How Ultra-Processed Food Took Over Our Diets with Michael Pollan

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor Hyman Show.

Michael Pollan
Ultra processed food, I think, is yeah. It's it's a scourge. If you go to Latin America or South America, where these food companies don't exert as much domestic power, you will find some powerful labels. I mean, skulls and crossbones and stop signs. Yeah.

Alright. Other countries are are starting to deal with it. Unfortunately, we haven't yet.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Doctor Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated, trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, doctorhyman.com, for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

So, Michael, it's great to have you back. Last time was before COVID, and the world changed a lot since then. 

Michael Pollan
'19, I believe. Yeah. That's right. I know. A lot's happened since then to both of us and to the world.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's true. We were just it was just pre COVID, and you launched your book, How to Change Your Mind, which changed the world, I think, in a big way, which is good. And then your your documentary series on Netflix was just remarkable, and and I think it really helped people understand that there's another way to think about addressing mental health and working with some of the struggles we have as human beings, which are, you know, often challenging, and it's been great to see how that book has just exploded and how it's become this catalyst for change, just like Omnivore's Dilemma did the same thing for the food and food system. So you kinda have this really unique, kind of role in our culture of being kind of the truth sayer and and the truth teller in a way that that people really have have a way of, warming up to in in challenging subjects because you're talking about, like, psychedelics and food, and these are these are controversial topics, but it's great to see how you sort of threaded that needle, and it is beautiful. So I I love that book, and I love what you've done.

So congrats on that, Michael.

Michael Pollan
Oh, thank you, Mark. I really appreciate you saying that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So, you know, today we're gonna talk about something that you wouldn't talk about any last time, which was food. Because you're like, I wanna talk about consciousness and psychedelic. I'm like, okay. Okay. So we're gonna get back to food because you just were part of a movie.

You helped produce it at called Food Inc two. Most people heard about Food Inc came out in 02/2008. And between 02/2008 and 02/2014, things have gotten a lot worse, not better. And, you know, there's there is a food movement, and you were a catalyst in helping establish that. But, unfortunately, there's so many forces working against it, and there's been consolidation of companies in the food industry.

There's been the explosion of ultra processed food even more than it was, and it's led to a real crisis. And what's really exciting to me though is it seems like the world is sort of waking up to this. Like, the movie exposes. So maybe you can share a little bit about your inspiration for doing a food ink too and why that was important and what the main lessons that, you learned doing it and that you hope that the audience would take from from watching. By the way, everybody's gotta watch the movie.

It's great. It's it's up on streaming services now.

Michael Pollan
Well, you know, when we did Food Inc in 02/2008, it really did help launch a conversation. And, there hadn't been a film that looked at the whole system quite the way that one did. And, it had a big impact. It also led to a backlash. It was I I just remember how much pushback there was from the industry, from the farm bureau, which is a, not really a farmer's organization.

They hide behind farmers, but they're really an agribusiness organization. And they came after me, and they came after Eric Schlosser. And, it was a real reminder how much power there is in the status quo in food. I had a series. I used to get invited to speak at agricultural schools, land grant colleges, and I love going to talk to young farmers.

And all of a sudden, those invitations would get canceled or, I would go and there would be some counter programming to to see

Dr. Mark Hyman
if they could get caught up. Concert at the same time.

Michael Pollan
That kind of stuff. And, and then I had I had, oh, I had a gig, at Cal Poly where they announced that it couldn't be a speech without challenge. I had to do a debate instead. Mhmm. Subsequently, came out in the Los Angeles Times that the owner of the biggest feedlot in California, Harris Ranch, had threatened the president of Cal Poly if I was allowed to speak unchallenged and threatened to withdraw a gift.

Yeah. And in the same letter, which they got a hold of at the LA Times, he, insisted they cancel a course on the on the grass feeding of livestock of ruminants. Wow. And then I had a a gig canceled at Washington East, Western Washington University. So and and it all turned out to be Farm Bureau organized.

And, so it was it was an interesting reminder to me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like the McCarthy area. You're blacklisted. Like being communist.

Michael Pollan
Yeah. I mean, you know, for the idea they don't want they don't want young farmers to hear from somebody like me is a is a sign of, I think, insecurity. Anyway, but I thought I was done after I did that. You know, I wrote several books on food. In addition to Omnivore's Dilemma, there was In Defense

Dr. Mark Hyman
in defense of food and

Michael Pollan
food rules. Botany of desire had a lot of material on food. So I thought I had said what I had to say, and there was a whole generation of young food journalists who were, you know, had taken the baton. And that was, you know, wonderful to see. And I moved on to other topics.

But then when the pandemic hit, something really interesting and revealing happened with the food system. And you'll remember, you have to go back to those early days in March and April and May, of twenty twenty when suddenly, you couldn't find food in the supermarket. There was the shelves were bare. Yeah. And at the same time, you saw on your television this incredible split screen, the bare shelves on one side.

On the other, farmers euthanizing chickens and pigs and spilling milk out on the ground. And the reason was that our food system it turns out we have two food systems. One supplies, supermarkets and consumers, and the other supplies institutions, whether it's restaurants or schools or factories. And, that one completely shut down, because nobody was going to work or school. And so everyone got all their food at the supermarket or tried to.

And, the system crashed for a period of time. And the two systems don't relate to one another because we've had such concentration. So the kinds of companies that are selling, say, liquefied eggs in the institutional food chain didn't have the containers to sell their eggs in a supermarket. Right. Ditto toilet paper.

Remember the famous toilet paper shortage? There

Dr. Mark Hyman
were there were giant egg rolls. Well, the

Michael Pollan
you know, the way that toilet paper is sold to institutions is on these giant rolls, and they they couldn't sell those in the supermarket chain. So, so we really learned something about the the system, that it was highly centralized and specialized and really brittle. And that, of course, is the cost of efficiency. You can get a very efficient system, and we have that in some ways, But it's only efficient if there are no shocks. And as soon as you get a shock, the brittleness of the system reveals itself.

The other thing that revealed itself was the political power behind the food system. And the most telling instance here, and this really got our attention that spring when we were deciding whether to make a sequel or not, was, the day that John Tyson, took out ads in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, an open letter to the president. And the reason they were doing that is because the public health authorities were trying to shut down their some of their processing plants in the High Plains. I remember that. And in Iowa because they had become vectors.

That very they were bringing COVID into these communities. These people were working really close to one another in the cold with, no PPE. And, people were, like, turning off the production lines and vomiting and going right back to work. They were sick. And the public health authorities in these towns, and Waterloo, Iowa is the is the one we focused on, were trying to, like, close them down for a while to clean them up and and put some protocols in place.

