Michael Pollan Speaks in Pennsylvania.

Here is a summary of Mr. Pollan's comments generously provided by Troy Bogdan of Pure Earth Organic Farm. Web links are available at the bottom of the article if you wish to learn more about Troy's farm or to contact him via facebook.



You may be interested to know that I was in attendance last night at the presentation by Author, Professor and Movie/TV "Celebrity," Michael Pollan, here in Northwest Pennsylvania, at Allegheny College, in the small town of Meadville (approx. 12 miles away from our farm).
In his talk, which was entitled, "The Sun Food Agenda," he explained (he was preaching to the choir in my case) how we are so dependent on oil for our nation's food supply and how agribusiness uses oil to produce our food, from running machinery, to fertilizing, spraying, and including the transportation network around our country and the world. He went to great lengths to explain how this works, in simple language, that everyone in the audience (this was free and open to the public, and from what I could tell from glancing around, it was standing room only on both levels of the auditorium) could understand. He brought in a Quarter Pounder with cheese burger from McDonalds as a prop, and also had a pitcher of "oil" and four 8 oz. glasses. He went on to say that the amount of oil required to produce this McHamburger (as he poured it into the glasses) was . . . one 8oz. glass, two 8 oz. glasses, three 8 oz. glasses and for the 4th, he poured 2 ounces in the remaining glass, for a total of 26 ounces of oil needed to make one McBurger {He then proceeded to dip his finger in the oil and he licked it off and said Yummy (It was actually liquid chocolate)}!!!

He showed some very interesting slides and also some clips from some of the movies he was featured in (Food Inc.) and explained how the health of our people has been in decline ever since WWII, when farms were partnering with the industrial-military complex (he mentioned that WWII munitions plants were used to produce nitrogen fertilizer for farms) to create a wealth of food.

He also described and showed more slides and videos of some alternative ways of raising food, such as grass farming (Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm was one example) and some other ways of growing food with less oil.

After his talk he took a few questions from the audience, including one concerning an eight year rotation plan that he talked about for raising cattle in South America from our own "Farmer's Wife," Maggie Henry.

One thing I regret not asking him, was, what was his take on the current honeybee crisis? This was fresh in my mind from last weekend's Bee Seminar in Cranberry, and I know he covered some of that topic in one of those PBS T.V. specials, but I wished I would've asked him his thoughts on that during the Q&A session.

I thought the entire presentation was excellent, and I enjoyed it very much. Afterwards, there was a book signing, and everyone that wanted to, had a chance to meet him and have their books signed.

My favorite quote from the presentation was (and I paraphrase) . . . "Denmark is a big producer of Sugar Cookies, which they export to the United States, yet they also import Sugar Cookies from the United States. In my opinion, they should just exchange recipes and make them locally!"

There were so many people in attendance from the local food community and many PASA members. It was a great pleasure to see so many old friends (and some new ones). BTW, Mia made a great plug on behalf of Brian Snyder, for PASA to ask Michael to come and speak at the PASA conference (which falls on Michael's birthday), and I tried to help by telling him the food alone at the PASA conference would be a birthday celebration in itself, but he said "he gets tired of preaching to the choir over and over again." :-(

Troy Bogdan
Pure Earth Organic Farm, LLC19000 New Richmond Road, Cambridge Springs, PA 16403



You may find Troy:

on the web:
http://www.localharvest.org/farms/M5225

on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cambridge-Springs-PA/Pure-Earth-Organic-Farm-LLC/51760106987

map:

http://agmap.psu.edu/Businesses/866