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Sixteen years after the first film was released, Food, Inc. 2 comes “back for seconds” to reveal how corporate consolidation has gone unchecked, leaving a highly efficient yet shockingly vulnerable food system dedicated to profit over people.
In this episode, host Amy O’Neill Houck talks with the film’s co-producer Michael Pollan and co-director Melissa Robledo about how innovative farmers, food producers, workers’ rights activists, and prominent legislators are facing these companies head-on to create a more sustainable, equitable future.
Food, Inc. 2 will be available for streaming beginning April 12, 2024.
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Michael Pollan’s website
Robert Kenner Films
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Full Transcript:
Amy O’Neill Houck:
Today we’re speaking with author Michael Pollan and director Melissa Robledo about the new film Food Inc. 2. This film is a second dive from Michael, Melissa and their team, which includes co-director and producer Robert Kenner and producer Eric Schlosser into the country’s corporate food system and the dangers it imposes on our health and the lives and livelihoods of the people, farmers, farm workers, producers, food processing workers who, mostly unsung, bring food to our plates.
The film reveals in sections about farming, food technology, ultra-processed ingredients and food policy and politics, how corporate consolidation has only intensified in the 15 years since the first Food Inc. was released.
Michael and Melissa are both producers of the new film, which releases on April 12th. Melissa is also co-director and Michael has a leading role on screen.
Melissa Robledo has been producing documentaries for more than two decades. She co-produced the Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning Food Inc. in 2008 and made her directorial debut with this sequel. She has produced or co-produced films including Command and Control and Merchants of Doubt, and she executive produced the five-part series The Confession Killer for Netflix.
Michael Pollan is a writer, teacher, and activist. His most recent books are this Is Your Mind On Plants and How to Change Your Mind, What The New Science of Psychedelics teaches us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. He’s also the author of several books on food and the food system, including the Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Cooked. He’s likely one of the more frequently quoted or mentioned people by guests on this podcast.
Michael and Melissa, welcome to Eat. Drink. Think.
Melissa Robledo:
Thank you.
Michael Pollan:
Thank you, Amy. Good to be here.
MR:
Yeah, great to be here.
AOH:
The other day I was interviewing Marion Nestle, who incidentally has a role in Food Inc. Two for an unrelated episode of Eat. Drink. Think. that will release after this one, and she was talking about how in federal discussions of agriculture, the name for the part of the cultural system that feeds us, the part that’s food, is called specialty crops.
That idea kind of aligns well with one of the big ideas of the movie that what’s important to corporations is not food, not high quality or delicious ingredients, but commodities, lowest quality, cheapest forms of input into their manipulated industrial system that puts profits over people.
But it seems like people could be forgiven for not having a concept of a food industry. In fact, Michael, you say in normal times the power of the food industry and the monopolies that dominate it is invisible to most of us, but when the pandemic hit, the curtain was peeled back.
Can you talk a little bit about how the pandemic was the impetus for the film and where that initial spark led you?
MP:
Sure. The pandemic was a very revealing moment for many systems in our lives, but I think particularly for the food system and in fact what happened in those early days, those early weeks of the pandemic really is what inspired the film.
As you suggested, most of the time, how this system delivers food to our plates and restaurants is invisible to us. It’s remarkably efficient, fast, relatively inexpensive, and we don’t pay attention to what’s going on behind the curtain.
But suddenly after the pandemic hit, the shelves of the supermarket were emptied. It looked like the Soviet Union. There were certain items you could not find. At the same time we saw on our television screens farmers euthanizing hogs by the thousands, dairy farmers spilling milk onto the ground that they couldn’t sell, chickens being euthanized, eggs being destroyed. So this created this weird split screen between empty shelves and food being thrown out, and it was a bit of a mystery.
But if you understood how the food system has come to work and the levels of specialization and concentration, it made perfect sense.
Basically, we have two food chains in this country.
We have the industrial food chain that feeds, or I should say we have the institutional food chain that is feeding restaurants and cafeterias, schools and offices, and then we have this other food chain that’s feeding supermarkets and they’re totally different players. Imagine a farmer who’s producing eggs for the institutional food chain. He produces them in lots of 128 or 64 on these giant trays or that he’s liquefying them and they’re in these 10 gallon jugs. He doesn’t have the cartons to send his eggs to the supermarket. He doesn’t have the contacts. It’s not his world.