And rather than do that, the president of Tyson, writes this letter asking the president of The United States, who was Donald Trump at the time, to invoke the Defense Production Act to force open their production lines. And lo and behold, two or three days later, the president does it. The president writes an executive signs an executive order written or drafted by Tyson, opening up their production lines. And if you you know, the reason we have antitrust laws in this country is to avoid concentrations of power. It's not just to protect consumers from price gouging.

It's to protect the Republic from overly powerful interests. And if you ever needed an example that we had gone too far in that direction, when you can have a company force the president's hand. And the Defense Production Act, you should understand, was something passed in the fifties, giving the president the power to force a company to do things in the public interest that they don't wanna do. Like, say, a car company should start making tanks because we're in wartime or planes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Michael Pollan
And and basically, this was a a perversion of the of the act because it it was, allowing the company to do exactly what it wanted to do, but using the federal power to do it. So all of this told us that the food system had reached a point of crisis in terms of concentration, and that was a reason to reopen the story and take another look at the food system.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And and most people don't realize that the, you know, that the food industry is the biggest industry on the planet. I think it's 16 or $17,000,000,000,000 a year because everybody eats. And that it's controlled by just a few dozen CEOs. When you look at the seed companies, there used to be dozens and dozens of them.

Now there's, like, five or so. The the fertilizer companies

Michael Pollan
There are four four companies slaughter all the beef. Look at infant formula. Remember that crisis? You know, there are only two companies that sell all the infant formula. And when one of them had a contamination problem on their production lines, mothers couldn't get formula.

So had if you had 20 companies or 10 companies, a screw up at one of them would not have affected everybody. But so, you know, it's the old adage. We're putting all our eggs in in one basket, and that's never a good idea.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And, and also the, the, you know, the, they're insidious in how they work because they're, they work a, you know, to kind of gobble up other companies that seem to have a halo of health. So a lot of the health brands that you're having are actually bought by these big food companies. And and

Michael Pollan
that Yeah. It's it's one of the saddest, things. You see these, these creative startups doing healthy food or doing innovation, and they get gobbled up right away. And invariably when they get gobbled up, you know, they add the they add to the amount of sugar in the products, which always increases sales and add salt and, you know, kind of, destroy the golden egg that they've just bought.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You know, in in Michael Moss's book, it was it was fascinating to read about how the food industry got together. I think it was in the late fifties in Minnesota because there was a pushback on processed food, and there was this woman named Betty who was a home ec teacher who basically was trying to get families to cook and and garden and, you know, basically be self sufficient around food, and and they wanted to get their processed foods into the American kitchen. And they got together and kinda colluded to to kinda make convenience king, and they succeeded. And and it's just gotten worse and worse and worse.

And I, you know, I grew up on TV dinners. I'm sure you say you're about my age.

Michael Pollan
I do too. Yeah. And it's like Love TV dinners.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And Pop Tarts and all that crap. This industry has become so so controlled by so few people, by so few companies that are all working towards making, a profit, which is what they're supposed to do, but at the same time, they're killing us. And what what I think the movie really did also was was sort of expose this, one, this consolidation in in concentration, around the food companies that control our entire food supply and how fragile it is, but also how they've just kind of aggressively pushed more and more processed food and fought at every turn to stop any attempt to try to limit, access to or label or restrict or change policies around ultra processed food.

Michael Pollan
Yeah. Well, that's the other big story, that we focus on in fooding too because that's the other big change since 02/2008. The term ultra processed food was not in use then. We talked about junk food a lot, or processed food. But a lot of research has been done since then to really pinpoint the fact that, the degree of processing of food matters, greatly to our health.

And, ultra processed food, the term was coined by Carlos Montero, who was an epidemiologist in Brazil, in Sao Paulo. And he's a very interesting character who's in the movie. And he was trying to understand, you know, ten or fifteen years ago, why was it that Brazilians were putting on so much weight and and having rising rates of diabetes when the, the the amounts of, of say, meat or sugar or salt hadn't actually changed? And, and this was kind of a paradox. And what he found was that, yes, even though the amounts of sugar and salt and fat hadn't changed, people were getting them in a new form.

Instead of in home cooked food, they were getting them in in highly processed food. Sweetened yogurt came into the market. Sodas came into the market. Prepared meals came into the market. And he hypothesized that there was something about ultra processed food that caused people to eat more of it.

This idea was controversial until, a man named Kevin Hall at the NEH decided to do a very controlled test where he he had people live in a hotel for thirty days and gave them one of two meals. One was ultra processed and the other was, you know, cooked normal food, matched for percentages of of fat and salt and all the all the macronutrients. And, and lo and behold, he found that on the the peep and people could eat as much as they wanted of either. The people on the ultra processed diet ate 500 more calories per person per day. And, and that is because the study didn't determine exactly why that was true.

That work is going on now, but it clearly has to do with the way this food has been engineered, that it is engineered to be irresistible, addictive in various ways, but also that it's also engineered to be very quickly absorbed in the body. Mhmm. It has very little fiber, ultra processed food. And, and that leads I mean, you know this as a doctor. That leads to, you know, quick insulin spikes, you know, and, and that that terrible cycle, that gets started.

So, ultra processed food, I think, is yeah. It's a it's a scourge. And, other countries are are starting to deal with it. Unfortunately, we haven't yet. You know, if you go to Latin America or South America Yeah.

Where these food companies don't exert as much domestic power, you will find some powerful labels. I mean, skulls and crossbones and

Dr. Mark Hyman
stop signs. Yeah. Alright.

Michael Pollan
And, you know, it's it's pretty intense if you go to Mexico or Chile or or Brazil. But so far, you know, there's I mean, Biden was supposed to announce front of package labeling of some kind. Hasn't happened yet, I don't think. But, let's hope. And let's hope it doesn't get diluted by the industry.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. No. I've I've been in the conversations around this front of package labeling with the FDA as part of my nonprofit food fix. And, you know, they're they're gonna do something, but, you know, I kind of talked to someone who talked to the FDA commissioner and kinda was pushing him. He said, look.

You know, you're gonna get something, but it's probably not what what you want.

Michael Pollan
And I've heard the same thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Subtext there is it's like, you know, the food industry still got its hands on the reins. And and that that just really concerns me because we're talking about it's just putting front of package labeling to protect our children. Like, if if we can't protect our children from the harms of these foods, you know, as a nation, then who are we? And and the the fact that the food industry is so powerful and so consolidated and it drives so much of the policy in Washington, is is something that most people don't realize. And like like this effort you mentioned in in, with Tyson Foods and president Trump.

I mean, that stuff goes on all the time, and the the voices that actually need to get heard aren't getting heard. And so I'm just a little guy. I'm I have a little nonprofit, and and I've got a team that's very sophisticated and smart. But when we go and talk to the senators and congressmen, they don't know much about this at all, and it's not their fault. It's just there's just zero education, and all they're hearing from is the other side.

