Michael Polan is h alfway full of shit

Yes, we need to eat healthier. And yes, we need to reform corporatized agriculture so as to make it cheaper to eat healthier.

We DON'T need to write books that bullshit us about the reality of what farm life was like in the past, and often still is today.

The reality? Not Pollan's gauzy "bourgeois nostaligia," but this essay on going back to the farm ... and going back to farm-labor cooking.

First, the Polanesque nostalgia:

Listening to the conversation about food reform that has unspooled in this country over the last decade, it’s hard to avoid the idea that in terms of food production and consumption, we once had it right—before industrialization and then globalization sullied our Eden. Nostalgia glistens on that conversation like dew on an heirloom tomato: the belief that in a not-so-distant past, families routinely sat down to happy meals whipped up from scratch by mom or grandma.

The reality? Farming involves WORK. And 19th-century, pre-mechanized agriculture on smaller farms involved a lot of it.

That's why the essay notes that "family" farming a century ago was already looking at ways for farming to become easier and more convenient. That's why people loved canning. And the railroads(when they weren't getting ripped off on rates), and especially refrigerated railroad cars. That's why they bought mechanical tractors. They wanted convenience.

And, if convenience, in terms of mechanization, was too hard to come by, or too expensive, there was always good old "Plan B":

There is an even more fundamental concern about our nostalgia: America’s food system has always depended on the exploitation of someone, whether it was indentured servants, slaves, tenant farmers, braceros and other guest workers, or, now, immigrants. ... We have no history of a food system that does not depend on oppression of some sort, and it seems unlikely that we will be able to create a future system that avoids this fate.

It was easy for Thomas Jefferson to laud "yeoman farmers"; after all, all of them in the South had slaves!

Beyond that, per my friend Leo Lincourt, I have now expanded a great stereotyping phrase:

Dear white, Volvo-drinking, latte-sipping, Meyer-lemon-marmalade making (that one is going in my phrase stereotype book!) pseudoliberals: "Michael Pollan is a big poopy head."

Beyond that, Pollan's bourgeois nostalgia type farming is expensive. Obamiac Volvo-drivers can afford it, but not most of us. Pollan doesn't tell us that one, either, though.