The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

"This is not a well-known book. It’s an anti-Pollan book. Lusk argues we’ve gotten obsessed with organics and that there’s not really any justification for that. Organic foods, in his view—and there’s evidence for this—are not healthier. And there is evidence that they don’t taste better. Organics take up more land and they’re more expensive. Lusk also takes on prevailing prejudices about technology and food. We are living much longer in part because food is safer than it used to be. Water, too, is much safer than it used to be due to technological advances. Technology can have bad effects on food, and we have to worry about that. But technology is not inherently bad. The best example of this is genetically modified foods, which he also discusses. Genetically modified food can have many advantages: for example, they take less land to grow, and thus they preserve open land. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He acknowledges that you can argue against genetically modified foods, but he points out that most people who argue against them are actually morally opposed to them. They think Monsanto is evil. They don’t think we should play with nature. But in fact, we’ve been playing with nature for a long time. We take water from its source and purify it. Technology is not bad; technology is good, but it has to be controlled, it has side effects and we have to deal with them. People think of the side effects of new technologies and they don’t realize that we have a long history dealing with side effects, for instance in medicine. We try to keep the good part and get rid of the bad side effects. “Those against genetically modified foods don’t think we should play with nature. But in fact, we’ve been playing with nature for a long time” So, the anti-technology view doesn’t make a lot of sense in his view (and in my own, too). We have to be reasonable. Nature, after all, is sometimes awful. Death is part of nature. Technology can trigger great advances, but it also can produce problems. What we have to do is use technologies that help make the planet better and control those that don’t. There are two main determinants of whether people will eat something. First, accessibility: can you get it? Second, cost. Lobster could be your favorite food, but unless you’re wealthy, you don’t eat it very often because it’s expensive. A lot of the cheapest foods are high-carbohydrate foods, fast food. Your food budget is controlling what you can eat."