On Wednesday, Michael Pollan appeared on Oprah to discuss the food system and the film Food, Inc. At the beginning of the program, entitled “Before You Grocery Shop Again: Food 101,” Oprah said that she saw Food, Inc., and it inspired her to host this discussion. “We all have to start paying more attention to what we’re putting in our bodies,” she said. “Do you know where you food really comes from? What’s been added, what’s been taken out? What goes down before they put a label on it?” Interspersed throughout the show were clips of the film, including the film’s introduction on the disconnect between our idea of food production and its reality; chicken production, featuring a farmer speaking out against the industry; and a family that can’t afford to eat real food and is forced to choose fast food.

Pollan explained how “the less we spend on food, the more we spend on healthcare,” siting statistics that show that in 1960, we spent 18% of our income on food and 5% on healthcare nationally, while we now spend 9% of our income on food and 17% on healthcare nationally. They got into the nitty gritty about the western diet and its pitfalls, and Oprah got a laugh when she exclaimed, “the low-fat kick made everybody fatter!”

When Oprah asks Pollan what he eats, and he speaks in favor of cooking: “I think cooking is really key because it’s the only way you’re going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us,” he said. “The fact is, so far corporations don’t cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat and sugar—much more than you would ever use at home.” The best line in the program came from Oprah: “We need a food revolution, because people want the corporations to cook for them because it all boils down to convenience.” Pollan agreed, saying that when you understand what it takes to make the food we are currently eating, “you lose your appetite.”

Oprah later asked Pollan if he eats meat, and he talks about being “picky” about the meat he eats and making sustainable choices, saying “I don’t eat feedlot meat.” Oprah then provoked a laugh by asking “you’re not worried about saying bad things about beef?” referring to the lawsuit filed against her by the beef industry 1996. (That episode focused on mad cow disease, and one of her guests described the industry’s practice of feeding processed livestock back to the cows, to which she responded to by saying that it “just stopped me cold from eating another burger.”)

The full episode is worth watching, and we’ve posted the available videos from around the web below:

Part 2:

…which gets cut off, and the ending is very worth watching:

Perhaps it was all just too much, too kind and too ahead of the curve, all that work she had done recently to expose what truly goes on for chickens and other animals in the factory farm setting. Because now Oprah has decided to bolster one of America’s worst offenders when it comes to support for factory farming, KFC, by giving away two pieces of chicken to every human in America.

It may seem harmless: a mass market “they want it, so I’m giving it to them” kind of campaign. But because Oprah has marketed herself as one who cares about animals, even getting a “Person of the Year” award last year from PETA, this KFC campaign is a serious disappointment to say the least.

This is because KFC buys their meat from Tyson, which is the largest chicken processor in the United States and is known for supporting a conglomeration of chicken CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). Inside these daylight-free hellholes, chickens are crammed so tightly together they can barely move. Worse, if we were to grow as fast as these broilers are bred to grow, we’d be 350 pounds by the time we were 2 years old. This is largely because these chickens are bred to have more breast meat (because that’s what the consumer wants), so many of them can’t even stand up. On top of that they produce so much shit that many farm workers get asthma just doing their job — and that is just the workers on the farm. Most of the Tyson workers spend their entire day on one part of the production line, slitting throats, de-feathering or removing intestines for hours on end. Yum. (video made by one worker, be warned, it is quite grotesque)

Just a recap: in order to have what we want to eat, we have created little monstrosities, which then get essentially tortured before routine killings performed by ill and disgruntled workers. And Oprah is encouraging this practice to continue!

If she would have taken the time to think about all this, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she would see that encouraging these practices is not in line with the Eckhardt Tolle, Live Your Best Life, “We will all be judged on how we treat the least among us” persona she sells on her popular television show.  Individual choices do matter, especially the choices of those with enough money to buy every person in the United States two pieces of chicken.

