Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

So, to continue with my posts on Michael Pollan’s work, particularly _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_, to give a little more background, apparently when commenting on the book to Dwayne, mostly agreeing with him, I was unaware of the bee’s nest I was stepping on. As in: no idea that Michael Pollan has a zealous fanbase of people who drink deeply from his organic well of local water, a well Pollan dug himself with his bare hands and brute strength, occasionally borrowing a neighbor’s power tools in order to get the job done.

Ha ha. Is there an organic Pollanade on the market yet?

In response to Dwayne, one such fan argued that Pollan avoids and examines the notion of “alienation of Nature.” This, of course, irritated me because Pollan trades totally and completely in the alienation from nature thesis. More on that below, after this quote from Andy, who objected to the idea that Pollan romanticized nature and portrayed humans as alienated from nature:

At 10:13 AM 10/14/2008, Andy wrote:

Regarding an “alienation from Nature”, his avoidance and examination
of this notion is one of the joys of reading his work. I haven’t read
_The Omnivore’s Dilemma_ in a year, so it’s possible that my memory is
mistaken, but I recall going into it with my antennae out in
anticipation of a McKibbenesque argument and being delightedly
disappointed.

it’s in the chapter ‘greetings from the non-barcode people’. this is where he waxes most sentimental about our alienation from the land, how we are bereft because no longer buying our food directly from the farmer who grows it, and stunningly he makes the argument that we all think of food as special, as precisely something that should *not* be part of the exchange process if we can help it. and there is some celebration of tribalism, spoken of by joel saletin, and not criticized by pollan. we shouldn’t legislate change — of course not, if you’re joel — and we should just let ourselves break up into tribes of like-minded people.

and the part, earlier in the book, where he goes on about how important it is to be a self-sufficient community, producing your own food (because food is special and different). that was kind of wild, to me, for someone to write this:

“And why *should* a nation produce its own food when others can produce it more cheaply? A dozen reasons leap to mind, but most of them the Steven Blanks of the world — and they are legion — are quick to dismiss as sentimental. I’m thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing that your community, or country, can feed itself…..”

p 256

notice that, instead of addressing the charge of sentimentality, what pollan does is elide it by making the person who questions it into an ally of Steven Blanks. Pollan here _embraces_ the charge of sentimentality with a rhetorical “so? what’s *your* problem?”

“So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual’s control — what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decided, every day, what we’re going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in.” (p 257)

and what i find endlessly fascinating is that he begins all this with a critique of the Supermarket Pastoral as literary device at Whole Foods. But this entire section on life at Polyface farm *is* precisely the Supermarket Pastoral he derides. It is telling a narrative about food, that pushes a much higher value, that gets you to buy the stuff, *because* of the story:

“Supermarket Pastoral is a most seductive literary form, beguiling enough to survive in the face of a great many discomfiting facts. I suspect that’s because it gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for safe food, but for a connection to the earth and to the handful of domesticated creatures we’ve long depended on.” (p. 137)

as I said earlier, Supermarket Pastoral appears to be something Pollan’s mocking in this section. But it turns out, he’s not. He’s perfectly well in support of it. As long as it is true. He judges the pigs at Polyface farm as happy, and so they are. Truth in advertising. Nothing wrong with branding — getting people to pay more for something because of the description, because we are buying an identity. That is all fine. As long as it is true that, if the label says pigs are happy, then they are. If your tribe agrees, then they are. Buy the bacon!

Anyway, gotta run. I’ll get back to that bit about the need to understand Pollan’s book by understanding causality as Aristotle understood it in Physus. Nature works toward the end of pig happiness, see.

Also, Dwayne? Recalling an ecofeminist book that compared putting ladies on pedestals in the system of Romantic Love with the way that the environmentalists you criticize put the Earth on a pedastal…. Made me realize: to really get at what you’re getting at would be to draw in Zizek’s analysis of romantic love. Twould be an awesome essay!

shag