This happened with the famous toilet paper shortage. There were no small rolls of toilet paper, but there were these giant rolls that you see in institutions all the time and they just couldn’t be meshed in any way.
So what we saw, and this is really what got our attention as journalists, was a system that was breaking down because it was so brittle.
It was really efficient at doing one thing, getting milk into those giant dispensers at a cafeteria, but it couldn’t do another thing, because that whole part of the economy had broken down and we were only going to supermarkets, and we learned that this level of efficiency and specialization is wonderful in normal times in that it gets food to us cheaply and the supermarkets are always well stocked, but when there’s a shock to the system, it falls apart.
I think it’s important to understand that the future is going to be more about shocks to the system than normal times.
This was our kind of wake-up call that it was time to take another look at the food system, that a lot had changed since 2008 when we did the first Food Inc. None of us had been eager to do a sequel, and in fact, a participant had asked us repeatedly, but we didn’t think the story had changed enough. It was at that point that we realized, well, the story had changed and it was worth taking a look at. In some ways things had gotten a lot worse, but in other ways there was sprouts of greenery and reform coming up that we wanted to explore. That’s kind of what was the initial impetus for revisiting food Inc.
MR:
I can say that for Robbie and myself, we were really tracking what was happening with meatpacking workers around the country, and we were shocked and outraged that they were being sent to work at a time of immense danger. We were trying to figure out how best to do that, and simultaneously, Michael and Eric Schlosser wrote articles that were focusing on what was happening in the food system at that time. So that sparked how we all came back together to do this.
In terms of the meatpacking workers, we were seeing outrageous behavior on the part of corporations and what we learned later, we didn’t know at the time, was that the companies were actually influencing local and federal government to change policy so that they could keep their workers in unsafe conditions.
We realized that the power of the companies had gotten so much stronger and so much worse that it demanded our attention.
MP:
The wake-up call there was of course the executive order that Tyson basically forced the president to sign, reopening their production lines when local health authorities were trying to close them down because they’d become super-spreaders of COVID.
If you ever wanted any evidence that having these concentrated centers of power was distorting to democracy, there it was.
A corporation, they wrote a public letter to the president and within days he had done their bidding, and the Defense Production Act is designed to get corporations to do things they don’t want to do in the public interest, like produce tanks rather than cars in wartime. This was a very unusual application of it. It was use of the Defense Production Act to force companies to do exactly what they wanted to do against the better judgment of local health authorities, supposedly to refill our shelves with food, but in fact, Tyson was sending a great deal of, if not most of, this pork to China. It was really doing very little for our country.
AOH:
There’s a sheriff in the town in Iowa that you have a scene about the Tyson plant, he says, “This is blood money”, because people died because those plants were kept open.
When you have someone like that who speaks up, Melissa, do they face any consequences?
MR:
I don’t know, honestly. I’m curious what the reaction will be in Waterloo to the film. Sheriff Thompson didn’t personally face backlash there, but there were many public officials, a public health official who spoke up and lost his job. So yes, there are very real consequences. In terms of Tony, I am curious how … I mean, Tyson is one of the two biggest employers in Waterloo, and it remains to be seen how the film will play out there.
MP:
But we also found, Melissa can confirm this too, that finding workers at these plants willing to talk to us, they were so afraid that that became impossible.
MR:
That’s absolutely true. That’s absolutely true. There was not a single worker who was willing to talk in Waterloo.
AOH:
Michael, the fragility that you talk about on the ground during the pandemic, it led to some community care and some inventiveness and some ways of reallocating resources.
Do you think that there’s any kind of long-term re-regionalization or resilience added to the marketplace or to the food system because of that creativity that happened during the pandemic?
MP:
Well, it’s a good question how lasting those changes are, but there was a dramatic spike in people joining CSA’s. For example, I know a farmer in Lincoln Massachusetts and his CSA membership had gone from like 1,300 to 2,600 because people were at home and they were cooking, and there were some very positive changes in the food system.
As to whether they’re lasting, last I spoke to him, he said the numbers had fallen back, but not all the way back and that some people had actually developed new habits of using a CSA, which usually requires you to do some serious cooking. I don’t want to romanticize this, but I think for some people they were exposed to a new way of feeding themselves, and for some of them it stuck.
