After writing ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma,’ I wanted to write a book that got past the choir, that got to people who didn’t care about how their food was grown but who did care about their health.
It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries, and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage – indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.
A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.
I think cooking is really key because it’s the only way you’re going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us. The fact is, so far, corporations don’t cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar – much more than you would ever use at home.
Europeans fought for shorter workdays, more vacation time, family leave, and all these kinds of things. Those haven’t been priorities in America: it’s been about money. You see, in the countries that fought for time, they cook more often; they have less obesity. There are real benefits to having time.
The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn’t have. It’s very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that’s going wrong in society.
It’s not that hard to eat well if you’re willing to put a little more time into it, a little more thoughtfulness into it and, yes, a little bit more money.
Basically, farm chemicals are labor-saving devices, and farmers who don’t use them – weed killers especially – have to work harder or hire more help.
You can make real food in 20, 30 minutes, but we’ve convinced ourselves that it is a rocket science. It’s a shame. It’s the media and the food industry: they’ve fed our panic around time.
You can’t be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based ethanol, before agricultural subsidies. I mean, even McCain was a critic of ethanol, but when he got to Iowa, he was singing a different tune.
Pages: 1 2
