Pollan Watch
It’s hard to read about food in the San Francisco Bay Area without coming across Michael Pollan. My most recent reminder came when I listened to the “A Butcher and a Chef Walk into a Bar” podcast. I could envision Josh Epple’s eyes rolling when he described the behavior of customers who took Pollan’s book “The Omnivore's Dilemma
” just a bit too seriously.I’d like to read Pollan’s books but I hesitate to buy them because I get the sneaking suspicion that I’ll regret sending my money into his wallet. It’s the exact reason that I don’t buy books written by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh (to pick two caricatures of the right), Al Franken or Arianna Huffington (ditto the left).
Perusing Pollan’s web site gave credence to my suspicions. Take, for example, "Our Decrepit Food Factories," a piece that he wrote for the New York Times Magazine. In it, he tells two tales, the second about honeybees.
Colony Collapse Disorder does seem to be a real and serious problem affecting honeybees and, by extension, forms of agriculture that rely on honeybees for pollination. First identified in 2006, it appears that bees leave their hives, never to return.
Pollan correctly says, "Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit [that causes CCD]." But, in the next paragraph, he points the finger at California almond orchards saying, "You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees...could have gotten into such trouble." Really? I thought you just said, "Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit." At least pretend to be internally consistent.
"The problem," Pollan tells us, "is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures — 80 percent of the world's crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California's Central Valley — that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers."
Here, Pollan throws out statistics that would seem, on the surface, to support is claim of "vast monocultures" when, in fact, they don't.
California's Central Valley is huge, encompassing about 42,000 square miles (109,000 square kilometers). This is about the same size as Denmark, The Netherlands and Belgium combined (115,000 square kilometers). I have a hard time imaging anyone getting excited about 80% of the world's supply of an agricultural commodity coming from those three nations. Rather, I think that the logical conclusion would be that the soil and climate of that area of Europe lent itself to growing the crop.
Put another way, 600,000 acres converts to 938 square miles. That's less than 2.3% of the land in the Central Valley.
Perhaps, if all that land was in the same area of the Central Valley, that would be evidence of "vast monocultures." However, that's not the case.
According to the 2007 California Almond Acreage Report (yes, there is such a thing — amazing the statistics our government keeps), 10 California counties had at least 10,000 acres planted with almond trees. These counties range from Butte (36,000 acres) and Glenn (31,000 acres) Counties in the north to Kern County (the county with the largest area dedicated to almond groves at 135,000 acres — lest you think that's evidence of monoculture, there are 8141 square miles in Kern County meaning that about 2.6% of the land is planted in almonds) in the south. This area spans a distance of more than 300 miles from north to south.
So, while there may be "vast monocultures" of almond growing, Pollan gives us no evidence of it in his article.
Pollan is correct when he says, "more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February [to pollinate almond trees]" The USDA backs this point.
But he goes on to state, "California's almond orchards have become...a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope." That's not so clear.
Remember, Pollan himself said, "Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit [that causes CCD]." That statement is not consistent with implying that almond pollination is somehow to blame. Where's the evidence, beyond conjecture?
If we're going to speculate, why not speculate in the opposite direction? Why not say that bringing together honeybees from various places around the country and world strengthens the bee population by promoting genetic diversity? Scientists have demonstrated that Africanized bees (so-called killer bees) in South America mated with the western European honeybees that have been there for centuries, picking up functional parts of the western European genome and gaining an evolutionary advantage. Could not the same argument be made for diverse groups honeybees gathering in the Central Valley?
Another hypothesis is that there is a natural cycle in the life of honeybees that causes populations to collapse every 40 or so year. The USDA says, "The scientific literature has several mentions of honey bee disappearances—in the 1880s, the 1920s and the 1960s." That's a 40 year cycle and the next occurrence would be, guess when, the 2000s or right about now.
Note that I'm not claiming that either the genetic diversity benefit or the 40 year cycle is true. I'm just saying that I've provided at least as much evidence to support these theses as Pollan does to support his claim the our "bee population [is] ripe for an epidemic national in scope."
Further, as absurd as the idea of migratory beekeeping sounds (and I'd have never dreamed that such a thing existed until I read Pollan's article), it turns out that it's been going on for more than 100 years. If it's to blame for CCD, why did the malady take so long to emerge?
There are serious issues regard our food supply that need to be addressed. Doing so will require evidence and intellectual honesty. "Our Decrepit Food Factories" falls short on both counts.
One major sore spot for me regarding The Omnivore's Dilemma was that I could find no referencing or acknowledgment of Margaret Visser's Much Depends on Dinner-- a book that is technical in all the right places, but also more concise and frightfully amusing. And written nearly twenty years before Pollan's book.
If you want good Pollan, read The Botany of Desire. It's not preachy, just clever and thought-provoking in a good way.
Reply to this