seemed a bit uncomfortable with Pollan's treatment of nutrition science, the audience was clearly receptive to the idea that the American food system is failing our environment, our communities, and our bodies.
Although Pollan often writes and speaks about food policy, most of his prescriptive advice targets the individual consumer. His ideas have contributed to grassroots food movements aimed at creating a bottom-up change by shifting demand. Pollan also promotes movements on college campuses as important sources of food system change. However, he admits that it may be up to people such as audience member and former Tufts faculty member Kathleen Merrigan – now Deputy Secretary of Agriculture at the USDA – to truly change the system.
Pollan points out that changing the food system should be a win-win: “What is best for our health – real food cooked at home – is what is best for our agricultural system and for our environment.” This highlights the opportunities for collaboration presented to us as students and academics across the many seemingly disparate fields that relate to the food system. If comprehensive transformation of the food system requires an effort spanning many disciplines, interdisciplinary programs such as UEP are especially well positioned to take up the challenge.