AOH:
Michael, I think maybe you were referring to the first film or to your earlier work when you say, “We thought we could change the food system one bite at a time. As important as that is, it’s not enough.”
There’s a central tension in the film between what consumers can do, like possibly exert some buying power or participate in activism and politics and what they can’t do, like maybe be a David against Goliath corporations.
Can you talk about that tension and where it leaves us, the average eater?
MP:
When the food movement began, which was in the early 2000s, there was this phrase, which Marion Nestle helped popularize, of “voting with your fork”. I wrote about it a lot. I remember writing a whole piece about our identity as consumers versus citizens and that we can actually combine those two identities and people did in impressive numbers and that we created, and when I say we, I mean consumers acting as citizens help create an alternative food economy that is now north of $50 billion.
I don’t know exactly where it is, but if you combine … organic alone is at $50 billion I think, and you combine that with local food and CSAs, something impressive was created and this gave people an alternative to the supermarket and an alternative to conventionally produced food that has lots of pesticides or is brutal to animals.
You throw in the humane labeled food with that, pastured food, grass-fed beef, all these kind of little segments of the market, you put them together and it’s pretty impressive how big it is.
It also offered something to the producers that one of the biggest problems of concentration in the food industry is that producers become price takers. They cannot set their own prices. If you only have four meat packers packing beef, slaughtering beef, and they’ve kind of divvied up the country and you’re a rancher in a certain part of Colorado, you may only have one potential place to sell your meat, so you’re going to be forced to take that price. That’s the price of consolidation. So many ranchers, not the majority by any means, but many ranchers learned about these new direct markets they could sell directly to … especially if they were grass finishing cattle, they could sell directly into this alternative food economy.
This alternative food economy was a boon to many producers who now had an option. Instead of being forced to sell to the biggest company in their area, they could go direct to the consumer and recover more of the consumer’s food dollar. There were a lot of very positive things came out of it, but the idea that this would revolutionize the whole food economy I think was naive on our part. It could only go so far. The forces driving consolidation are really powerful and that the challenge for the alternative food economy was the food cost more. So it offered a lot to people who had a certain level of affluence and offered a lot less to people who couldn’t afford it.
Now, there were various programs to compensate for this and lead to discounted farmer’s market foods and things like that that farmers’ market accepts SNAP payments and all those kind of programs, which are really important, but I think we learned that finally we’re going to have to vote with our votes if we’re really going to change this food system because the key factors affecting the food system, the rules by which the whole game is played, are written in Washington, specifically in the way we either enforce or don’t enforce antitrust laws, and in the Farm Bill, this piece of legislation, this giant piece of very obscure legislation that comes around every five years, and this is a farm bill year, that sets the rules of the game that determines which crops we’re going to subsidize and which were not, and which ones we’re going to insure and which ones we’re not, what kind of farming we’re going to encourage.
There has not been a free market in food since the depression, the Great Depression, if not earlier.
It is really a system that operates according to a set of rules that are set by our government. Until we change those rules and those incentives, we can expect the kind of just fair and nutritious food supply that we need.
AOH:
Melissa, do you want to talk about the choice to have politicians in the film, John Tester and Cory Booker and how that plays into what Michael was talking about?
MR:
Well, we did lean a little more into policy on this film and a little more head-on on the issue of consolidation. It certainly was covered in the first film, but we felt we had to hit it a little bit harder and like you mentioned, that the change really needs to be much larger.
What is encouraging to me is that we already have the laws on the books we need to enforce antitrust protections. Not a lot has to happen. There just has to be an appetite to use the laws we already have and there are politicians doing this, which is part of the reason we felt it was helpful to have both the senators in the film, Cory Booker representing the urban eater and John Tester representing the rural eater. He is also the only working farmer in the Senate, which we thought was essential to have, and they’re also fantastic on camera. They’re really fun additions in that way and very serious. Those were the main reasons that we wanted to include them.
AOH:
It’s also an election year in addition to being a farm bill year. Did that play into the timing of the film at all?
MR:
I wish I could say so, but I mean, yes, we planned it perfectly for this. We always meant to release it right now.
MP:
And to take four years to make it.