I mean, Sam Kass said this to me. He said, Mark, you know, when I was in the White House, we would have a parade of food industries coming and telling, you know, what the sign, quote, science says, which is funded by them, what, you know, what the legislation should be. They write the legislation. They give it to us. They create all the rationale.

We don't hear from anybody else. We don't hear from the other side. And so I I wonder, Michael, you know, you've been this a long time, and you've been thinking about this a long time. You know, where do you see the biggest levers to pull our is it is it is it, grassroots? Is it, you know, huge, efforts with our our policymakers?

Is it trying to sort of, you know, learn from other countries and put pressure on America to kind of follow follow the suit? I mean, I I wrote an article in Time magazine about it sort of as as sort of about ultra processed food and in front of package labeling and sort of this being the new cigarettes. And I I think, you know, what what do you see as the the lever that's gonna really make a difference?

Michael Pollan
I think it's gonna take power in Washington and, and specifically in Congress. I mean, that's where the problem lies. We've had a couple of White Houses that wanted to do the right thing and got stymied. The Obama administration didn't achieve all they'd hoped to around food, although Michelle Obama did some positive things. But, you know, I think they sort of chickened out on some issues, especially around antitrust, during the Obama years.

I I have more hope for, Biden's antitrust policies, which which have some real teeth, much to the upset of the industry. One positive change since 02/2008 is like allies in Washington, and I'm sure you've had this experience too. There's a a group of people in the house and now a couple in the senate, who are committed to food issues. We spent a lot of time with Cory Booker making the film. And, you know, here is a a person who is an urban legislator and a mayor who gets to congress and decides to use his political capital to get on the ag committee, the agriculture committee.

That is not a place that ambitious urban legislators go. But he understands that the health of his constituents in New Jersey depends on what's going on on the farm. And if we're growing monocultures of corn and soy, his constituents are gonna be eating ultra processed food. And that until you change agricultural policies, you're not gonna have an impact on nutrition and the issues we care about. And, yeah, I mean, labels are really important, and and better information is really important.

But in the end, food choice is is driven in large part by price and the unhealthiest food unhealthiest calories are the cheapest calories in our food system. And and that is what has to change, and that won't change until you have policy. So I think building, you know, a caucus of people who care, John Tester is another one who has is really he's a farmer himself, an organic farmer in Montana. Very popular despite the

Dr. Mark Hyman
importance of Yeah. He is a great guy.

Michael Pollan
Yeah. He is a great guy. And he gets it. He gets it. He understands this industry.

He sees what they're doing to farmers. And, you know, the, I also think the Democrats have to do a better job talking to farmers. I mean, we they they've completely lost that, that register or that vocabulary. And rural America has turned against Democrats. And

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's true.

Michael Pollan
We we forget that Obama won Iowa twice. That is unimaginable today. Yeah. Yeah. Although I think one of the reasons that the Democrats lost it is because he disappointed, expectations that he had created that he was gonna be more helpful to farmers.

So, anyway, I it's it's political organizing. It's it's hard work, and there is not a natural business constituency in favor of reform. You do have all these, you know, great small farmers and small farm food companies. But the food companies, the only exit for them is to sell to a big company. Yeah.

Right. That's, you know, that's how you do it. You the returns on food are not very high compared to other parts of the economy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I wonder who the natural allies are, like insurance companies? I mean, in terms of them being run.

Michael Pollan
It's interesting you bring that up, Mark. I I remember a few I always thought that the natural ally of the food industry were health insurers. Because if you can prevent you know, for every case of type two diabetes you prevent I remember seeing a number, and this is 10 or 15 years old. They saved half a million dollars over the life of that person. And I was invited to give a speech in, Scottsdale, Arizona to a group of presidents of of health insurance companies.

And I got up there, and I gave a stem winder about how they should be allies of the food movement and how preventing, you know, chronic disease could make them money, and that, you know, they should really be in there fighting for a farm bill that privileged health over productivity. And this president of a of a health insurance company comes up to me after, and he says, you know, with all due respect, you don't understand our business.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Really?

Michael Pollan
We we have so much churn. We we anticipate holding on to a customer for one year. So prevent we don't make any money with prevention. And if we if we if the contracts were five years, that would change everything. So there is a lever you could pull.

Right? Longer contracts for health insurance.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or six years. Portability. There's different ideas I've heard tossed around about how to get insurers to sort of be working together to sort of have it aligned incentive so they're not, you know, just passing the buck to the next one. So that's what happens. You're right.

I I the churn is a big issue. And I I think you're right. In Washington, there is an growing array of allies, both on the right and the left. I mean, I met with senator Cassidy, senator Marshall, who were very active in trying to move food as medicine policy forward, nutrition education in medical schools to, you know, creating reimbursement for nutrition through Medicare and nutrition services and food as medicine. So there there's a lot of a lot of people in congress now, I think, and and senate very interested in this.

But, you know, just it's, like, really slow going, and I and I worry for us as a nation. And when I think about the cost, you know, of our of our national debt, and I I I just consolidated end to end. Our health care bill in America is about, you know, 4,500,000,000.0 trillion. Sorry. Trillion with a d.

And when you add up all the government, payers that are paying for Medicare, Medicaid, any health service, department of defense, VA, you know, all federal health workers, it's 40% of the entire health care bill. So it's like about $2,000,000,000,000. We're racking up that debt every year, and most of that's preventable. But but somehow, the government hasn't figured this all out and looked at it. I was just met with, Sammy, Inikin, who started Virta Health.

You may know him. He basically created an online company to cure diabetes using a ketogenic diet. And he's got over a hundred thousand people. They've run through it. They save an average of $6,000 per, patient, which is, you know, when the average cost for diabetic is about 9,600.

So for the sixteen and a half million people on Medicare, if everybody did this and and they pay the government paid for it, they'd save literally a hundred billion dollars just with one simple, you know, reimbursement change in in Washington. So I'm actually going to testify on September 18 in Washington from the subcommittee on, of health ways and means for the health subcommittee and try to, you know, move forward the needle on this. But I think you're right, Michael. The the the it's sort of this there's an incrementalism that drives me, and I'm sure you're crazy, but there's an opportunity for for, I think, a a tipping point to happen in this. And I think the movie, the Food Inc was part of that, number one, and two also contributed.

The book is great. It's a number of essays that go along with Food Inc too. I encourage people to read it. You have an essay in there and, so does, that guy from Brazil you mentioned who's who's, developed the Yeah.

Michael Pollan
Carlos Montero. And Eric Schlosser is a very good piece in there too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I've kind of, was talking to a guy from Europe who's working in The UK and similar issues and other doctor about how do we kind of start to to really deal with the ultra processed food issue. Because in some ways, this this controversy about the definition, about, you know, what it means, about, you know, which foods are bad or good, or is all processed food bad. And so the food industry tries to obfuscate all the time. But I I think it's pretty clear what what it is. People know what ultra processed food is when when when they see it.

