A Cultural Eating Disorder

Michael Pollan Speaks at UBC Farm (June 6, 2009)

A guest post by Dave Mcdonald.

Dave is a Certified Management Accountant based in Vancouver, Canada.  Since 2007, he has taken a personal and professional interest in sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) through strategy and responsible purchasing.  He believes that sound personal and professional purchasing strategies, integrated with our values and our missions, are the foundation for protecting the environment and our health while increasing community engagement.

On June 6th, I had the good fortune of attending a talk at UBC Farm by Michael Pollan – author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. It was a beautiful day out at the farm – the sun could have come out and burned us, but stayed nicely behind the clouds. I’ve yet to read either of Pollan’s books, but his talk resonated with me in several ways I’d like to share.

Food is a complex issue – on all of industrial, societal, and even psychological levels. Discussing food as a system, seemingly without variation, is painting some fairly broad strokes, but the key to this, if I read Pollan correctly, is through culture. Pollan began by stating his premise: That you can’t have a healthy population without a healthy diet and that you can’t have a healthy diet without a healthy food system. This makes sense on an intuitive level and even he admitted that the latter is a point that will take some convincing. Assuming Pollan is correct, there’s a chicken-and-egg paradox here: In order to have a healthy food system, producers need to be providing healthy, sustainable food options to consumers. But producers are not currently providing these options to consumers in any large number, so without these options, how does this all start on a meaningful scale? Because they act in the interest of sales and profits, it’s really not likely that producers will change their models for the sake of sustainability. In fact, I would speculate that most traditional food providers would not be able make these changes even if they wanted to because they are so deeply rooted in their strategies, supply chains and general processes that any change would be entirely profound and beyond the capacity of most. The onus is unfortunately pushed onto the “eater” to be diligent. This is where I have the most concern – we’re asking the masses to act independently and there’s no obvious compelling case to convey that there is a tipping point for most; that is, a reason that appeals to people’s pocketbooks and sense of value, to ensure they act responsibly. Appealing to intellect, values, and the general sense of what one ‘should’ do, versus corporate decision making on the scale of a half trillion dollar industry is a gargantuan task. Looking at a larger system, roughly sketched out below, there’s a significant vested interest in parties representing economic sustainability and growth to keep things as they are.

There is so much money being made at all these different layers, that no one has an incentive to change beyond the leap of faith related to what is generally good. Pollan notes that $283 billion in revenue is generated in the US thanks to food-related health care. I am someone who depends heavily on the British Columbia health care industry for my own sustenance and the thought of losing that scares me. Where’s my ROI for the right choice? I’m not certain that the people on the planet today are facing the most hardships seen on the planet in history, but I am sure there’s a case to be made for that. We certainly have one of the most difficult choices in the history of the planet – to take action against the corporate earnings per share mentality from 20 years ago and force change in supply chains we don’t even fully understand. It’s an interesting leap of faith, indeed.