New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2003
The Futures of Food
By MICHAEL POLLAN
When I was a kid growing up in the early 60's, anybody could have told
you exactly what the future of food was going to look like. We'd seen
''The Jetsons,'' toured the 1964 World's Fair, tasted the culinary
fruits (or at least fruit flavors) of the space program, and all signs
pointed to a single outcome: the meal in a pill, washed down, perhaps,
with next-generation Tang.
The general consensus seemed to be that ''food'' -- a word that was
already beginning to sound old-fashioned -- was destined to break its
surly bonds to Nature, float free of agriculture and hitch its future to
Technology. If not literally served in a pill, the meal of the future
would be fabricated ''in the laboratory out of a wide variety of
materials,'' as one contemporary food historian predicted, including not
only algae and soybeans but also petrochemicals. Protein would be
extracted directly from fuel oil and then ''spun and woven into 'animal'
muscle -- long wrist-thick tubes of 'fillet steak.' ''
By 1965, we were well on our way to the synthetic food future. Already
the eating of readily identifiable plant and animal species was
beginning to feel somewhat recherche, as food technologists came forth
with one shiny new product after another: Cool Whip, the Pop-Tart,
nondairy creamer, Kool-Aid, Carnation Instant Breakfast and a whole slew
of eerily indestructible baked goods (Wonder Bread and Twinkies being
only the most famous). My personal favorite was the TV dinner, which
even a 10-year-old recognized as a brilliant simulacrum -- not to
mention an obvious improvement over the real thing. My poor mother,
eager to please four children whose palates had already been ruined by
the food technologists (and school lunch ladies), once spent hours in
the kitchen trying to simulate the Salisbury steak from a Swanson TV
dinner.
What none of us could have imagined back in 1965 was that within five
short years, the synthetic food future would be overthrown in advance of
its arrival. The counterculture seized upon processed food, of all
things, as a symbol of everything wrong with industrial civilization.
Not only did processed foods contain chemicals, the postwar glamour of
which had been extinguished by DDT and Agent Orange, but products like
Wonder Bread represented the worst of white-bread America, its very
wheat ''bleached to match the bleached-out mentality of white
supremacy,'' in the words of an underground journalist writing in The
Quicksilver Times.
As an antidote to the ''plastic food'' dispensed by agribusiness, the
counterculture promoted natural foods organically grown, and whole
grains in particular. Brown food of any kind was deemed morally superior
to white -- not only because it was less processed and therefore more
authentic, but because by eating it you could express your solidarity
with the world's (nonwhite) oppressed. Seriously. What you chose to eat
had become a political act, and the lower you ate on the food chain, the
better it was for you, for the planet and for the world's hungry. Almost
overnight the meal in a pill became a symbol of the forces of reaction
rather than progress. The synthetic food future appeared doomed.
Though claims for the moral superiority of brown food have been muted in
the years since 1970, the general outlines of this alternative vision of
food's future are no less relevant or compelling today. If the postwar
food utopia was modernist and corporate, the new one is postmodern and
oppositional, constructing its future from elements of the past rescued
from the jaws of agribusiness. It goes by many names, including ''slow
food,'' ''local food'' and ''organic'' -- or, increasingly, ''beyond
organic.'' Its agriculture is not only chemical-free but also
sustainable, diversified and humane to workers as well as animals. Its
cuisine (or, as it's sometimes called, ''countercuisine'') is based on
traditional species of plants and animals -- those that predate modern
industrial hybrids and genetic modification -- traditionally prepared.
Its distribution system aims to circumvent the supermarket, relying
instead on farmers' markets and C.S.A.'s (community-supported
agriculture) -- farms to which consumers ''subscribe'' to receive weekly
deliveries of produce. As for the consumption of this food, it too is to
be overhauled, in an effort to recover the sociality of eating from the
solitary fueling implied by fast food.
It's a beguiling future in many ways, full of promise for our physical
and social health as well as for the health of the land. It's tasty too.
So what's not to like?
Plenty, if you're one of those supermarket chains being circumvented, or
an agribusiness corporation nervously watching organic foods gobble
market share or, for that matter, if you're a harried working parent who
simply hasn't the time or money for food to be any slower or more
expensive than it already is. And so with one eye on that family's
predicament and the other on its own, Big Food has been hard at work
developing a counter-counter food future, one that borrows all that it
can borrow from the countercuisine and then . . . puts it in a pill. Or
if not literally in a pill, into something that looks a lot more like a
pill than the kind of comestibles we've traditionally used the word
''food'' to denote.
To thumb through the pages of Food Technology, the trade magazine for
food scientists, is to realize that the dream of liberating food from
the farm wasn't killed off by the 60's after all. The food-in-a-pill
future has simply been updated, given a new, more natural and
health-conscious sheen.