And and I think, you know, he he he's talking about the the the best lever really is around kind of awareness and labeling. And and you mentioned Chile. I was just in South America for a few months and, yeah, you know, the warning labels are clear. You get you get a little snack on the airplane. It's got, like, three giant black, you know, stop signs on it.

And I'm like, I'm not eating that, you know? And it and it and it works. But it it it getting that through America's heart, in terms of of ultra processed food being kind of the smoking gun, do you think it's the smoking gun that that should be the thing we go after?

Michael Pollan
I think it's a great place to start. I mean, I think that there are other issues too. You know, to the extent that our interest is is about, the health of the individual but also the health of the planet, we have to look at meat eating and the amount of meat we're eating. I think that's an issue too even if it's unprocessed. We're eating altogether too much meat or more than the the planet can afford to to make, particularly a beef.

But I think ultra processed food look. The message that works for people is their health. And, I think that's a good place to start. You know, in terms of the definition, I think Carlos's definition is kinda brilliant. I mean, he basically says, this is food made with ingredients you don't have at just look at the label and you, you know, you do not, have, you know, all that stuff, all those weird long chemicals.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I I jar of butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard? No.

Michael Pollan
I don't know about your pantry, but I can't find it. And and then the other thing is, and you can't make it without a factory. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Michael Pollan
And I think we know what that is. And, so it's it's it's hard to put in a law, I suppose, but, but there you have it. I think most people recognize it. I think we do have to educate people about it. Mhmm.

You know, cured meats, people don't think of as ultra processed, but, of course, they you know, it's not a complicated process, but it renders them much less healthy as we're learning.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I wonder how. I mean, I wonder if, like, I was in Ikaria when I was researching my book and and Sardinia, and they have, like, you know, legs of of ham they make and they cure it in, like, grape leaves and seaweed and all this stuff. I mean, I wonder if that's as bad as what you would get made in sort of a, like, you know, processed meat that you get.

Michael Pollan
Or Mel or somebody. Yeah. I I don't know the answer. I don't know how the processes differ. I mean, certainly, we've been smoking meat for a long time.

But, you know, the thing we have to remember is the quantities are so different today. You know, Americans eat nine ounces of meat per person per day. And, that's unprecedented in the history of humankind. There just wasn't that much meat around.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Unless you're unless you got all the the bison and the and your planes in there.

Michael Pollan
Yeah. I mean, there were moments of, you know, where people splurged on meat. But meat in in most cultures is a flavoring and not a main course. You know? I mean, think of the way the Asians use it or the Indians use it.

And, there you know, there's another way to eat meat and and have the advantage of eating meat because it is it is nutritious food. And, but our idea that you have this big slab of of animal on your plate and, you know, with some vegetables cowering in the corners, that's a kind of very novel Anglo American idea.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I guess, why it sort of speaks to Dan Barber's third plate concept, which is Third

Michael Pollan
plate.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Which is basically meat as a side dish and having the veggies as the main dish and as opposed to two asparagus on a plate next to a steak. I

Michael Pollan
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I I I think that that that I do wanna go deeper into the meat thing because, you know, the there's a number of really arguments around meat. There's moral and ethical, there's environmental climate, and there's health, and they all get conflated. And I think, you know then there's also the scale of, like, you know, can we actually scale up our gender of agriculture to have enough animal food for a growing planet? And, you know, there's a lot of controversy and a lot of different opinions about that. A farmer, rancher Williams, is who's done work on this and said, you know, we looked at all the, like, BLM land and all the unused land and all the land we used to grow sowing corn to feed the animals.

Like, we could actually have far more meat produced in America in a regenerative way than we do now even in feedlots. You know? And I I love to hear your opinion about this because I I think that, you know, like you said, meat is a nutritious food. We need protein. There's there's significant protein deficiency around the world.

And and yet the way we do it now, as you sort of exposed in omnivore's dilemma and food ink one and and also food ink two, it's just it's horrible for the animals. It's horrible for the planet. It's horrible for the humans to be immediate. It's just it should be outlawed, period. Everybody, I think, can agree on that except maybe your friend out in California who blacklisted you from Cal Polytech.

Michael Pollan
John Harris.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. But, basically, I think there's general consensus about that. But, you know, if if we could change the the sort of agricultural policies to incentivize regenerative agriculture, which is one of the things I'm working on in my nonprofit, do you think we could kinda move away from these feed laws, or are they just so entrenched and so consolidated and so stuck, we're just never gonna be able to do that.

Michael Pollan
Well, I don't think we're gonna eliminate them. I I don't picture, them going away entirely, but I could imagine them getting a lot smaller and a regenerative agriculture getting a lot bigger, you know, acre by acre. The fact is that most of our best land in the Midwest is being used to grow feed for animals, not food for people. And that is, you know, not just the result of this is how capitalism works. It's it's the way we've organized the incentives.

And we make it very easy for farmers to grow lots of corn and soy, neither of which are foods directly. They they have to be processed. This is not corn on the cob we're growing or edamame.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. Right.

Michael Pollan
These are industrial commodities, raw ingredients that and and they get broken down and teased into all those ingredients that become ultra processed food. So we're subsidizing the unhealthy calories directly, and we don't have to. And we could, in turn, instead, subsidize people who are, you know, pasturing their animals, you know, letting them live outdoors, which produces meat that is more flavorful and and more nutritious. Mhmm. Can you do it at the same scale?

Well, I think we we have to look at that scale. I I don't think we wanna do it at that scale. It's just way too much. I mean, meat is, you know, is a in for most of history, has been a luxury food, and we're treating it as a three meals a day food. And that's just not sustainable.

I remember reading years ago a study, and I think it was WorldWatch or somebody, was looking at, trends in, meat consumption in China where, of course, they're eager to eat meat at our rates, and and their rate of meat eating is is going up very quickly. In fact, we're growing a lot of their meat now. They're too smart to, wanna grow the feed for it, so they let companies like Tyson, take on all the environmental and labor problems, and then they just ship over the sides of pork.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. Smithfield's. But, like, really, China owns

Michael Pollan
all those. Now owned by the Chinese. Yeah. And but, you know, it's it's very much of a colonial situation where we keep the pollution and and they get the meat. But anyway

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. Our our our evil ways are coming back to bite us.

Michael Pollan
Yeah. In in a lot of ways, they're they are. And, so, oh, yeah. And the study found that, if if the Chinese were eating meat at the rates we do, we would need 2.3 more worlds to grow all the grain necessary. And that's just not gonna happen.

So we we need to you know, if the Chinese are gonna eat more, we need to eat less and, and a lot less. So I I just think the goal should not be one to one convert from feedlot agriculture to, you know, pastured agriculture. But, but I think we have to just reexamine the whole system. And, you know, this move toward synthetic meat is

Dr. Mark Hyman
Lab meat. You talked a lot about that in the movie. Yeah.