MR:
It took a while, but the timing is good. It feels like consolidation and enforcing antitrust regulations are very … there’s gaining a lot of momentum within Congress. We’re seeing really positive steps in many industries, in big tech particularly, and for big tech, we’re seeing that there’s bipartisan support for breaking up those companies, and we are hoping that the attention gets paid in the food sector as well, that there’s an appetite in Congress to take a look at food and apply that same antitrust enforcement. We’re seeing some of it. There was just a giant merger blocked between Kroger and …
MP:
Albertsons.
MR:
Albertsons, thank you. Yes, and that was really significant, and within some of the documents that were found in that pursuit, it was clear that they were setting prices for workers’ salaries, and I’m sure more will be discovered as people dig into what was found there. It impacts obviously not just the eater, but all of us in different ways as workers and the environment, et cetera. So yes, it feels essential that politicians are part of this. It’s going to take policy to make the big changes.
MP:
Also, I would add to that in 2008 you could not have found two powerful senators who were interested in these issues, and it’s a sign of the times that the food movement has these allies now in the US Senate and particularly interesting is an urban legislator like Cory Booker, that he should use a lot of his political capital to get the Agriculture Committee because he understands the links between the kind of centralized food economy we have and the fact that his constituents are dealing with all these health problems connected to nutrition and that it’s all connected and the way we incentivize our farmers leads us to eat in a certain direction.
If you heavily subsidize corn and soy and other commodity crops rather than so-called specialty crops, which is what we call food in the Farm Bill, you’re going to get a lot of ultra-processed food because that’s all you can do with that stuff.
Cory Booker understands this, and John Tester understands the challenges that concentration poses to producers, and this is the reason we have these antitrust laws.
People assume it was all about protecting consumers from price fixing, but in fact, the impetus was to protect farmers from being forced to take prices from overly concentrated buyers of their products and to protect all of us from undue concentrations of power in our political system.
I’m encouraged guardedly by what’s happening in this administration, that you have people in place who are pursuing a much more aggressive antitrust enforcement. As Melissa said, the laws are there, it’s just about willpower.
Lena Kahn, who’s the lawyer in charge of the Federal Trade Commission, she completely understands this. She wrote a pioneering article when she was still a graduate student about how the chicken industry works and how concentration forces chicken farmers into virtual slavery to these companies. I mean, they’re indentured. They can’t get out of these contracts. I’m hopeful that we’ll see more, and especially in a second Biden administration if that comes to pass. If it doesn’t, of course, everything goes backwards.
AOH:
You mentioned ultra processed foods, and that’s one of the more dramatic portions of the film where you say that they make up about 58% of the average American diet right now.
Michael, can you talk a little bit about the difference between ultra processed and their less processed alternatives and why in the film you say that’s where the money is?
MP:
Sure. This is another big change since 2008. I don’t think the term ultra processed food was in use in 2008 and this grew out of a body of research, some of it conducted by a Brazilian epidemiologist who was trying to find out why Brazilians had put on so much weight and had so much more diabetes in a very short period of time.
He thought he’d go back and look at the figures for how much sugar and fat were being consumed, and they hadn’t changed that much, and he was kind of surprised, but the way they were being used in the food supply had changed a lot. They were not getting sugar from their sweetened coffee or baked desserts. They were getting it from soda and they were getting fat from potato chips and all sorts of snack foods.
They were eating the same amount of nutrients, but they were getting it in this new form, ultra-processed food. Some research has been done since that we highlight in the film by a man named Kevin Hall, a scientist, and he found that indeed people eating an ultra-processed diet put on a lot more weight and studies since then have shown that ultra-processed food is linked to something like 32 different diseases.
So what is ultra-processed food? Basically the easiest way to understand it is if you’re eating food that contains ingredients that the average person doesn’t have in their pantry and that you need a factory to produce, that’s ultra-processed food. You don’t have to get any fancier than that and I think we all recognize what that is.
Given the choice of eating a certain number of calories or eating all you want, that’s what this Kevin Hall study did, from meals that were normal, cooked whole foods versus ultra-processed foods, people would eat something like 400 more calories of the ultra-processed food and not surprisingly put on the weight.
The research around ultra-processed food is pretty revolutionary and it’s really changing our understanding of nutrition, that we have to pay attention not just to nutrients, which is to say to how much fat are you eating, how much salt, how much sugar, but the form in which it comes because that form has a huge bearing on your health.
Why? Well, that’s the part we don’t know for sure yet.