Food Technology offers a pretty good window on the industry's future,
and the first thing you notice when you look through it is that the word
''food'' is about to be replaced by ''food system.'' Which is probably
as good a term as any when you're trying to describe edible materials
constructed from textured vegetable protein and ''flavor fractions,'' or
''antioxidant bars'' built from blueberry and flaxseed parts. (According
to an ad for Land O' Lakes, that company is no longer in the business of
selling butter or cheese, but ''dairy flavor systems.'')
The other thing you notice is that those ''food systems'' are rapidly
merging with medical systems. The industry has evidently decided the
future of food lies in so-called nutraceuticals and ''functional
foods'': nutritional products that claim to confer health benefits above
and beyond those of ordinary foods.
The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against a
troublesome biological fact: try as we might, each of us can eat only
about 1,500 pounds of food in a year. True, the industry has managed to
nudge that figure upward over the last few decades (the obesity epidemic
is proof of their success), but, unlike sneakers or CD's, there's a
limit to how much food we can each consume without exploding. Unless
agribusiness is content to limit its growth to the single-digit growth
rate of the American population -- something Wall Street would never
abide -- it needs to figure out ways to make us each spend more each
year for the same three quarters of a ton of chow.
The best way to do this has always been by ''adding value'' to cheap raw
materials -- usually in the form of convenience or fortification.
Selling unprocessed or minimally processed whole foods is a fool's game,
especially since the price of agricultural commodities tends to fall
over time, and one company's apples are hard to distinguish from any
other's.
How much better to turn them apples into a nutraceutical food system!
This is precisely what one company profiled in a recent issue of Food
Technology has done. TreeTop Inc. has developed a ''low-moisture,
naturally sweetened apple piece infused with a red-wine extract.'' Just
18 grams of these ''apple pieces'' have the same amount of
cancer-fighting ''flavonoid phenols as five glasses of wine and the
dietary fiber equivalent of one whole apple.'' We've moved from the
meal-in-a-pill future to the pill-in-a-meal, which is to say, not very
far at all.
The news of TreeTop's breakthrough comes in a Food Technology trend
story titled ''Getting More Fruits and Vegetables Into Foods.'' You
probably thought fruits and vegetables were already foods, and so didn't
need to be gotten into them, but that just shows you're stuck in the
food past. We're moving toward a food future in which the processed food
will be even ''better'' (i.e., contain more of whatever science has
determined to be the good stuff) than the whole foods on which they are
based. Once again, the food industry has gazed upon nature and found it
wanting -- and gotten to work improving it.
All that's really changed since the high-tech food future of the 60's is
that the laboratory materials out of which these meals will be
constructed are nominally ''natural'' -- dried apple bits, red-wine
extract, ''flavor fractions'' distilled from oranges, resistant starch
derived from corn, meat substitutes fashioned out of mycoprotein. But
the underlying reductionist premise -- that food is nothing more than
the sum of its nutrients -- remains undisturbed. So we break down the
plants and animals into their component parts and then reassemble them
into high-value-added food systems.
It's hard to believe plain old food could ever hold its own against such
sophisticated products. Yet while the logic of capitalism argues
powerfully for the meal-in-a-pill food future, it is at least
conceivable that, flaky as it might seem, the alternative food future
has behind it an even more compelling logic: the logic of biology. The
premise of the alternative food future -- slow, organic, local -- has
always been that the industrial food future is ''unsustainable.'' In the
past, that word has mainly referred to the industry's impact on the
land, which organic farmers insisted could not indefinitely endure the
reductionist approach of industrial agriculture -- treating the land as
a factory, into which you put certain kinds of chemicals (pesticides,
fertilizers) in order to take out others (starches, proteins, flavonoid
phenols). Eventually, the land would rebel: soils would lose fertility,
the chemicals would no longer work, the environment would grow toxic.
But what about the biological system at the opposite end of the food
chain -- the human body? It too is ill served by industry's powerful
reductions. Increasingly, there is evidence that breaking foods down
into their component parts and then reassembling them as processed food
systems is also unsustainable -- for our health. It is not at all clear
that the ''healthy'' ingredients we're isolating function in isolation
the same way they do in whole foods. Already we're finding that beta
carotene extracted from carrots, or lycopene from tomatoes, don't work
nearly as well, if at all, outside the context of a carrot or a tomato.
Even in the pages of Food Technology, you now find nutritionists
cautioning industry that ''a single-nutrient approach is too
simplistic.''
Foods, it appears, are more than the sum of their chemical parts, and
treating them as collections of nutrients to be mixed and matched,
rather than as the complex biological systems they are, simply may not
work. Which probably shouldn't surprise us. We didn't evolve, after all,
to eat phytochemical extracts or flavor fractions or mycoproteins grown
on substrates of glucose. Rather, we evolved to eat that archaic and yet
astonishing array of plants and animals and fungi that most of us are
still happy to call food. Don't write it off just yet.
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer to the magazine and the author
of ''The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World.''