As for the health issues with my corporate meal, that seems like something people can make their own decisions about, no? You might fear the effects of the ingredients a lot more than I do. I eat that meal about once a week, and I’ve had zero adverse health effects. So you can bypass the frozen food, and I’ll buy some. As for low-paid migrant workers, I thought this was about food, not income distribution. If the food movement is another left-leaning effort to eliminate income inequality, then it needs to be transparent about that. I, for one, can’t make food purchasing decisions based on speculation about how much the workers made harvesting my meal. I have no idea. I don’t know how much GE paid the workers to make my refrigerator, either. How much did the mill workers earn making the shirt you’re wearing?

The larger public health issue Pollan seems to be talking about is not so much fertilizer and pesticides, but high fat and salt, and low nutritional value. That is right as applieed to many corporate meals. But it’s not true as to all of them, like the one I ate. And it came in a bag that amounted to about 650 calories. Even if one at ate the whole thing, it’s not an unreasonable dinner that leaves on over-full.

Which gets back to my point that corporations make lots of bad fod, and lots of good food too. If folks ate Healthy Choice meals instead of McDonalds, the obesity epidemic might not exist. So I think the fod movement errs by focusing on the role of corporations in supplying food, and by essentially second-guessing the food choices people make. It has to simply deal with the fact that people like high fat foods, and not just poor people. There is a very defnite class condecension in haitng on McDonald’s and waiting in line for Farm Burger. The food movement seems to do exactly that.

Yes, it might be high in protein and include veggies (good things), but be careful about what else is included, especially in the sauce. Mostly I’m talking about man-made chemicals and additives, which we really don’t know the long-term effects of. Our bodies haven’t yet evolved to deal with the many creations of food labs. This doesn’t mean necessarily that these preservatives will cause cancer, but at best they make it hard for your body to know when its full.

Also, corporate, corn and byproduct-fed meat isn’t all that it could be. It’s lower in healthy saturated fats than animals that live a more traditional lifestyle. Also, animals fed on corn are given large amounts of antibiotics to combat the animal’s natural problems with digesting such starchy food. Those antibiotics are passed on to us. Also, large slaughterhouses ruin the environments around them due to the high concentrations of waste.

As for the “time” issue with preparing fresh food, I don’t know your personal schedule obviously, but the average American watches something like 5 hours of television a day. I’m not suggesting you have to spend hours each day making a meal…I certainly don’t. But it’s not necessarily for lack of time. Those committed and inspired by the movement will tell you that the time is available if you dedicate a bit more time to what you eat.

As for “the problem” addressed in your final paragraph, it’s again a multi-fold issue, but here it’s mainly about price. Since Earl Butz, the Fed has heavily subsidized corn, soybeans and wheat, making the price discrepancy between foods made with elements of these items MUCH cheaper than the fresh fruits and veggies. More than anything else, these subsidies are the biggest single problem with the U.S. food chain. The poor aren’t “duped” by slick marketing, but by the fact that frozen dinner made with cornfed beef and nitrogen fed veggies, looks the same as an organic option, tastes similar, but costs far less.

As for why entire food cultures evolved around frying food, I believe it mostly had to do with the fact that frying food is the most effective way to cook food without releasing a ton of energy and heating up a kitchen. An open fire or a couple boiling pots of water in the summer Georgia heat? Yuck. Also, because of that heat, the folks in those cultures, working in a non A/C world, could afford to consume a few extra calories. Fried food was a good way to do that.

So last night I had “corporate” food for dinner. It was a frozen meal with chicken, pasta, peas, broccoli, and a few other veggies in a light sauce, that I prepared in a sauce pan. Marketed by a large corporation. Relatively low fat, not particularly high in calories. Basically, a healthy meal made mostly of lean protein and veggies.

Of course, making all of that from scratch, as opposed to frozen food, would have made a tastier meal. But it would have taken 5 times as long to make it, and I did not have time. Nor did I happen to have all those fresh ingredients on hand on this particular day. Keeping these in a frozen meal diminishes taste, but precludes spoilage of the ingredients and saves a huge amount of time in preparation. Really, who has time for slow food on a regular basis, and doesn’t need the occasional 15 minute meal?

So, I have ask, after reading Pollan’s review, what exactly is the problem with this? There was nothing low-quality about the food — it was nutritious and, though it could have been tastier, it was far from bland/awful. It saved me time and prevented me from buying a bunch of fresh food that might have spolied had I not eaten it in a few days from purchase.

Also, I’d love to have time for a fresh dinner, eaten over deep/insightful conversation with friends and family. That would have required a huge amount of re-arranging of schedules. No one has time for the equivalent of a holiday meal most nights.

I’m sure that the frozen food section has many awful, unhealthy meals for sale next to my healthy meal. So is the problem that corporations make those meals — both unhealthy and healthy — or is it that many people simply choose the bad meals? Pollan seems to almost avoid this issue with the standard critiques — oh, the poor can’t afford the good meal (no evidence of that; it’s all corporate, frozen food sold at WalMart) or they’ve been duped into an awful diet by slick marketing. But there’s also slick marketing for the healthier corporate food too (Healthy Choice by ConAgra, Smart Balance, etc, all advertise). Is Pollan telling me the marketing works for fried chicken, but not grilled chicken? For McDonald;s but not Farm Burder? If so, why is that? And if he’s right, why did entire food cultures evolve around frying food in oil/lard in the first place, years before television, when it has always been easier to just roast something over an open fire or boil it in water?