Michael Pollan
Yeah. Is, you know, is an effort to confront this. The the premise of the industry, and this goes for both, the people making plant based meat and the people making what's called cultured meat, which is actually meat meat cells that are, you know, fermented in a laboratory, basically. And this is starting to hit the market. And they're you know, all these companies are founded on the premise that the way we're eating meat now is unsustainable, and it should change.

And a lot of the big companies are behind these cultured meat companies, including Tyson. The problem but there's a few problems with that. So their premise is, of course, you're never gonna get people to change their habits. So let's just change what a hamburger is or a chicken breast. And, I I don't buy that premise.

I think changing people's behavior based on education and knowledge and experience is is well worth trying. It certainly worked with cigarettes and it and worked with littering. And, you know, we we can change deeply ingrained habits, but we have to work at it, and we have to tax them probably. But their their premise is, no. That's never gonna happen, so let's change, what what the meat is made out of.

The problem with the, synthetic meat is that it's ultra processed food. I mean, it's, you know, got I mean, look at the ingredient list on Impossible or Beyond. It's got, like, twenty twenty one ingredients.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Michael Pollan
And we did this. You know, we we went to their factory, and I interviewed Pat Brown. And Oh, boy. You know, it's an impressive piece of food science, I have to say. He's got it he's got this plant based thing to behave like a like a burger on the grill.

But it has a has an ingredient that hasn't been part of the human diet before, this heme iron from from soybeans. And it's got all these ingredients and lots of, you know, methylcellulose and stuff like that, which is essentially wood pulp.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so that's soy, so they're spraying glyphosate on it and

Michael Pollan
That's right. And that's and that's a real concern. And so, you know, you're you're trading in, yes, you may be not killing a cow to make this burger, but you're eating an ultra processed food that has its own issues. So and then on the k and in the case of I

Dr. Mark Hyman
bet he he didn't he didn't he didn't probably like that when you when you challenged him on that, I imagine.

Michael Pollan
No. He didn't. You know, he has his eye on one thing. I mean, Pat Brown is an environmentalist first, and his his goal as a vegan himself is to destroy the meat industry. And he's not selling health or he wasn't.

I mean, now they now they figured out you have to make a health claim to sell anything, processed. The more bogus, the better. But his interest was just take you know, whatever we have to do to take down the meat industry. I you know?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wasn't that one of your health rules? Wasn't that one of your food rules, don't eat anything with a health claim on it?

Michael Pollan
Yes. Yes. It was counterintuitive, but the basic idea was only packaged foods only packaged foods make health claims.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I know.

Michael Pollan
And that the, you know, the fresh produce is sitting there quietly in the produce aisle. And that's, you know, the broccoli is not saying anything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I'm filled with all these phytonutrients and folic acid in it. Like, that doesn't

Michael Pollan
Yeah. It's one of the ironies. I mean, you know, because if you have to have I mean, look. I mean, under underlying this whole conversation, of course, as you know, is you can't sell real food very for a lot of money. You know, I'm talking about, produce and, you know, flours and grains and things like that.

You you can't make money without processing it. And the more you process it, the more money you make. And that is the problem, the value added in terms of convenience and novelty and, you know, snackability and craveability. And that that is our problem. I mean and look at the percentage of the food dollar farmers get.

You know? It's 10 or 12%. And the reason is that the processors, that's where you wanna be. I mean, you you can talk to executives in the food industry, and they'll say, yeah. The you know?

Farmers are not the way to make money making food. And, you know, as long as we are not cooking as a culture, that that's gonna be an issue because, who's gonna buy the the raw, unprocessed whole foods? It's gonna be the people who are setting out to process it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, that was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen you write was really, the book Cooked and and also the sort of I I I'm gonna botch the sense. I I quoted it in one of my books, which is basically, you know, cooking is one of the essential acts of being human. It's it's it's sort of this essential part of who we are and what makes us different and unique, and it it it brings together us to nature, to each other, to community, and and that we've lost that. And the industry has later hijacked American kitchens.

Michael Pollan
I I think it is so important on so many levels. It takes care of this health conversation automatically. Whatever you cook at home is gonna be healthier than what you're buying. You're not gonna make fried chicken every day. You're not gonna make French fries every day.

It's too messy, and it's too big a pain. In the end, you're gonna cook simply, and you're gonna your family is gonna benefit. But then there are all the spiritual benefits of it and and even the political benefits. I I really believe that what happens at the family dinner is a nursery of democracy. It's it's I mean, think about it now.

We're we have such centrifugal lives. Everybody goes off to their room and they have their screens. And when do they come together? You know? In the car and at the at the dinner table.

And, that's where we kind of learn how to how to talk in a civilized way, how to argue without fighting. It it really is training for really important social and civic skills that we lack. So, yeah, there's the food piece and the health piece, which is profound, but there's this other piece that, we're losing to. And, the problem is it's very hard for a man to make an argument for cooking

Dr. Mark Hyman
because Well, I'm the one who cooks in my house.

Michael Pollan
Well, I share it with my wife. We're we're really fifty fifty about it. We divvy up each meal. Who's gonna do the protein? Who's gonna do the vegetable or the salad?

But in general, when a lot of women hear a man saying cooking is really important, often they hear go back to the kitchen. And that's certainly not what I I meant in that book. It was really about, sharing this work. It's it's the responsibility of both parents and the kids. I mean, I think we need to get our kids to cook too.

That was a big deal in our family, when Isaac was growing up that he had to do something to contribute to each meal. And I know he had sports and he had, you know, and he had his homework to do, and they always pull the homework excuse. But, but even if he had a lot of homework, he at least had to cut up an onion or mince some garlic or do something to contribute to what we were doing. And now he's a wonderful cook, and he cooks for pleasure.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. Same thing with my family. I I always started cooking with my kids, brought them in the kitchen. Even though they were making a mess, I didn't care. And there was that Molly Katz had that great kids,

Michael Pollan
cookbook for

Dr. Mark Hyman
10 soup. And it it was like all these really healthy recipes, but they're kinda kid friendly and they're delicious and they're fun. And so, you know, I think, you know, it's it's an incredible way to bring families together and to create health. I I I was in this movie Fed Up where we went to South Carolina, in Easley, South Carolina, and I was with this family of five that lived in a trailer. They were on food stamps disability.

The father was on dialysis of 42 from kidney failure from diabetes. The mother was a hundred plus pounds overweight. The 16 year old son was almost diabetic and 50% body fat. He should be 10% at that age. And they didn't have a single fresh food in their house, and they had only packaged, boxed, packaged frozen foods, and I didn't even know what they were eating.

