[Sca-cooks] The Futures of Food, OOP, Long, NYTimes.com Article

[Christine Seelye-King]

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  Interesting and scary all at once.  I know it's long and out of period,
but it was sent to me by another foodie, and I thought it might be of
interest here.
  Christianna
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: The Futures of Food
Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 18:30:25 -0400 (EDT)
The Futures of Food
May 4, 2003
By MICHAEL POLLAN
When I was a kid growing up in the early 60's, anybody could have told you
exactly what the future of food was
going to look like. We'd seen ''The Jetsons,'' toured the   1964 World's
Fair, tasted the culinary fruits (or at least
fruit flavors) of the space program, and all signs pointed   to a single
outcome: the meal in a pill, washed down,
perhaps, with next-generation Tang. The general consensus seemed to be that
''food'' -- a word
that was already beginning to sound old-fashioned -- was destined to break
its surly bonds to Nature, float free of
agriculture and hitch its future to Technology. If not   literally served in
a pill, the meal of the future would be
fabricated ''in the laboratory out of a wide variety of   materials,'' as
one contemporary food historian predicted,
including not only algae and soybeans but also   petrochemicals. Protein
would be extracted directly from
fuel oil and then ''spun and woven into 'animal' muscle --   long
wrist-thick tubes of 'fillet steak.' ''
By 1965, we were well on our way to the synthetic food   future. Already the
eating of readily identifiable plant
and animal species was beginning to feel somewhat recherche, as food
technologists came forth with one shiny
new product after another: Cool Whip, the Pop-Tart,   nondairy creamer,
Kool-Aid, Carnation Instant Breakfast and
a whole slew of eerily indestructible baked goods (Wonder   Bread and
Twinkies being only the most famous). My personal
favorite was the TV dinner, which even a 10-year-old recognized as a
brilliant simulacrum -- not to mention an
obvious improvement over the real thing. My poor mother,   eager to please
four children whose palates had already
been ruined by the food technologists (and school lunch ladies), once spent
hours in the kitchen trying to simulate
the Salisbury steak from a Swanson TV dinner.   What none of us could have
imagined back in 1965 was that
within five short years, the synthetic food future would be   overthrown in
advance of its arrival. The counterculture
seized upon processed food, of all things, as a symbol of   everything wrong
with industrial civilization. Not only did
processed foods contain chemicals, the postwar glamour of   which had been
extinguished by DDT and Agent Orange, but
products like Wonder Bread represented the worst of   white-bread America,
its very wheat ''bleached to match the
bleached-out mentality of white supremacy,'' in the words   of an
underground journalist writing in The Quicksilver
Times.
As an antidote to the ''plastic food'' dispensed by   agribusiness, the
counterculture promoted natural foods
organically grown, and whole grains in particular. Brown   food of any kind
was deemed morally superior to white --
not only because it was less processed and therefore more   authentic, but
because by eating it you could express your
solidarity with the world's (nonwhite) oppressed.   Seriously. What you
chose to eat had become a political
act, and the lower you ate on the food chain, the better it   was for you,
for the planet and for the world's hungry.
Almost overnight the meal in a pill became a symbol of the forces of
reaction rather than progress. The synthetic food
future appeared doomed.
Though claims for the moral superiority of brown food have been muted in the
years since 1970, the general outlines of
this alternative vision of food's future are no less relevant or compelling
today. If the postwar food utopia
was modernist and corporate, the new one is postmodern and oppositional,
constructing its future from elements of the
past rescued from the jaws of agribusiness. It goes by many   names,
including ''slow food,'' ''local food'' and
''organic'' -- or, increasingly, ''beyond organic.'' Its agriculture is not
only chemical-free but also sustainable,
diversified and humane to workers as well as animals. Its cuisine (or, as
it's sometimes called, ''countercuisine'')
is based on traditional species of plants and animals --   those that
predate modern industrial hybrids and genetic
modification -- traditionally prepared. Its distribution system aims to
circumvent the supermarket, relying instead
on farmers' markets and C.S.A.'s (community-supported   agriculture) --
farms to which consumers ''subscribe'' to
receive weekly deliveries of produce. As for the  consumption of this food,
it too is to be overhauled, in an
effort to recover the sociality of eating from the solitary   fueling
implied by fast food.
It's a beguiling future in many ways, full of promise for   our physical and
social health as well as for the health of
the land. It's tasty too. So what's not to like?   Plenty, if you're one of
those supermarket chains being
circumvented, or an agribusiness corporation nervously   watching organic
foods gobble market share or, for that
matter, if you're a harried working parent who simply hasn't the time or
money for food to be any slower or more
expensive than it already is. And so with one eye on that   family's
predicament and the other on its own, Big Food has
been hard at work developing a counter-counter food future, one that borrows
all that it can borrow from the
countercuisine and then . . . puts it in a pill. Or if not literally in a
pill, into something that looks a lot more
like a pill than the kind of comestibles we've traditionally used the word
''food'' to denote.
To thumb through the pages of Food Technology, the trade magazine for food
scientists, is to realize that the dream
of liberating food from the farm wasn't killed off by the 60's after all.
The food-in-a-pill future has simply been
updated, given a new, more natural and health-conscious   sheen.
