By Carol Ness, Public Affairs | 10 September 2009
BERKELEY — The passage of federal healthcare reform might, just might, have the unintended side effect of turning the healthcare industry into an ally of the movement seeking profound changes in America’s food systems. So says Michael Pollan, the Berkeley journalism professor whose best-selling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (The Penguin Press, 2006) has raised the nation’s consciousness about the health, environmental, and energy problems caused by the industrialization of food production, while helping to fan West Coast sparks of food activism into a national uprising.
The book, which he calls “very much a product of UC Berkeley,” is the subject of the College of Letters and Science’s fourth annual On the Same Page program, which each year selects a work or works by a leading thinker or artist for incoming freshmen to read and reflect on, and for L&S faculty to teach to in seminars as well as their regular courses.