And I showed them what they were eating. I didn't give them a lecture on how to, you know, eat healthy, but I said, like, do you know how to cook? Let's let's make a meal together. And I I basically got the guide from the environmental working group, EWG, called good food on a high budget. It's good for you, good for your wild, good for the planet.

And I I showed them how to peel garlic, how to stir fry, how to make turkey chili, how to, you know, make simple salad dressing, how to make a salad. And they were shocked, and they and they loved the food. And then they were like, you one kid goes, doctor Hyman, do you do this with your family every night? I'm like, yeah. That's what we do.

And then they ended up doing it. They didn't have a cutting board or knife. I mean, I was trying to cut, like, sweet potatoes into pieces with a butter knife. It was not that easy. So I I bought them a cutting board.

I bought them knives, on my way home on the plane from Amazon, sent it to their house. And I I gave them a cookbook, and I said, you could try it. Here you go. And they did it. And the father lost 50 pounds, got a new kidney.

The mother lost a hundred pounds. The son lost 50, regained it and and end up, going to work in Bojangles, which is like a fast food chain down in the South. Yeah. Because there's no place to work for these kids. It was in worst one of the worst food deserts in America.

And and I was like, wow. It we're basically just one meal away from solving our health crisis. Like, one and I and I and and the son then, you know, gained the weight back, but then he called me and I helped him. He lost a 32 pounds and ended up asking me for a letter of recommendation for medical school. So it gave me it gave me such hope that, like, if if, you know, we can get out there in the community with each other, helping and supporting each other, it works.

You know, I did this with the church and Saddleback Church with Rick Warren. We did it with 15,000 people, and they lost a quarter million pounds a year by doing it together. I I I did this in Cleveland Clinic, you know, where I at Southpointe Hospital, which is mostly African American community. We got 300 African American women coming to a cooking class that I led. You know, I was just like, what do you I was like, what's going on here?

And and I think there's a real hunger for people to know. They just don't know. And I and I actually say I had implicit bias, which was people kinda know, but they're lazy and they don't wanna do it. But I don't think people really know.

Michael Pollan
They don't. They don't have the skills. I mean, you know, we that that chain of transmission from parents to kids to their kids and their kids of how you cook has been lost. And, you know, home ec doesn't happen, the way it did because because that was too gendered. And, but I do think that I mean, what you're talking is really important.

The question is, how do you plant these values in the society? And I really think you do it in the public schools. I think as time goes on, you were asking for where the important leverage points are. It seems to me, it's very exciting that, that the new vice presidential candidate is associated with a program to give, two meals a day to children in Minneapolis. Walls pass this, you know, and it's for everybody.

It's not means tested or anything. It's a universal program. Now, you know, this could all be Cisco processed food. Right. You know, I I I hesitate to dig in too far.

But the basic idea that we have this opportunity to educate children about food by feeding them. But we have to pay attention to what we're feeding them, certainly. And we have to we have to give them two more things. One is, classes where they can learn how to cook, which they love. I mean, I've you know, the Edible School Yard is around the corner for me corner for me.

This is Alice Waters project. And there, they have a beautiful school garden where the kids grow food, and then they have a cooking class where they learn how to cook it, and then they eat it at lunch. Mhmm. And it's their favorite time of the day. And what happens is they start bringing these skills home, and they start introducing foods to their family that their family didn't ordinarily eat.

And, so, you know, human habits are hard to change, and you gotta start young. And so I think as a as a focus of our energy, Alice Waters talks about school supported agriculture. And she's trying very hard to get the schools in California to commit to buying locally, to support the farmers. There's so much buying power in schools. But anyway, and, you know, to the extent that this next administration is talking about a set of policies around children, child tax credits and things like that, I think it's a really good opportunity to to inject these ideas of of, educating kids about, how to eat, how to prepare food and and how to grow it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think it's so essential, Michael, because, you know, as a doctor, you know, I've been giving lectures on, you know, the state of our health and and for thirty years. And I keep having to change my slides because the the percent of kids overweight and obese keeps going up and up and up. And now forty percent of plus kids are overweight, twenty percent are obese. You know, one in ten kids are on psych meds and, you know, a lot of other meds. They're talking about giving little kids those Empik now for obesity, and it's terrifying because we're we're literally have a a a state of the world now with kids where their futures are really in jeopardy in terms of their health and well-being, their future happiness, earning capacity, life expectancy are all being threatened by what's happening in in in the food system and their food supply and in the schools.

And so I a % agree with you. It's it's like that's why the front of package labeling effort is really focused on kids. You know? Like, how can we not protect our kids? Save the children should be our our basically call it calling cry for, for actually dealing with this.

Cause who, who can argue that? Like, who could argue that we should be poisoning our kids, but it happens. It's like, like the, the dietary guidelines committee is supposed to be an independent group of scientists, but often they're highly conflicted. The last group is a little bit better than the previous one, but they still came out with a, a ruling that ultra processed food did not have enough data to connect it to to obesity, so they weren't gonna gonna make any any guidelines around it. And I was like, gee.

This is terrible. There's, like, mountains of evidence that this is Yeah.

Michael Pollan
There is.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's not people a year. Right?

Michael Pollan
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and you're like, well, what is going on here? And and, and I think the the kids thing is is key, and and I think parents have to get get, involved. I think this they can make a difference in schools. You know, I I'm not sure you probably know Eat Real, which is a George Lane

Michael Pollan
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Initiative in California. They're doing great work in child schools. Kimbal Musk, Big Green, getting edible school schoolyard, similar thing with gardens and schools around the country, and and it's happening. But it just it seems like too slow, and I don't know if we're just gonna poison ourselves to death. I think, you know, lead was the death of Rome because the lead pipes well, I think ultra processed food is gonna be the death of America.

You know?

Michael Pollan
And, you know, look. I mean, we're talking about political money. Right? The influence of of money in politics has a tremendous influence on this, like so many other issues. And, but I also think that, you know, taboos arise in society.

I mean, the, you know, the associate it's entirely possible that ultra processed food, can acquire the image of something, you know, that it's like candy. It's like it's like something it's an indulgence you have every now and then, but as a regular way to eat is just really dangerous. And, the problem, though, too, is that the budgets, I remember Marion Nestle did this calculation, that the entire government budget for educating people about food and, you know, showing them the nutritional recommendations, when they come out Zero. Equaled a single SKU, a single product from, PepsiCo.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I I went to Washington. I met with the folks who were involved in dietary guidelines. Not not the not the political, but the sort of people who've been working there in the trenches, and they're like, you know, Mark, we we we don't have any money. The the congress mandates that we create these dietary guidelines, but we don't actually have a budget to do it. So we have to go to run all the other, No.

Not to promote them. Just to develop them. We have to go around with a tin cup to the other departments in in our agency and ask for money. And if and there's no money to to promote them, to educate people about them, to kinda create awareness. It's it's it's incredible.

