Known for his dietary advice, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” author Michael Pollan says the food system looks much like it did 10 years ago when he published “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Yet, Pollan tells the website New Food Economy, “The simple question that got me started on the book — where does your food come from? — is now front-of-mind for a lot of people.”
“The alternative food economy is growing in America,” Pollan said. Organic food sales are zooming, “local food” has a sizable audience, “there are artisanal foods of various kinds,” and mainstream companies are investing in organic food — all signs of growing influence.
“Ultimately, I think many of the values that seem alternative now — cage-free eggs, for example — will be mainstream very soon. I think you’ll have major fast food chains switching to organic at some point as a marketing matter — and it’ll work, and others will follow suit,” said Pollan.
“The real challenge now is … to get people to vote on food issues, to get people in Congress to vote for improvements in the food system,” Pollan said in the interview. “My hope is that people will start to revalue food as something worth spending more money on when possible … But of course, there remain people who won’t be able to afford the higher prices of sustainable food, and that’s where the difficulty arises. How do we make this food available to them? That, I think, is the big challenge of the food movement: to democratize sustainably and ethically produced food.”