Flawed Fantasy

 Perhaps Michael Pollan should actually interview someone who remembers the “good old days” of farming before he spouts his “misguided food nostalgia” tripe. They would likely inform him it wasn’t quite the simplistic and idyllic task that he makes it out to be. To hear Mr. Pollan tell it we should all be growing, harvesting, and producing our own farm to table food. But the industrial age of farming is not the picture of decline and destruction that he so often likes to paint it. Quite the contrary. If we were to return to Pollan’s fantasy of pre-industrial agriculture, there would likely be an extreme drop in the nation’s over all life expectancy; today we live longer and healthier lives due to our ability to have a wide and abundant variety of food at our disposal, thanks to decades of technological and innovative improvements in the ag industry. While Pollan likes to advise of “not eating anything our great or great-great grandmothers wouldn’t recognize as food”, truth is many things our great-greats ate we wouldn’t recognize as food! Let’s not replace more efficient and productive agriculture with one man’s unrealistic and flawed fantasy.