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I'm deep into the final remaining pages of The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I can't begin to articulate what an incredible and life-changing book it's been. Michael Pollan has offered America a meditation on all things food, with all of its complexities and potentials. I dare anyone to read it and not change their diet.

Particularly distressing for me to read (as a designer) was Pollan's reflections on supermarket package design. Never has graphic design seemed so greasy and misleading. We often look squarely at advertising agencies and marketers when we want to point the finger at someone who lies repeatedly as a way of collecting a paycheck, but Pollan makes it clear that we designers and copywriters are just as worthy of being condemned. He criticizes the entire genre of art and literature known as "Supermarket Pastoral."

I spoke about this around Thanksgiving, pre-Pollan-reading, but it's only now become so vivid and real. For anyone who's ever strolled through a Whole Foods, you are fully aware of the colorful language and graphics that influence our choices. One need only march towards the refrigerated cases to discover a milk carton's quaint images of cows grazing behind a picaresque red barn, sunset in the background. This image, of course, diametrically opposes the reality of its real production within a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feed Organization). Despite claims of free-range, cage-free, grass-fed, etc., the organic industry is highly unregulated and free to interpretation. For instance, free-range often means locked in a cage until the last two weeks of an animal's life!

In Pollan's words, "Supermarket Pastoral is a most seductive literary form, beguiling enough to survive in the face of a great many discomfiting facts. I suspect that's because it gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for safe food, but for a connection to the earth and to the handful of domesticated creatures we've long depended on. Whole Foods understands all this better than we do. One of the company's marketing consultants explained to me that the Whole Foods shopper feels that by buying organic he is 'engaging in authentic experiences' and imaginatively enacting a 'return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact.'" He goes on to ask the question "How well does Supermarket Pastoral hold up under close reading and journalistic scrutiny?" and answers it with a troubling, "About as well as you'd expect anything genuinely pastoral to hold up in the belly of an $11 billion industry, which is to say not very well at all." Then Pollan goes on to describe industrial organic food in all of its harrowing reality.

As revolting as a lying graphic designer is, I can't help but see their side of the situation. What's the alternative? Have pictures of caged animals with pumping machines hooked to them? I'm sure that would boost sales. In truth, the banal and stark containers with no imagery at all are at their most honest. The designs are symbolic of an industrial product, which is precisely what it is.

Food packaging offers a fascinating insight into design, because it really is the birth of graphics in so many ways. Up until not-so-long ago, about 100 years back, consumers would trust their food to the local market guy. You had a personal relationship with a store owner (with whom you entrusted your health) and they in turn had a personal relationship with a farmer. There were no packages, other than unadorned sacks and jugs. When industrialization kicked in, the first graphics were faces (Quaker guy's mug, Aunt Jemima, etc.) to help bridge that personal gap. "Oh! I know that guy! I trust him. Gimme some oats." Ergo, the birth of the logo.

And it seems the alternative Pollan suggests has no use for a designer. Buying directly from a farm, seeing the farmer and his habits, cuts off the need to "sell" a piece of food. The farm itself is all of the marketing you need. It also keeps the price more affordable, since their is no design cost built into the food.

I challenge everyone to pause and reflect before they throw something in their shopping cart. Practice an exercise in Buddhism, and when you grab the milk, pause and see the cow, the farmer, the delivery truck, the stock boy, and the entire machine that brought you the product. In might SEVERELY change what you put in your body. Oh, and buy Omnivore's Dilemma. It's a well-designed, beautiful, and challenging book.