Michael Pollan’s new Dilemma — Voting with your fork, he says, is so 2006. So what comes next?

Michael Pollan’s new Dilemma

Voting with your fork, he says, is so 2006. So what comes next?

By Joe Fassler June 7, 2016

Doug McLean

If we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high wall of our industrial agriculture,” Michael Pollan wrote, in the introduction to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “we would surely change the way we eat.”

A decade later, we can say we’ve gotten a good look–or at least a better look–at what’s on the far side. And Pollan is wondering whether that alone is enough.

Alia Malley

In a recent interview, I asked him whether heightened consumer awareness has changed food the way he’d hoped it would. His surprising answer: not so much. Though he pointed out some encouraging developments, he also argued that our food system, on the whole, is not so different from the one he wrote about in 2006. It’s going to take some difficult conversations for the alternate food economy to become the primary food economy, he said. Conversations about the political limits of conscientious consumption. About who should pay for food and how much. And about identity—how advocates should feel about corporations co-opting their message, and how big a role Big Food should play in a movement’s future. MORE