I came rather late to Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," but it would be hard for me to recommend it too highly. A couple of well-read friends mentioned it at Thanksgiving. The book goes very deep; I can see why some people have suggested that Mr. Pollan should be Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, instead of the usual agribusiness shill from Monsanto or ConAgra.Perhaps there's hope. Barack's impending selection of Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy was nothing short of inspired, IMHO. It makes me wonder whether this can actually be the same country that gave us the Pre-Enlightenment Obscurantism of George W. Bush. The answer being, of course: No. As the Buddhists tell us, one can never step into the same river twice.
Pollan's theses include the idea, anticipated in the writing of Frances Moore Lappe and Wendell Berry, that industrial food production is a very sick idea. Factory beef, factory chicken, factory corn, monoculture farming, processed food, long supply lines for delivery, fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer, nitrogen runoff, manure lagoons, massive pollution, Omega-3/Omega-6 imbalance, incompatible diets for ruminants, animal cruelty, cancer, diabetes, obesity -- hey, we've perfected it all right here in America. Michael Pollan's book is a great public service.
I was musing this morning, while drinking a cappucino with a little too much foam (and musing out loud, because that's what happens when I'm fully caffeinated), that the USA has managed, through its mass industrialization of everything, to place itself in the degenerate condition of a kind of capitalist USSR in the depths of its senescence. We have a sort of command economy now: highly centralized, grotesquely energy-inefficient, wasteful in the extreme, and with the great mass of our population on a downward spiral toward poverty. We are in the process also of finishing up an eight-year experiment in Leadership by Mental Defective. That will be one for the history books for sure. How did the United States finally arrive at a place where half the population actually voted for a brain-damaged, emotionally unstable intellectual mediocrity as the President of the United States? Do you ever think about it in just those terms? Because that's exactly what happened.
I have theories, because I have theories about everything. (Beats working, as someone once said.) The "Globalists" really love this "interconnectedness" of everything, the human mosaic pulled together by modern technologies like television and the Internet. Thomas Friedman, for example, practically achieves orgasm when writing about Internet "platforms" that allow everyone to "plug and play" in a "flat world." A question that never seems to get asked is fairly basic: simply because these technologies exist, and were invented by humans, does that necessarily mean that they represent the optimal means of human interaction and lifestyle?
Marshall McLuhan's use of the term "global village" is often misinterpreted, I think. The automatic assumption is that McLuhan meant this in a positive sense. It seems more likely to me that he meant it simply in an inevitable sense. The interaction between electronic media and the human brain, given the way the human brain works, leads inevitably to the illusion of interconnectedness because that's simply the way the human brain operates. The perception of the senses is accepted as Reality. Millions of years of evolution adapted us to this literalness: if we perceive something with our senses, then we conclude it's real. Any other way of looking at the world is just too dangerous. There isn't time to second-guess the primary authority of our senses.
The world of advertising, including the selling of political candidates, relies heavily on this essential fact of the human-techonology interface. People will vote in droves for a brain-damaged nincompoop if you can dress him up and give him some folksy aphorisms, resulting in an image reminiscent of some real person we encountered in non-electronic life. George W. Bush was an amalgamation of electronic pixels and rehearsed affect. Nothing more. And he got elected.
As with politicians, so with our food. All this crap we eat seems vaguely like food so we eat it. We're told it's food, it's advertised on television as food, so we believe it's food. Is it optimal nutrionally, in terms of taste and enjoyment, all this bar-coded junk we ingest? No, of course not. But industrial food production is what we do now, and the cheerleaders for globalization, Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, the World Trade Organization, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agribusiness, are excited that the human race has lost touch with its localized sense of direct judgment and discernment in favor of this new "platform" of Mass Everything.
The pendulum is beginning to swing the other way now. The big energy companies are frightened to death, as they should be, of the idea that indiviudal citizens will be able to access their own energy directly from the sun for home heating, cooling and electricity. As Americans die off from obesity, cancer and diabetes, industrial food will give way once again to localized agriculture. The experiment with the Total Economy, as Wendell Berry called it, will come to an end. The Global Village will give way to the older paradigm of maximal diversity.
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