Michael Pollan

When you have too much of one thing, you also get too many pests, too many diseases.

Therefore, it drives you to use a lot of chemicals in your agriculture.

I think many of the problems in the whole food system can be traced to that very fact that we grow these vast monocultures.

As I mentioned, they're not exactly food.

You can't eat the kind of corn we grow.

The soybeans are not edamame.

They're a different kind.

And they're basically big packets of starch and protein that can be broken down into their component parts and then reassembled as ultra-processed foods or turned into sugars, you know, high-fructose corn syrup, which is where a lot of it ends up.

You can't take a corn cob and eat it.

It's like these giant kernels that are incredibly hard.

You'd break your teeth.

And they're just pure starch.

They have none of the sweetness that sweet corn has.

You see these vast fields and they cover Iowa and Indiana and Illinois.

And you think, oh, all food.

But no, it's not.

It has to pass through a factory or several factories before it can be food.

Although I don't even think what you turn that stuff into should be dignified with the word food.

So there's a direct link between the way we're farming and the way we're eating.

50 years, I'd say.