(2009-07-03) Kenner Pollan Food Inc

Interview with Michael Pollan and Robert Kenner of the Food Inc film's messages.

Organic might mean organic the way we think of it when Gary says it, but it doesn't all the time. "Naturally-raised" just got its FDA definition, and it's a cruel joke: "raised entirely without growth promotants, antibiotics (except for ionophores used as coccidiostats for parasite control), and have never been fed animal byproducts." It conjures up one image in the mind of the consumer but means something else for the producer. Pretty quickly after you had organics, you had organic Oreos. So when people are trying to trick you, and there's many degrees of separation between you and your food, how do you respond?

It's unbelievable to me that you can sell meat with E-Coli in it. I think one of the harder ones is changing the Farm Bill to the Food Bill. It's hard to change our support systems to work in favor of food that's healthier. Spending a bit more to encourage small farms to get us away from large corporations. Making school lunches healthier. But I'm not so politically tied in. It's my job to just make people more conscious. It's like tobacco; people smoked it for a long time and then the information began to come out that this isn't healthy. And things began to change.