Like, you know, what what what we would be to one one bomb, you know, fighter jet, we could literally, like, change everything. Right? It's Well,

Michael Pollan
you know, the defense and actually, the food industry spends more on lobbying than the defense industry. So that gives you some idea of the scale of it. It's it's vast.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It is. And and, just to kinda loop back a little bit about the lab grown meat, because it seems like that could be a a good idea, but there are issues with it. And and I'd love to hear your kind of thoughts about the challenges on that.

Michael Pollan
Well, we went to a company called Upside, which is, near me here in Emeryville. And they are a very well financed company with all the big players in agribusiness, owning a piece of it. And I don't know why exactly, whether they believe in it or they wanna control it or have a window on it. I don't know. But they're all there.

It started by a doctor, actually, a cardiologist who, adopted some of the techniques he was using to repair the heart with stem cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
This is Uma Valletti. Right?

Michael Pollan
Uma Valletti. Yeah. And he's very dedicated, very idealistic. And, we we were given a tour, and we saw these great stainless steel vats. It looks like a brewery, and it's it's very similar kind of equipment.

And in those vats, are cells that are removed almost by you know, it's a biopsy, essentially. You don't have to kill the animal. You just need cells, and you start duplicating them. And you have to feed them. And one of the challenges, there are two big challenges, to scaling this, is that the feedstock, which is has to be pharmaceutical grade.

This is the kind of feedstock you would use if you were growing cell lines in a laboratory. It has to be perfectly clean. And it, you know, it's a mix of amino acids and fats and sugars and, and micronutrients, I assume. But you get a single bacteria in there, and the bacteria will multiply much faster than your meat cells. And you've got to throw out the whole tank.

So the issue is and pharmaceutical grade feedstock for cells is not cheap. The issue is, can a company like Cargill make trainloads of this stuff that will be so clean that you can use it? And that's a really open question. There's nothing that clean in our food system. If you've been in a slaughterhouse, if you've been, you know, in a in a grain elevator, it's doing things at that level of cleanliness is gonna be very difficult.

The other, though, is that in these tanks, you can multiply cells, but the final product doesn't look like a chicken breast and doesn't look like a steak. It looks like a slurry. And you can form that into chicken nuggets and form it into hamburgers. But to make cuts of meat takes another very expensive process, that hasn't been perfected. And, so when we went there, we I I got the full tour with Ooma, and he explained what he was up to.

And then he sat me down, and they cooked me a chicken breast. And that was,

Dr. Mark Hyman
Where'd you get that? A Costco?

Michael Pollan
Not quite. But they were, you know, we were fooled into thinking that the process we had just seen had produced this chicken breast. And this chicken breast, it was an impressive piece of technology in that it was a chicken breast. It wasn't like a Beyond Meat chicken breast, it was a chicken breast. It was kind of tough and it cost, he said, like $500 to produce and was this big.

But, subsequently, we learned through the work of another journalist, not me, that the process I was shown cannot produce cuts of meat and that that's produced in a very bespoke system that's basically designed for journalists and chefs.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. Right. Right.

Michael Pollan
So Oh

Dr. Mark Hyman
my god.

Michael Pollan
I think that, upside is a long way from having a marketable product that's inexpensive. Their plan is to mix, this slurry with, plant based materials to create things that feel like chicken breasts and feel like steaks. But there, we're back to processed food again.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, part of part of the problem, and I I know Ooma, and I spent a weekend with him. And we he's a beautiful man.

Michael Pollan
Brilliant. He's a very good guy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Brilliant guy, cardiologist, trying to really do the right thing. And I said to him two things which he really never considered. I said, well, if you're gonna scale this, where where is the feed gonna come from? And you you mentioned Cargill, which is one of the biggest food manufacturers and processed food companies in the world. And, you know, it has to come from somewhere.

So is are we growing fields of corn and soy and industrial agriculture to feed lab grown meat and at scale, it's gonna get worse. And then what energy inputs are you using? You know, using fossil fuels to fuel these bioreactors that take huge amounts of energy are using renewables. So we're kind of, you know, solving one problem, but maybe creating another problem. And so I said, unless you can figure out how to, you know, source your your food sources for the cultures from regenerative sources and you can get renewal energy, you're kind of in a in a in a downward spiral, I think.

It's just gonna have

Michael Pollan
some good

Dr. Mark Hyman
order effects.

Michael Pollan
And I think that the feedstock is gonna be the same old, same old. It's gonna be the corn and soy, the the monocultures of the Midwest, because that's the cheapest source of those, of those ingredients, because that's what we you know, that was an issue too with Impossible that they were gonna initially, I think they wanted to use pea protein or something like that or, you know, something that would diversify if they got big. That would diversify agriculture. But in the end, they used GMO soy. And that and economically, it's hard to argue with that.

So, you know, it's very interesting that these monocultures at the at the very base of our food system, the corn and soy grown in the Midwest, even when we change our food system, we're still on that same foundation. And that foundation has lots of problems. I mean, as you you pointed to glyphosate, you know, there's so much glyphosate in the food supply now. A lot of it comes from soy. Some of it comes from wheat, though.

One of the most absurd practices in recent years was that farmers found that if they sprayed their wheat fields with glyphosate immediately before harvest, they could harvest earlier because they didn't have to wait for the plants to die and dry out. You know, they have to they have to get to a certain level of hydration in the in the wheat berry before they can harvest. So they spray our our our food, with this weed killer immediately before we eat it. I mean, this shouldn't be allowed. And, and so that's one of the reasons I will only buy organic flour because the rest of the flour now is contaminated.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's on everything. It's on 70% of our food crops. And if you eat at a restaurant, you know what you're getting. And I and I'm, like, really careful, but I checked my, urinary levels of glyphosate, and they were relatively high. I mean, if you I could be average American, their bodies are full of it, and it destroys the microbiome.

It has epigenetic effects that's two or three generations down the line, and it's it's quite it's quite harmful. And yet, you know, we don't regulate it, and we we don't do anything about it. And, I mean, I think, Monsanto who makes it was sold to Bayer Bayer. Which yeah. Which is gonna, I think, probably shelve it and create a creating another product that's probably even worse or just as bad and and kinda distract us for a minute.

But it it you know, we're in a we're we're to me, we're in an existential crisis. It's a national emergency that no one's talking about, and it's even in the presidential campaign, and I I remember you wrote that letter to, I think, the Obama? Obama. Yeah. Yeah.

There was a New York Times magazine where you kinda laid out, hey hey, like, pay attention to this. But, you know, I don't know. Is it take, is it take a litigation like we did for tobacco? Is it antitrust laws that we need to go after? Is it like these these are the levers that I'm thinking about.

Michael Pollan
Yeah. I think it's all of the above. I mean, I think, you know, antitrust is focused now on, on tech. But Lina Khan knows a lot about the food industry. That was her first she first wrote about it.

