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For Personal-Injury Lawyer, Michael Pollan’s Book Is Worth Fighting For
Patricia Cohen, New York Times
Among the things that Bill Marler feels passionately about are Washington State University (his alma mater), food safety and negotiation. So after he heard about a dustup on campus over the cancellation of a program requiring all freshmen to read the same book — Michael Pollan’s double-fisted examination of agribusiness, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — he stepped in to resolve it.

This month administrators said budget cuts forced them to suspend this year’s program, but some faculty members and students were skeptical. They suspected that the decision had less to do with money than with pressure from the state’s powerful agribusiness interests. After all, they pointed out, the university had already purchased 4,000 copies of the book (published by Penguin Press), which links the agriculture industry to obesity, food poisoning and environmental damage.

... Mr. Pollan, who said he has taken part in about a dozen freshmen readings at other universities for a reduced fee, was doubtful that money was the issue. “The last I’d agreed to was a video conference, if they wanted to save money,” he said in a telephone interview.

In any case, he is pleased that the program is back on. Holding a common reading program “at a land-grant university is especially important,” Mr. Pollan said, “because we are in the midst of this national conversation about the future of food and agriculture, and land grant universities have a critical role to play.”

“That’s why this really mattered to me.”
(28 May 2009)

Offshore; Food, Inc.
Louis Proyect, Unrepentant Marxist
“Offshore” might not be the first movie about Indian call center workers—“Slumdog Millionaire” has that distinction—but surely this dark comedy is the first produced by Indians that deals with the cultural and economic dislocations, not to speak of the outright racism, when they get these jobs as a result of outsourcing.

As a joint Indian-U.S. production, the movie tries to tell both sides of a story that is all the more topical given the current economic downturn.

... “Food, Inc.” is a powerful indictment of corporate farming that opens at the Film Forum in New York on June 12th. Inspired by the writings of Eric Schosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”), who provide a kind of tag-team running commentary throughout the documentary directed by Robert Kenner, it is the definitive statement on how America produces crappy food to the detriment of the people who eat it, the animals who are treated cruelly in farms and slaughterhouses, and the largely immigrant workforce that labors in unsafe and low wage conditions. The only benefactors it would appear are the men who run Monsanto, Purdue, Smithfield and a small group of other huge multinationals that only see food as the ultimate commodity. When they look at a tomato, they don’t see something to eat but something to turn into a dollar no matter the consequences to society.

While I have been paying close attention to these issues for well over a decade, I was surprised to learn that I only knew half the story. It is far worse than I imagined, especially when you are dealing with camera images rather than words on a page. I was shocked to see what chickens raised in factory conditions look like.
(28 May 2009)
Louis Proyect is a moderator of Marx Mail and one of a small number of Marxists familiar with peak oil and resource depletion. He is an "Unrepentant Marxist" as his blog is titled, but his film reviews have a broad appeal. -BA

Industrial Local?
Honor Schauland, Beginning Farmers
The New York Times published an article on May 12th titled When ‘Local’ Makes It Big, that outlines the latest attempt by Big Food to cash in on the growing sustainable food and farming movement. This time, they’ve gone after “local.”

Frito-Lay North America (owned by PepsiCo) is trying to portray Lay’s potato chips as a local food in the regions where the potatoes are grown.

ConAgra is trying to say that because Hunt’s canned tomatoes are mostly grown within 120 miles of its processing plant in Oakdale, California, that makes them “local” for Oakdale, and maybe even Californians.
“Kraft is trying to figure out whether people in Wisconsin will buy more pickles if they know the cucumbers that go into a jar of Claussen’s are grown there.”

Admittedly, in terms of food-miles, maybe “more local” is better than not at all. Paying some attention to your food is better than paying no attention at all. But as Tom Philpott points out in his analysis of the issue, a lot of times this kind of greenwashing (and it IS a kind of greenwashing) is downright ridiculous and obvious:
(14 May 2009)

I would say that Big Ag is starting to run scared in some ways. They seem to be moving beyond denial and lobbying to co-optation and hopeful greenwash. What next? KS.