KEY POINTS:
Michael Pollan blames George W. Bush for the suddenness of food price rises - increases which seem to have rocketed up overnight.
He's talking about the American President's declaration in early 2006 that America was "addicted to oil" and the subsequent decision to increase subsidies for corn-based ethanol and soy-based biodiesel.
"It's a very interesting lesson for everybody - the downside of globalisation, one country's stupid decision affecting everyone's livelihood," says Pollan, who will be in Auckland next month for the Writers and Readers Festival.
To understand Pollan's position - that Government subsidies in America's vast corn belt have created a ripple effect around the world -is to grapple with the interconnectedness of the food industry.
To see, for example, that as the price of fossil fuels and commodities such as grain climb, so does the cost of nutritionally questionable, high-profit ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup. What that means is your next Coke just got more expensive, or possibly smaller.
Which, from a health perspective, may not be a bad thing - assuming the high cost of corn syrup-sweetened soft drinks could lead to fewer people drinking them. Our food system is indeed a tangled web.
Pollan, a journalist and the author of In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating, is well-versed in the labyrinthine ways of processed food.
"A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature on to the world stage - the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species," he writes.
At Berkeley's graduate journalism school, Pollan teaches a course called Following the Food Chain - something he did, in meticulous detail, in The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast Food World. What he found was a trail that took him to unexpected places - from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from cattle "feedlots" and fast-food restaurants, to organic farms and hunting grounds.
But time and again, in all manner of food products, including breakfast cereals, snacks, soft drinks, chicken and grain-fed beef, the trail traces back to corn, rivers of which flow from the American Midwest.
But about a third of the 10 billion bushels of American corn harvested annually are now being used to make ethanol, and corn prices have more than doubled.
When corn prices go up, says Pollan, all grain prices go up, because those who were planting wheat or soybeans last year start planting corn because its price is so good. That drives up the price of soy and wheat because less is grown.
American ethanol subsidies may explain the suddenness of the food price rise, but the underlying cause is the industrial food chain's reliance on fossil fuels, from the chemical fertiliser crops feed on, to the machinery needed to make food grow, transport it and process it into what appears on our dinner plates.
"At every point in the food system, fossil fuel is a key ingredient," says Pollan.
He produces the statistics to back his case. One fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes into producing and transporting food; about 190 litres of oil are needed to grow, harvest, dry and transport an acre (about 0.4ha) of corn; a single feedlot steer consumes 130 litres of oil in its lifetime; and it takes between seven and 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy.
Add to this the growth of the middle-class in China and India, who are eating more meat (mostly grain-fed) and further fuelling the demand for grain.
Until now, our food system, built on the premise of an endless supply of cheap fossil fuel energy, chugged along fine. It's cheap energy that allows food of all kinds, including organically grown types, to be flown around the world to satisfy consumer whims.
It allows, for example, efficiently produced New Zealand grass-fed beef to be sold at a lower price in a New York store than the local grass-fed beef.
But as fuel prices shoot up, the equation changes, giving back some advantage to local agriculture. Locally produced organic products also begin to look less expensive.
"If other countries could feed themselves and were less dependent on the global grain trade, this wouldn't quite be the problem that it is," says Pollan.
Over-production of grain in the US and other countries has made it hard for countries dependent on cheap American corn to grow their own.
For a country such as Mexico, where corn is a staple of the diet, it's a ridiculous situation. When the cheap supply dries up, the country finds it doesn't have the capacity to feed itself and can do little else but pay the inflated world price.
Says Pollan: "One of the lessons of this is that we have to think about food sovereignty, so countries have a buffering from the swings of world commodity prices."
Pollan advocates building strong local economies based on local food systems that operate independent of the world economy of industrial agriculture and the agri-foods industry.
He's a huge fan of farmers' markets - which he sees as a political movement - and knowing who is growing our food.
"I know a lot of the people who grow the food that I eat. I think it's really weird that more of us don't."
What Pollan uncovers in his research - "about the messy places where nature and culture have to engage with one another, where we have to change nature, where we can't simply admire it" - is a fundamental food problem. Much of what we eat isn't food - or certainly not what our great-grandparents would have regarded as food.
What we get from our reliance on petroleum for fertilisers, food production and global transportation is a consolidation of farms, environmentally unsound monoculture and, at the end of the line, a surplus of inexpensive food with questionable nutritional value.
Bizarrely, what's brought about this state of affairs, contends Pollan, is the ideology of nutritionism - food broken down into its component parts and dietary advice framed in terms of good and bad nutrients. Hence the stream of conflicting nutritional studies: carbohydrates are good for you, no they're not; fats make you fat, no they don't.
"The ideology offers a respectable rationale for creating and marketing all manner of new processed foods and permission for people to eat them," writes Pollan.
Which would be fine, if eating "by the light of nutritionism" made us happier, if not healthier. Instead what we get is orthorexia - "an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating".
There's also an inescapable paradox: "Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker and more poorly nourished."
Pollan's deconstruction of nutritionism and his answer to the omnivore's dilemma is contained in a haiku-like seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
If you buy the argument - that most of what we're eating today is not really food, and the way we're eating it, on the run or in front of TV, is not really eating - following the advice requires significant change.
It is change Pollan senses is happening - a focus on food, rather than nutrients as the basis for nutritional science. But, ironically, what's more likely to drive the change is high food prices.