Food Technology offers a pretty good window on the   industry's future, and
the first thing you notice when you
look through it is that the word ''food'' is about to be  replaced by ''food
system.'' Which is probably as good a
term as any when you're trying to describe edible materials
constructed from textured vegetable protein and ''flavor  fractions,'' or
''antioxidant bars'' built from blueberry
and flaxseed parts. (According to an ad for Land O' Lakes, that company is
no longer in the business of selling butter
or cheese, but ''dairy flavor systems.'')   The other thing you notice is
that those ''food systems''   are rapidly merging with medical systems. The
industry has   evidently decided the future of food lies in so-called
nutraceuticals and ''functional foods'': nutritional products that claim to
confer health benefits above and   beyond those of ordinary foods.
The growth of the American food industry will always bump   up against a
troublesome biological fact: try as we might,
each of us can eat only about 1,500 pounds of food in a year. True, the
industry has managed to nudge that figure
upward over the last few decades (the obesity epidemic is   proof of their
success), but, unlike sneakers or CD's,
there's a limit to how much food we can each consume   without exploding.
Unless agribusiness is content to limit
its growth to the single-digit growth rate of the American   population --
something Wall Street would never abide -- it
needs to figure out ways to make us each spend more each   year for the same
three quarters of a ton of chow.
The best way to do this has always been by ''adding value''   to cheap raw
materials -- usually in the form of
convenience or fortification. Selling unprocessed or   minimally processed
whole foods is a fool's game,
especially since the price of agricultural commodities tends to fall over
time, and one company's apples are hard
to distinguish from any other's. How much better to turn them apples into a
nutraceutical
food system! This is precisely what one company profiled in   a recent issue
of Food Technology has done. TreeTop Inc.
has developed a ''low-moisture, naturally sweetened apple   piece infused
with a red-wine extract.'' Just 18 grams of
these ''apple pieces'' have the same amount of cancer-fighting ''flavonoid
phenols as five glasses of wine
and the dietary fiber equivalent of one whole apple.''
We've moved from the meal-in-a-pill future to the pill-in-a-meal, which is
to say, not very far at all.
The news of TreeTop's breakthrough comes in a Food  Technology trend story
titled ''Getting More Fruits and
Vegetables Into Foods.'' You probably thought fruits and   vegetables were
already foods, and so didn't need to be
gotten into them, but that just shows you're stuck in the   food past. We're
moving toward a food future in which the
processed food will be even ''better'' (i.e., contain more   of whatever
science has determined to be the good stuff)
than the whole foods on which they are based. Once again,   the food
industry has gazed upon nature and found it
wanting -- and gotten to work improving it.   All that's really changed
since the high-tech food future
of the 60's is that the laboratory materials out of which   these meals will
be constructed are nominally ''natural''
-- dried apple bits, red-wine extract, ''flavor fractions''   distilled from
oranges, resistant starch derived from corn,
meat substitutes fashioned out of mycoprotein. But the  underlying
reductionist premise -- that food is nothing
more than the sum of its nutrients -- remains undisturbed. So we break down
the plants and animals into their
component parts and then reassemble them into  high-value-added food
systems.
It's hard to believe plain old food could ever hold its own   against such
sophisticated products. Yet while the logic of
capitalism argues powerfully for the meal-in-a-pill food future, it is at
least conceivable that, flaky as it might
seem, the alternative food future has behind it an even more compelling
logic: the logic of biology. The premise of
the alternative food future -- slow, organic, local -- has always been that
the industrial food future is
''unsustainable.'' In the past, that word has mainly referred to the
industry's impact on the land, which
organic farmers insisted could not indefinitely endure the reductionist
approach of industrial agriculture -- treating
the land as a factory, into which you put certain kinds of chemicals
(pesticides, fertilizers) in order to take out
others (starches, proteins, flavonoid phenols). Eventually,   the land would
rebel: soils would lose fertility, the
chemicals would no longer work, the environment would grow toxic.
But what about the biological system at the opposite end of the food
chain -- the human body? It too is ill served by
industry's powerful reductions. Increasingly, there is evidence that
breaking foods down into their component
parts and then reassembling them as processed food systems is also
unsustainable -- for our health. It is not at all
clear that the ''healthy'' ingredients we're isolating function in isolation
the same way they do in whole foods.
Already we're finding that beta carotene extracted from  carrots, or
lycopene from tomatoes, don't work nearly as
well, if at all, outside the context of a carrot or a  tomato. Even in the
pages of Food Technology, you now find
nutritionists cautioning industry that ''a single-nutrient approach is too
simplistic.''
Foods, it appears, are more than the sum of their chemical  parts, and
treating them as collections of nutrients to be
mixed and matched, rather than as the complex biological  systems they are,
simply may not work. Which probably
shouldn't surprise us. We didn't evolve, after all, to eat   phytochemical
extracts or flavor fractions or mycoproteins
grown on substrates of glucose. Rather, we evolved to eat that archaic and
yet astonishing array of plants and
animals and fungi that most of us are still happy to call  food. Don't write
it off just yet.
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer to the magazine and  the author of
''The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of
the World.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/magazine/04FOOD.html?ex=1053433025&ei=1&en
=290c9af6dec4ddb4
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