Michael Pollan’s name keeps popping up. This past week, I listened to his excellent discussion on one of the local radio forum programs. As the author of several popular books on our relationship with food, including “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” [1] and “In Defense of Food”, he has become the de facto spokesperson for the movement to food diversity in America.
The science of food is inextricably linked to the culture of food, for both good and bad reasons. For thousands of years, people have developed sustainable forms of agriculture, forms which has been abandoned in the industrial food sector in favor of genetic and chemical monoculture. Pollan attempts to communicate food science, albeit sometimes with abandon of standard scientific conventions in favor of a more populist approach to explaining the science [2].
This week, I have been doing a little work while on travel to my in-laws place in Wisconsin. I was listening to the TV when an advertisement ran touting the fact that diabetic strip testing equipment is made in America. The scientific irony of this ad was deep. It was as if a nation spent years engineering the spread of a disease and then built an entire industry around treating that disease, then touted the nationalism of having that industry. Well, not as if – this is much of what has happened with diabetes in this country. Our infatuation with fatty, sugary, salty processed food [3] has taxed our organs, our pancreas not the least of them.
I know a lot of people with diabetes, and not the kind that comes from excessive sugar intake. They take great care in observing and responding to their blood sugar levels, and I am grateful that technology has provided means for rapid and useful feedback about the human body. I don’t begrudge anybody their diabetes (especially the kind that doesnt come from excessive sugar intake), but I worry about a culture that, as a whole, accepts the processed food in the supermarket without question and then complains about the cost of healthcare, or takes pride in building industries around treating food-induced disease. The diet industry is the worst of them.
I’m not blaming people for getting diabetes. As a scientist, I am concerned about how we disentangle ourselves from this web of cheap, industrial grade food and the subsequent disease. Food is so necessary, which is what makes the food industry so deceitful. At least cigarettes weren’t necessary for life; industrial food, sold like snake oil, has a necessity to life that makes the food industry fall back on an angelic premise.
I, like many others, think it’s time to stop selling just the treatments, and start working on a cure.
[1] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/blog/2009/04/04/cap-and-trade-meat-edition/
[2] http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2009/07/03/food-and-other-elements/
