A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Michael Pollan

  • A simple argument for vegetarianism

    The New York Times “Ethicist” column recently challeged its readers to submit essays making the case for why it’s ethically okay to eat meat. The submissions are supposed to offer a pro-meat answer to the question “Whether it is right to eat animals in the first place, at least when human survival is not at Read more

  • Friday Links

    I spent the day hanging out with my family, so these are coming a little late… –Why Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is neither brave nor serious. –Free-range meat isn’t necessarily “natural.” –A case for universalism from the Scottish evangelical preacher and biblical scholar William Barclay. –A review of a recent book called What’s the Read more

  • Intelligent dissent on the food movement

    I’m obviously sympathetic to a lot of the proposals of Michael Pollan, et al., but some of what passes for criticism of our system of food production can come across as simplistic, naive, or nostalgic. That’s why I was happy to discover the blog of historian and author Maureen Ogle who, among other things, subjects Read more

  • The agri-empire strikes back

    California beef producer Harris Ranch Beef Co. put the screws to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo when they found out Michael Pollan was scheduled to speak there, with the company chairman essentially threatening to withhold financial support in a letter to the university’s president. The result? Instead of a speech by Pollan, the university put Read more

  • Farmers vs. “agri-intellectuals”

    A while back, the American–the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute–published an article by farmer Blake Hurst called “The Omnivore’s Delusion,” taking to task “agri-intellectuals” like Michael Pollan who have criticized industrial farming. Here Tom Philpott points out some of the holes and omissions in Hurst’s argument. Philpott acknowledges that the sustainable food movement hasn’t Read more

  • “Critical Animal” on Pollan

    A couple of posts providing some interesting criticisms of Michael Pollan’s views on meat eating, here and here. Pollan’s obviously doing more than nearly anyone to draw attention to the problems with our system of food production, including factory farming. And yet, he seems to have a soft spot for silly atavistic arguments against vegetarianism. Read more

  • Beyond “organic”

    Mark Bittman makes a couple of good points here: food labeled “organic” is not necessarily true to the spirit of organic food (i.e., is sustainable, treats animals and the land well, etc.); and you don’t necessarily have to buy “organic” food to eat better. An easier place to start is simply with eating real food Read more

  • Michael Pollan interviewed in Mother Jones

    Here. I do take issue with this, though: MJ: When you first wrote the mantra “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” did you have any idea what kind of reaction you’d get? MP: Well, I studied my poetry in school, and I knew there was something about the way it sounded that made it Read more

  • The anti-foodies’ foodie

    Salon has an informative review of Mark Bittman’s new manifesto/cook book Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. Bittman is the author of several cookbooks and writes for the NYT, including the “Minimalist” column about cooking. The reviewer, Laura Miller, calls Bittman the “anti-foodies’ foodie” and describes his book as an application of Michael Pollan’s Read more

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008): Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power “Empire of dysfunction” Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Read more