Are you too busy cooking fabulous meals to read a book about how costly cheap food is for America? No problem. In his essay in the June 10 edition of the New York Review of Books, Michael Pollan discusses five new books on food politics, a diverse movement that’s about more than how broccoli sprouts taste so much better than wedges of pesticide-imbued iceberg lettuce. “Perhaps the food movement’s strongest claim on public attention today is the fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system,” Pollan explains. And despite its proponents’ many perspectives, he says that they all generally believe “that today’s food and farming economy is ‘unsustainable’–that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind, whether environmental, economic, or both.” OtherWords will run a related op-ed in our next editorial package by Kristi Ceccarrosi.