If I were Oprah, I’d have struck a better deal with the fried chicken hawking establishment: She could have told KFC to change their buying practices, and only serve free-range chicken, and THEN give away free chicken. Had she done that, producers would start to see the value in letting their chickens outside to scratch the soil, eat grubs and peck grass.

Yesterday, Oprah spent her entire show discussing the treatment of the animals we raise for meat in this country. No wilting flower, Oprah did not shy away from discussing a subject that got her into a lot of hot water in the late 1990s, when she was sued by cattle ranchers for food disparagement when she admitted during the period of fear surrounding the early outbreaks of mad cow disease that she was “stopped cold from eating another burger.”

Back then, she didn’t have the eloquent ammo provided in Michael Pollan’s New York Times Magazine letter to the next commander-in-chief on Sunday, which focused on the perils of letting growth be the single factor in running the food system: “When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.”

On Oprah’s program, the issue at hand was the upcoming vote in California on Proposition 2, a referendum on changing the way laying hens, pregnant sows and veal calves are kept in confinement. A reformed eater of the standard American diet, Oprah has discussed issues of health on her program before, such as earlier this year when she ate a vegan diet for three weeks to lose weight. At the beginning of the program, she stood before her audience and presented visual representations of the current standards in confinement: six hens to a cage not large enough for any one to open its wings, a six foot long sow in a seven foot block with no room to turn around, and a calf in a similarly small paddock. The debate was on. We would be presented with both sides of the argument, and Oprah would refrain from bias, even though she stated that we are “the measure of how we treat the weaker among us,” twice.

Lisa Ling was on hand to talk about the videos at both caged and cage-free chicken operations, and confined and free-range pig farms. At both, we witnessed smaller “caged” operations, run by families who insisted that Proposition 2 was the kind of legislation that could put them out of business. They argued that they just didn’t have the space or money to retrofit their barns to fulfill this obligation. A representative speaking against Proposition 2 stated that the results of this bill passing would be less available food. Should Proposition 2 pass in November, these fears of mid-sized operations need to be eased. At the free-range farm, space was plentiful, and the animals seemed to fulfill the romantic vision farming holds in our consumer minds. The most interesting moment, arrested by a commercial break before it could come to fruition, was when the free-range pig farmer reached out to the confinement operator and said that he used to think that putting the pigs free to roam outside would be too hard, that they would be cold in the winter or would be difficult to breed and maintain. But that now he has come to realize that it just isn’t so. I really hoped Oprah would let him go on, but the schedule of daytime television was set in stone.

Back from the break we were on to veal calves. Apparently no confinement operator would let Oprah’s cameras on the premises, because they used fuzzy footage taken in the most horrible conditions imaginable by an activist: calves that could not stand up, that had never even learned to walk, and were chained by the neck to their paddock. It was reminiscent of the videos released last year of the California slaughterhouse that set in motion a change it the public thinking about the treatment of the animals we eat. As a contrast, Oprah’s camera crew visited a free-range cattle farm in Wisconsin, where calves were raised on their mother’s milk with the other cows, distinguished only by a tag on their ear that they would be sold as veal calves. For a contrasting view, a representative from the veal processor’s union argued that Proposition 2 was unnecessary, because producers were already moving in that direction. To that I ask, then why oppose it?

The fact that the argument has reached Oprah’s stage is telling for where we will continue to see this discussion going forward. As she reaches on average 14 million viewers per program, we can assume many new people have been brought into the fold, and have been given images of where our food comes from to turn over in their mind. What Proposition 2 might lack in assistance for small factory farmers to make the transition could be gained in the seven years before the implementation of the law. While not perfect, Proposition 2 calls for the humane treatment of the food we eat, something that was practiced up until we laid the foundation for industrial agriculture. We have been detached from these truths about where our food comes from for too long, and whether Proposition 2 passes or not, the argument for changing the way we farm, and specifically, raise the animals we eat in this country has gone mainstream.

Photo: gthebash