{"id":1434,"date":"2008-10-28T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2008-10-28T16:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/batesthisweek.wordpress.com\/?p=1434"},"modified":"2024-07-08T13:42:11","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T17:42:11","slug":"pollan-explores-paradox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2008\/10\/28\/pollan-explores-paradox\/","title":{"rendered":"Food writer Pollan explores ‘American paradox’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Michael<\/a><\/p>\n

“The science around food,” said Omnivore’s Dilemma<\/em> author Michael Pollan to a rapt Bates College audience on Oct. 27, “is basically where surgery was in 1650.”<\/p>\n

Then he asked, “Are you ready to get on the table?”<\/p>\n

The line drew one of many big laughs from the capacity crowd at the college chapel. Yet therein, too, lay a key theme of Pollan’s talk: In what he calls the “American paradox,” the U.S. obsession with nutrition has actually given this nation “some of the lousiest nutritional health in the world.”<\/p>\n

“The ideology that we bring to food and eating decisions really is the problem,” he said. He calls this ideology “nutritionism,” and says its disciples have put their faith in imperfect, even destructive, science and food-industry marketing.<\/p>\n

The annual Otis Lecture at Bates, Pollan’s droll, fact-rich talk was titled In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Solution<\/em>. (Because scores of would-be listeners were turned away from the crowded chapel for the evening talk, he reprised the address the following morning.)<\/p>\n

His appearance was timely, coinciding with the College’s yearlong Bates Contemplates Food<\/a><\/em> initiative, examining where food comes from and what it means. During Pollan’s two-day stay at Bates, an institution whose dining practices<\/a> he praised as “light years ahead of many other places,” the award-winning writer and journalism professor <\/a>visited around the campus community and offered an informal talk about writing on Monday afternoon.<\/p>\n