The last few years have been interesting times for food and eating habits, as "slow food," locavores and farmer's markets have entered mainstream conversations about how we eat. This spring saw Michelle Obama planting the first garden on White House grounds since the era of President Roosevelt. One of the Pied Pipers leading the movement to eat more fresh, local fruits, vegetables and meats has been author Michael Pollan. In books such as In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan explains why junk food really is junky and why it's so important not to eat food that has ingredients that you can't even pronounce. Now Pollan appears in the new documentary Food Inc., a disturbing look at giant food companies in the United States, with a focus on the beef industry. NEWSWEEK's Nicki Gostin spoke with Pollan about whether the cost of food at farmer's markets is worth it, why Europeans eat better than Americans and the steps we can all take to improve how we eat. Excerpts:

Gostin: Why is it so terrible that cows eat corn?

Pollan: Because it makes them sick when they eat it in large quantities. A little corn is not going to kill them, but when it's 80 to 90 percent of their diet, it deranges their metabolism. They are evolved to eat grass, that's what they're good at; when you put corn into that amazing organ called the rumen, it acidifies it and creates an environment where acid-loving bacteria such as E. coli 015787 are able to evolve. What's beautiful is a rumen has a very different ph than a human stomach; whatever bacteria live in the rumen would normally get killed by our stomach acids, but if you make the cow's digestive system more like ours, any bugs that evolve there will survive their transit to our stomach and go on to possibly make us sick. That's really the E. coli story, but there are other problems, too: To keep the animals healthy on that corn diet, you have to give them lots of antibiotics, they just wouldn't survive otherwise.

It's amazing in this film to see how removed the food industry is from actual food.

Even people who follow these issues in print for the last few years I think will be shocked to see this film, because the camera takes you places you have not been. One of the most noteworthy things about our food system is how invisible it is to most of us. The packages still have pictures of farms, but people don't see the places where their food is produced. As a journalist, visiting these places was transformative. To me, going on feed lots, chicken and hog operations, it changed the way I eat. You can't go through these places without being changed. You lose your appetite for certain kinds of food.

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