There are a couple of things going on though. Ultra-processed food has lots of ingredients, chemical ingredients that may interfere with things like the microbiome. Emulsifiers, for example, are very hard on your intestinal lining and on your microbiome and ultra-processed food are full of emulsifiers. That’s how you keep the fat and the water from separating when it’s going to sit on a shelf for two years. That’s one thing.
The other thing is that this food has been deliberately designed to be addictive, to make you eat as much as possible. The industry talks about achieving craveability and snackability. They don’t want to satisfy you. They want you to overeat because they make money the more of this food you buy.
We’ve put the consumer in a really bad spot where the consumer is confronted by food that’s very convenient and engineered to be very tasty and immediately satisfying. Nevertheless, it’s not good for you at all and we understand that better than we ever have before.
AOH:
So just like with the food movement that you talked about before, how it’s somewhat people with resources who could benefit from it, this ultra-processed food problem again disproportionately affects people who have lack of food access and food equity. What’s being done from that side of things?
MR:
I’m going to just chime in to say that we do see that people across all socioeconomic strata are eating high levels of ultra-processed foods. I think that is a point that’s essential to make, but I know where you’re going, that it is true that these are often cheaper foods and it remains a problem that healthier foods are more expensive, though not always.
MP:
No, and I would also add to that, if you’re willing to cook, that’s the most economical way to eat.
People never factor that in when they’re choosing between this food and that food.
But if you’re willing to buy raw ingredients and actually cook them yourselves, you’d be amazed how much money you can save. But we tend not to think that way. I mean, the whole culture around home cooking is in freefall, and it was revived during the pandemic, and some people kind of got the bug and continued to do it, but a lot of them were very happy to go back to fast food.
It’s not just a financial issue and people will argue that, “Well, you have to be affluent to cook.” You do need time. You do need some extra time.
But I studied this question when I was writing my book on cooking called Cooked, and people make time for what they value. We found another two hours in the day to be online after the internet came in. Where’d we get that time?
The idea you don’t have time, sometimes it’s true, some people don’t, but it usually is a matter of priorities and skills. I mean, cooking skills are not being passed down generationally, which is usually how it happens, that that chain of continuity has been broken by a generation that fell in love with fast food.
AOH:
Makes cooking sound almost radical. Can you imagine a new rise in cooking as a reaction to corporate influence or to alter processed cooked foods?
MP:
Well, I’ve been talking that up for a very long time, and it hasn’t happened yet. It happened briefly during the pandemic, but I do think it’s a political act.
If you want to take control of your diet, if you want to know what you’re eating, cooking is the way to do it.
Otherwise you are allowing corporations to cook for you and they do not cook with your best interests in mind. They use the cheapest possible ingredients, dressed up with much more salt, fat, and sugar than you need, and their goal is not to satisfy you the way your parents sought to satisfy you when your parents cooked for you. No, their goal is to addict you.
AOH:
There are mentions in the film of the industrial foods’ impact on the climate, especially relating to water use in the dairy industry, for example, but I was left wondering why it wasn’t a bigger focus.
Michael, can you talk about the climate implications of industrial agriculture?
MP:
Yeah. I mean, we did talk about it. It comes up in both films, but I don’t think people fully appreciate just how important the food system is to the climate picture.
I don’t think people know that a third of the greenhouse gasses that humanity has emitted, anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere right now, were once in the soil. They didn’t all come from fossil fuel.
A lot of it came from the deforestation for agriculture and then the tilling of the soil. Every time you till the soil, the earth exhales carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Agriculture plays a huge role, and then there’s the processing, and then there’s … I think people also don’t realize that the fertilizers we use to fertilize our corn and soy crop, which is mostly ammonium nitrate, is a fossil fuel product that is made usually from diesel fuel or natural gas.
Not only that, whatever ammonium nitrate fertilizer is not taken up by the plants and used by them, and that’s plenty because farmers are profligate in their spreading of this fertilizer, when it gets wet, it turns into nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is a much more serious greenhouse gas than carbon, it’s more like methane.
So estimates are that probably a third of the greenhouse gases can be attributed to the food system, and there are other aspects.
There’s transportation of food, but fertilizer actually is the biggest.
When Wal-Mart tried to calculate their carbon footprint for their whole economy, and they expected it might be the power to air condition these big box stores or their international shipping system with all its ships and trucks, turned out to be the biggest single contributor to their carbon footprint was the ammonium nitrate fertilizer being spread on corn fields at the base of their food chain. They were shocked and then started a program to see if they could reduce that impact.
