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• Ken Light

Journalist and sustainable food advocate Michael Pollan walked onstage at the Meyerhoff on Tuesday, looking lanky and pointy-eared as ever, carrying fistfuls of plastic grocery bags from Safeway.

He rifled through the plastic bags, pulling out one food item after another. First, Reese’s Puffs: breakfast cereal that evolved out of a chocolate candy. Not surprisingly, the cereal is 30 percent sugar by weight, and yet across the top, the banner “WHOLE GRAIN” mistakenly advertises the product as health food. The audience laughed loudly, eagerly—like teenagers privy to an inside joke—as Pollan continued to hold up his supermarket finds, which each betray a false sense of healthiness and a lengthy ingredient list full of unpronounceable chemicals.

Pollan’s show and tell would have felt condescending—fancy food guy from produce-happy Berkeley dissing Baltimore’s supermarkets!—if his message weren’t so right on, and if the Baltimore Safeway he visited weren’t so representative of every darn supermarket in America.

“America is suffering from a national eating disorder,” Pollan said. It’s called “orthorexia,” and it means “an unhealthy obsession with healthy food.” We have become so obsessed with what’s in (and not in) our food—Low carb! High fiber! Low fat! Omega 3s! Antioxidants!—that we have forgotten about the food itself. One of the “edible, food-like substances” (his own term) that Pollan held up was called simply “FiberPlus Antioxidants.” Though named solely after its nutrients, it appeared to have been a cereal. Or a cereal bar. Or something.

“Who among us has ever beheld a nutrient?” Pollan asked. When you talk about a food in the context of its nutrients, Pollan said, “You give power to the scientists.

“It’s a little like religion,” he said. “We rely on a priesthood to negotiate our relationship with the divine,” just as we now rely on scientists to make sense of nutrition—a science, Pollan explained, that we know shockingly little about. Consider the “low fat” era, Pollan said, in which the U.S. government convinced people that vegetable-based shortening (like margarine) was better for us than butter. A handful of years later, the evil trans fat—an essential element of margarine—was discovered to be even more lethal than the unhealthy animal fat in butter. “Nutrition science is kind of where surgery was in 1650,” he said.

Then there was the especially timely piece of news that America’s most unapologetic butter lover, television cooking personality Paula Deen, has been diagnosed with Type II diabetes. Deen admitted to having the disease on Tuesday on the Today show.

“I think this will go down as a red letter day,” Pollan said. “She has Type II diabetes, and the way she’s talking about it is very troubling.” Deen only went public with the news of her disease (which she’s had for two years) after making an endorsement deal with diabetes drug maker Novo Nordisk.

“The message she’s sending is you don’t have to change your diet, you just have to take the right drug.”

Pollan’s ideas are nothing new. He’s been in the public eye (or at least the New York Times Magazine-reading, Whole Foods-shopping, reusable bag-toting public’s eye) since his critically acclaimed book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, was published in 2006. Pollan has other books in which he explores our culture’s twisted relationship with food—and nearly three years after the publication of his last book, Food Rules (Penguin Press, 2009), one can grow tired of his schtick. At the same time, we’re worse off than ever, with rates of obesity and the chronic illnesses that arise from it showing no signs of falling. So maybe instead of drilling for new material, Pollan needs to continue to drive his point home.

It is inherently frustrating, however, to hear a figure like Pollan, who has a lot of legitimate knowledge to share with the city as a whole, speak to a majority white, wealthy audience. (The first was my own observation; the second is an assumption made based on the price of a subscription to the Baltimore Speakers Series, which starts at $265.) It felt, through much of the lecture, like Pollan was preaching to the choir. Not until a host of audience-posed questions asked about the realities of low-income communities being able to find and afford healthy food did Pollan address the issue.

Echoing sentiments like Mark Bittman’s, Pollan started his response debunking the myth that junk food really is cheaper. “Real food is cheaper than processed foods. It’s the convenience you’re paying for … If people are willing to prepare their food, you can eat healthier on a budget.” And, citing an experiment he and his family conducted where they microwaved individual dinners for themselves, “It’s not always such a time bargain. It took a really long time to microwave all those meals, and it involved 20 minutes of standing around feeling useless in the kitchen.”

“People like the people in this room can afford meat from happy animals, and other people can’t. Look at the way we subsidize food. Relative to real food, to fruits and vegetables, the price of soda has been going down while the price of fruits and vegetables has been going up. If you’re in the market for calories, you’ll gravitate to those center aisles. We need to change policy.”