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Michael Pollan Says We Must Fix The Food System To Truly Fix Healthcare

Michael Parrish DuDell — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:40:28 +0000

Michael Pollan is getting on that dietary pulpit and speaking the gospel.

The Bestselling author is warning that if we don’t fix our food system, we’ll never fix our health-care system.

Pollan recently told the New York Times:

“Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.”

What do you think about all of this? Is fixing our food the first step in fixing health care? Chime in and play doctor.

via: Grist.org

Bill Maher Discusses Food Industry With Writer Michael Pollan

Michael Parrish DuDell — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:49:38 +0000

Bill Maher knows what’s up. Plain and simple.

On Friday’s episode of Real Time, Bill chatted with author Michael Pollan about our extremely effed up food industry.

From dairy to tuna, Bill and Michael dissected the foods that were not only hurting our bodies, but our planet as well.

During the interview, Pollan said:

“What happens on your plate represents your most important engagement with the natural world and the biggest impact you have on climate change. Meat-eating in particular represents a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases.”

DUH!!!

Check out the clip below and get your learn on!

Real Time With Bill Maher For May 29, 2009 :: Michael Pollan
by Tullycast

Barack Obama Discusses The Dangers Of Modern Factory Agriculture

Michael Parrish DuDell — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:53:05 +0000

Granted I was only born during Reagan’s presidency, but it’s hard for me to recall hearing a president discuss modern agriculture (see also: factory farming) in any sort of productive way.

President Elect Barack Obama recently chatted with New York Times contributer Joe Klein about food policy and the dangers of our current system. Obama said:

“I was just reading an article in The New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.”

I just love that Obama is publicly acknowledging that factory farming contributes more to global warming than all our methods of transportation combined! What do you think about Obama’s point of view? Is he on the right track? Chime in and share your thoughts!

via: blogs.tnr.com