Michael Pollan: Forget Nutrition Charts, Eat What Grandma Said Is Good for You

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The New Press / By Harry Kreisler

Michael Pollan: Forget Nutrition Charts, Eat What Grandma Said Is Good for You
The author of 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' says science has supplanted cultural wisdom as a guide in telling us what to eat.

February 16, 2010 |


This excerpt originally appeared in Political Awakenings: Conversations with History, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission. Copyright © 2010 by Harry Kreisler.



....(snip)....

Harry Kreisler: And looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

Michael Pollan: Oh, in many ways, my parents and my grandparents. I got very serious about gardening as a young boy. I had a grandfather who had been in the produce business, and he was a passionate gardener--this is the late '60s--and he was very kind of reactionary, and there was not too much we connected on except plants.

I put in a garden at our house, too, in imitation of his garden, but I didn't call it a garden. I called it a farm stand, and every time I could get six strawberries together in a Dixie cup, I'd sell them to my mother. She was the only customer.

That was one thread. Another was that I have a mom who's a terrific cook and very aware of food. My grandparents still cooked very traditional Jewish food, used duck fat, goose fat, or chicken fat to cook with. I remember stuffed cabbage, big deal special holiday food, and blintzes, and a whole range of Eastern European Jewish cooking. My mother did not cook that way. She fashioned herself more of a cosmopolitan, and she cooked every different ethnic food--sometimes French, Chinese, Italian--it was the '60s, it was that moment, you know, the World's Fair.

You wanted to cook in every different kind of cuisine, and she was very good at all of them. And she doesn't cook the way my grandparents did; I don't cook that way now. So, one of the things that has struck me, writing about food, is how little stability we have in our food culture in this country, that we haven't held on to the immigrant traditions. Certain ethnic groups have more than others, but Jews? I don't think to such a great extent. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/food/145687/michael_pollan%3A_forget_nutrition_charts%2C_eat_what_grandma_said_is_good_for_you