She's the person at the who runs antitrust at the Federal Trade Commission, and she's she's kind of amazing. She's fearless. And, and that's why you hear all these wealthy Democratic donors telling Kamala to fire her. No. They've been doing it openly.

Barry Diller and somebody else came out and said, she's gotta go. And, it'll be a real test of, Kamala Harris whether she succumbs to that or not.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, if she gets to be president. Right?

Michael Pollan
Yes. Well, that has to happen first. You're right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But But She haven't by the way, I I imagine you know her because she's from California, but she hasn't been talking about these issues. And, you know, president Trump has talked about them. He was on a teleprompter, so I don't know. But at least he was talking about these issues. Bobby Kennedy is talking about chronic disease, whether you agree with his other policies or not, as this existential crisis for America.

But it's just sort of absent from the political discourse. And I I don't it doesn't make sense to me because I think people really care about these issues, and they they want them to

Michael Pollan
be done. You know, I think they do, and Obama understood that. And, you know, I had a little window into what was going on in his his process. And it was it was not a, it was it was calculated that that Michelle got involved in food issues. That was not her plan.

She was gonna do veterans' families, I think. And it it it grew out of, conversations that the that they were having with people in the food movement, not me. And, but I think Obama's analysis was that there wasn't enough pressure, you know, is what you were talking about earlier that, he didn't feel the heat from the food movement enough to spend the political capital. And that, you know, leaders don't really lead. I mean, they need to be pushed.

I hear you. Right. And he said to people I know, he said, Show me the movement, and I'll move. And, and I think we failed to do that. I don't think we're well enough organized, and I don't think we've got the numbers.

And, so, you know, some of it's on us. But, yes, we're up against a really formidable set of enemies.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I I think this is a sort of part of our strategy, you know, is is, with Food Fix and we're partnering with Food Fight USA, which is Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's nonprofit to try to create, a documentary series really that that takes us even deeper. That's more than just one one, but multiple multiple, docuseries episodes that sort of catalog the the harm that our current food and food system's doing from everything from mental health to physical health to economic health to national security to academic performance and global competitiveness to the environment, climate, social justice. I mean, the list goes on and on because food is the nexus for all these things coming together and they're all siloed and they're they're talked about as separate issues. The economic impact, these are all things that are connected to food and

Michael Pollan
can't stop. Climate impact, which only recently have people begun to hear about. You know, the fact that the food system is a huge contributor to to, greenhouse gas production and that in ways people don't fully understand. And, you know, you go back to the first, Inconvenient Truth, you know, landmark film that Al Gore did about and and really helped put climate change on the national agenda. There was not a word about agriculture or food in that film.

No.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, he he's getting there.

Michael Pollan
He's getting there. Anyone's radar. Yeah. And now he's he definitely understands it, and I think everybody in the climate activism world understands it. But the public still needs to be educated about that, that the way you eat is as much in part of your, your footprint, your environmental footprint as, the kind of car you drive or how you heat your house.

And we have to think about it that way.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So, Michael, this is such a great conversation. You're you're been such an inspiration to me and so many, and you've been the catalyst for really important change in our food system and our mental health system now.

Michael Pollan
Well, the same goes for you, Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and you know what? What is exciting now is that, like, people are are able to tap into resources and tools and things that that that are available. Like, your book, Omnivore's Dilemma, should be mandatory reading for everybody in America. All all the other books too, obviously, in defense of food. Food Rules is really fun, but, Fooding two now is a great book that came out.

And, also, you know, your this is your mind on plants, which is another book you wrote that's more on the mental health and the psychedelic space. And you're a journalist, you're a professor, you you're you're an outspoken advocate for telling the truth when no one else wants to tell the truth and it's not that popular, but somehow you you do it in such a way, in such a nice way that people aren't too mad at you. But, I think I think we we we have, a lot of work to do, and we have a lot of education to do. But I think we just gotta keep at it, and I think we just gotta keep educating people, and I'm gonna keep pushing Washington, keep telling stories, and and hopefully we'll get there. As a final question, I'm curious, you know, where do you see us in five, ten years with all this?

Michael Pollan
Well, you know, there there's a history in America of, pushing on issues like this, and things proceed with incredible slowness and frustration for years and years and years, and then something happens. And suddenly, history speeds up. And that's why you got to stay at it. It's really important to stay at it. And it's hard to tell when you're going to have that confluence of factors, you know, come together and give an issue the kind of prominence in the political debate.

You know, sometimes it's a disaster. Sometimes it's but it can be it's very serendipitous. I mean, I've watched this with the psychedelic, you know, movement, you know, another movement I'm very involved in, you know, to bring psychedelics back into medicine. And, and it's been very different than the food movement and and kinda thrilling because it's been so fast. Why has it been so fast?

Well, there's no opposition to talk of.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, the the site pharma industry probably won't like it. Nobody's gonna be taking SSRIs anymore.

Michael Pollan
Yeah. Pharma has been notably quiet. And I think they're starting to wake up and notice what's happening. They're often kinda late. But in general, it it it's been a good education to me on how politics works, and and the strength of your opposition is a big part of it.

But things can change really fast, in this country. You know, we just the last month has shown us that, how how much how much can happen in

Dr. Mark Hyman
a month. It's true.

Michael Pollan
So I I don't think we should assume because it's an uphill slog now that it will always be that. I I think that the conditions will be right. I think that the issue is is ripe for the kind of attention that it needs to to really move it forward. You know, when an issue is not front and center in our politics is when the lobbyists have the most power.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. That's right.

Michael Pollan
Because they go unnoticed. But if we can raise the profile in the public conversation, you know, that can do it. And, you know, we do have a ticket now on the Democratic side with two people who really understand the importance of food and children. And and so we should be lobbying them too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I agree. I'm a pathological optimist, Michael. So I think

Michael Pollan
Me too. Me too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I and I I think you're right about this. You know, I always say change doesn't start in congress. It ends in congress. You know, abolition didn't start in civil rights and women's rights and gay marriage, and all the things that have happened over the last, you know, hundred years.

Michael Pollan
There was pressure from outside.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Some of us some of it took a hundred years. We, you know, women's vote, and we had getting women to vote. You know, it was more than

Michael Pollan
a half. But then gay marriage, you know, happened really quickly. That's right. Amazingly fast. Yeah.

You know, Obama got flat footed. It was flat footed. You know? Biden came I remember Biden came out and, like, what are you talking about? And then months later, so, yeah, history speeds up sometimes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. Let's count on that, Michael. And, Michael, keep the good work up, and excited for your next book, Unconsciousness. We'll have you back talking about that when it comes out. And everybody go watch the film Food Inc two and read the book Food Inc two and check out Michael's other work, and, keep keep, keep on fighting the good fight, Michael.

Michael Pollan
Thank you. You too, Mark. Take care.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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