Posts tagged "Michael Pollan"
Farm Bill Updates: So What Is It?
I know the Farm Bill is important, but how can I ever understand a 1,000+ page complex, omnibus piece of legislation?
Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill, by Daniel Imhoff with a forward by Michael Pollan is your essential guide. Over the past three days, The Atlantic ran a three-part Farm Bill 101 series based on this guide. It is critical reading for anyone who eats: (more…)
Reading Noah in 2011 – Where Do Our Values Really Come From?
New York
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 / 28 Tishrei 5772
Dear All,
I’m back from my mini-sabbatical. My time away included riots in England, the European debt crisis, the Occupy movement, the Palestinian application for statehood, the death of Gaddhafi, the release of Gilad Shalit, and, most recently, Manchester United’s catastrophic home defeat to Manchester City. In the Jewish world, JDub, The Curriculum Initiative, and Milestones all announced their closure, at least in their current form. This is an unsettling time.
Over the coming weeks I’m going to use these emails to reflect on some of what I’ve been thinking about, as we look back on Hazon’s first dozen years and look forward to the future. For now I want to think about this coming week’s parsha to reflect very straightforwardly (i.e. unromantically and honestly) on how we read the Torah itself. (more…)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
By Michael Pollan – Penguin Press, 2006
Reviewed by Natan Margalit
From Tikkun Magazine, August 2006
Ben Zoma used to say, “What labors Adam had to carry out before he obtained bread to eat! He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped, he bound the sheaves, he threshed and winnowed and selected the grains, he ground and sifted the flour, he kneaded and baked and then at last he ate. Whereas I get up in the morning and find all these things done for me.”
-Babylonian Talmud, Brakhot 58b
Claude Levi-Strauss once said that food is not only good to eat, but also good to think. Our meals are statements that help us to understand ourselves and our world. Of course, the Bible makes this connection between food and thought with Adam and Eve’s fateful meal from the Tree of Knowledge. In today’s world of complex, industrial food chains, however, that connection is broken. Food seems to come from the supermarket, manufactured and packaged. Ignorance, not knowledge, characterizes modern eating. Even more disturbing is the fact that food categories that we might imagine are more transparent, more ethical, such as organic food – and kosher food — are increasingly involved in this manufactured ignorance.
Michael Pollan’s latest book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is about this connection between food and knowledge. He brilliantly explores the ways modern industrial food is based on ignorance, indifference and illusion, and the ways one may reconnect the food we eat with the story of how it reached our table. Much more than an expose of industrial agribusiness, Pollan’s book is a philosophical and practical meditation on the dangers of breaking the food/knowledge nexus, and the pleasures of mending it.