It’s a very important part of the climate story, but what’s exciting about it is it’s a hopeful part of the story. Agriculture has the potential to sequester a lot of that carbon that agriculture put into the atmosphere, and that’s what regenerative agriculture is all about. It’s an effort to come up with farming systems, things like cover cropping or increased diversification of crops or putting animals back on pasture, rotationally grazed. All these things return carbon to the soil and build new soil and take it out of the atmosphere. It’s not just in agriculture a question of mitigating in a negative impact, it’s actually it can be a tool for rolling back climate change. We need to do much more work on that, more research and more incentives. There are now some incentives for farmers to leave especially hilly land in grass and not try to till it and to use cover crops, but there’s so much more that we could do.
AOH:
For a brief moment in the film, it seems like Food Inc. 2 might be championing technology as part of the fix for our food system, but then it gets complicated kind of fast. Michael, you find out that a major ingredient in Impossible Burgers is methylcellulose, a wood byproduct, and then later you are, as you say, hoodwinked by the guys working to grow cellular meat and it leads to a moment a little bit later where you say, “I think there is a place for animals in agriculture.”
Can you tell us a little bit more, you were just alluding to it actually, about your thoughts on a healthy system where animals play a role?
MP:
Well, I was very excited when I first started hearing about things like Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat, because I have spent years studying and experiencing the feedlot system, and I know how brutal it is, how horrible it is, and what a environmental disaster and public health disaster it is.
Along comes these very well-financed, technologically sophisticated efforts to replace meat with something that would be greener and would not involve the killing of animals. I well remember my first meeting with Pat Brown long before he’d started Impossible Meat, and it was this dream of essentially destroying the meat system, and I was intrigued by it.
Technology has solved a lot of our problems and it has enormous potential, and here was all this capital, but the closer I got to it, the more I saw issues or problems with it.
Impossible Meat solves some problems, but it creates others. It’s an ultra-processed food. It’s got 22 ingredients. I forget what it is, but it’s a lot of ingredients, some of which have not been in the human diet before. Methylcellulose has actually. I think McDonald’s milkshakes also has wood pulp in it. That’s what it is basically. I don’t know if you want to eat wood pulp, maybe some people are fine with it, but it’s a marker of an ultra-processed food.
The film’s take on this is ambiguous. We’re equivocal about it because we see the benefits, but we also see the problems. Frankly, that’s the luxury, and why I like working in long form like documentary and long form journalism is that you don’t have to paint everything black and white, that you can look at something that really is ambiguous and that finally as a consumer, you’ve got to decide, “Is this trade-off worth it? Is it better to eat this ultra-processed material, or is it better to eat a hamburger?”
Or maybe you don’t want to eat meat. The premise also of these companies is that you’re never going to change the American’s meat habit, and so therefore you have to change the meat. I don’t know that I buy that.
We have changed consumer habits in various ways. We no longer smoke at the numbers we do. We no longer throw discarded wrappers and cups out of the window of our cars when we’re driving at 60 miles an hour.
These things were all routine, so I haven’t given up on the idea that through better information, people might moderate their meat consumption, but that’s the belief of the industry. When it comes to cell-based meat, there’s a huge question on whether it can be scaled and we did feel that we had been fooled by the company we were tracking and that they had given us a tour showing us how supposedly they were producing all this meat in these great vats, and then they served me a chicken breast and it was a real chicken breast.
It wasn’t the best one I’ve ever had, but it was a real chicken breast that had been produced from a single cell of a chicken that didn’t have to die. That’s extraordinary. But you dig in a little bit and you find that, in fact, they can’t quite do that in those big vats we saw. They have another very bespoke little system where a bunch of graduate students have to spin these bottles every couple hours and they can get a chicken breast out of that to show a journalist. All that showed to us is that scaling this up is going to be very difficult and it’s going to be very expensive. So we end up taking a skeptical view of these things, but we wanted to look at them and entertain the possibility that this was part of the solution.
There’s several solutions in the film. We also look at the aquaculture solutions that Brent Smith is talking about and the Stock Cropper, which is a very exciting idea for Iowa agriculture.
