The Maturing Food Movement
Decatur Metro | June 10, 2010 | 4:34 pmMichael Pollan, author and professor of journalism at UC Berkley, is often credited with igniting the local food movement with his 2004 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Building off the work of early big agribusiness critics like Eric Schlosser, who penned Fast Food Nation three years earlier, Pollan used a tale of four different meals to expose the often-ignored realities of the post-1970s corporate food chain and offered his readership an alternative: local, organic food.
For many of you, this isn’t anything you haven’t heard before. Heck, many of you are already arm-deep in compost, installing urban gardens in the forgotten corners of town, raising chickens, and luring farmer’s onto store shelves and weekly tables at markets, thanks to that little black book.
But Omnivore was published six years ago, and the food movement today struggles more with fusing the many thought-segments of the movement, than convincing enough average citizen that she should care more about the true “cost” of a corn dog.
Pollan’s follow-up books have dealt largely with transposing his Omnivore arguments into action items for the everyday eater. ( “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”) In Defense of Food and Food Rules are smart publishing moves, giving the populace the diet books they crave (pun intended), but what of the movement itself?