Taking An Idea and Making It Stick: Michael Pollan’s Quest to Put the Sun Back In Our Food

The line stretched around three sides of the city block that holds the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.

The casually hip crowd could have been waiting for a “secret” Wilco concert.  Or perhaps a limited delivery of ramps and purslane from a “rockstar farmer.”  But some were clutching books — In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a dog-eared Botany of Desire — and there was no mistaking who the main attraction was: Michael Pollan, the journalist-hero of sustainable agriculture.

We waited for 40 minutes only to get about 100 feet from the entrance to the museum and hear this message from an overwhelmed young museum assistant: “We’re sorry, but the lecture room is full.  You can stand outside in the hall if you’d like but…”  Then another assistant came and told us, no, the hallway is full, too.

My roommate Andrea and I are proud Pollan fans, so we pressed on, using the cover of a bathroom trip to make a break for the third floor of the converted school building.  We found about 50 people sitting against the walls in the two hallways adjoining the lecture room, their ears cocked to the sound of Pollan’s voice.  I pressed forward to the crowded door of the lecture hall.  The airless, oval space has a mirrored ceiling, and the audience sat on low benches and cross-legged on the floor, amplifying the messianic vibe.

His lecture, “Taking the Plant’s Point of View,” outlined the thesis of Botany of Desire: the metaphor of human domination over nature is false, and in fact, certain plants have “domesticated” us, attracting and using us in their quest for survival and reproduction.

“Corn domesticated our land, our diet, and our gas tanks,” he said.  Our system for growing corn, cattle, chicken, anything produced in a factory farm, ignores the points of view — the very nature — of the plants and animals.  This has created a tangle of problems for the crops, the environment, and ourselves.

“Our assumption is that our relationship with nature is a zero sum game,” he said.  But it needn’t be.  It’s possible for us to get all that we need out of the Earth and leave it more fertile than it was before.  He told the remarkable story of Joel Salatin, the “grass farmer” of Polyface Farm.

Polyface Farm’s robust ecosystem is fueled by the sun, an approach that stands in contrast to industrially-produced crops, which are grown with fossil fuels.  On a factory farm, it takes a half a gallon of oil to produce every bushel of corn, one of the reasons why ethanol as alternative fuel is at best a fallacy and at worst, as Pollan remarked, “the spark that lit the fire of the current food crisis.”

“We need to resolarize the American food chain,” Pollan declared, hinting at the “political manifesto” that he admitted he is in the process of writing.

“We’re not going to make progress on climate change unless we address the food system.  And we’re not going to make progress on the health crisis unless we address food system.”

The next Administration will be hearing these words from Pollan.

“Even though the candidates are not talking about it, they will have to,” he said, to rising applause.

Ask a six-year-old what makes a bean plant grow and she will tell you: the sun.  Resolarizing the food chain is something we all understand.  But what many do not understand is the urgency and the extent of the problem.  This task, Pollan said, “is for the writers, artists, gardeners.  They are the ones who know how to take ideas and make them stick.”

With that, he concluded, and we began filing out, eager for the relief of the cool courtyard.  Pollan, surrounded by admirers, made his way slowly to the table outside where a long line of people already waited for him to sign their books.

As he walked by Andrea and I, he brushed against her shoulder.

“He touched me!” she cried, “Michael Pollan touched me!”

She was only half-joking.