All these are going to have scale issues actually, but it’s important to show that there’s a lot of innovation going on at both the high corporate big investment level and at the grassroots level with just incredibly creative farmers. In the same way we highlighted Joel Salatin in the first Food Inc., we’re very interested in shining a light on farmers who are trying to do it differently. That makes a difference. I mean, the number of people who’ve been influenced by Joel Salatin since seeing Food Inc. and hearing him evangelize about this system, that’s one of the changes that’s happened in American agriculture.
We’re hoping introducing people to Zack Smith’s work with the Stock Cropper will lead to more innovation in the farm belt.
AOH:
Do you want to describe the Stock Cropper maybe, Melissa, just to give folks an idea of what we’re talking about here?
MR:
Sure. This is a system devised by Zack Smith who has been a corn and soy farmer in Iowa for many years, and he’s looking for ways that farmers can bring value-added opportunities to their own farms, and he devised a system that runs in between rows of corn or of soy and fertilizes the land using animals for the next season’s crop.
What is beautiful in my mind about this is that it’s a literal kind of pathway for a farmer that is stuck in an old commodity system to transition. I see it as a visual transition from one system to another, and maybe not everyone’s intention would be a full transition, but to me it just is a beautiful visual metaphor because to change in Iowa as an Iowa farmer is really challenging. It’s a system that integrates animals, it runs autonomously and fertilizes the land using animals, and you’ll have to see the film to see it. It’s beautiful.
MP:
It’s a mobile barn with animals in it, and it moves over the landscape and the animals eat the grain and deposit their manure, and the thing moves on its own power. It’s solar-powered, moves down the rows.
Bringing animals back onto farms that don’t have them is really an important goal of sustainability.
When we separated animals onto feedlots and then used our cropland to grow feed for them, instead of letting the animals eat the crops and nourish the crops with their manure, we broke a circular nutrient chain that was incredibly sustainable.
As Wendell Berry memorably put it, when we took animals off of farms, we neatly divided a solution into two problems. One was the problem of fertility, we didn’t have this fertility on the land that we had a remedy with artificial fertilizers, and the other was a pollution problem on the feedlot, which doesn’t exist if animals are on the farm.
Like Joel Salatin, Zack Smith is restoring that nutrient loop, and it’s just a beautiful idea. I’m sure there are issues with scaling it and one of the biggest issues that Zack talks about is, all right, he’s growing this very high quality meat now on his farm, both pork and … is it lamb? What’s the other? I forget.
AOH:
I think there were sheep and goats and pigs in the-
MP:
Or goats. Maybe it was goats. Where is he going to get this meat slaughtered and processed? If Tyson is his outlet, it’s not going to work because they’re not going to want a small lot of meat like that and of animals of irregular sizes, and so how does he … he has to go to a very customized slaughterhouse, and that’s going to make for a more expensive product. There are many, many challenges to making this work, but the genius behind it is this is innovation.
This is as innovative as … I mean it looks cruder, but it’s as innovative as that cell-based meat.
AOH:
It sounds like you’re talking about scale from two sides, right? You’re talking about scaling up enough to be meaningful, scaling back enough to be helpful.
MP:
Well, I think that’s kind of where we are. I don’t see the food system returning to a completely local farmer intensive system. We don’t have enough farmers left. We put so many farmers out of business.
There are less than two million farmers in America to feed a population of 350 million. It used to be 40% of us were farmers in 1900. So that’s not going to happen. But what can happen is letting a thousand flowers bloom, that we have many food systems, not just one, that there’s Zack and Brent Smith are feeding into one food economy and we shrink the concentrated economy, we shrink the feedlot economy, but we’re not going to replace it. I don’t think that’s realistic.
I don’t think the question to ask of any of these systems is could it feed the whole country, could it feed the world?
Let it feed part of the world, but let’s just not put all our eggs in the same basket. That’s what the pandemic taught us. When you put all your eggs in the basket of a highly industrialized food system, it is really vulnerable to shocks, and guess what? That’s what the future is going to be all about, shocks.
AOH:
Michael Pollan, Melissa Robledo, thank you so much for joining us.
MP:
Thank you, Amy.
MR:
Thanks so much for having us.
AOH:
We’ve been listening to Michael Pollan and Melissa Robledo producers of Food Inc. 2, which comes out April 12th. Thank you for joining us today at Eat. Drink. Think.. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and don’t forget to pick up your local Edible magazine. You can find show notes for today’s episode at ediblecommunities.com.
