The symbiosis of the American food and pharmaceutical industries, to which Pollan refers, is the grotesque avatar of the primitive supermarket that I dreaded on the eve of the Second World War. "Is it just a coincidence," Pollan asks,
that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent...on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income.
