Pollanation (n); Pollanate (v): The process by which products Michael Pollan would consider "edible food-like substances" are deliberately marketed as what Michael Pollan would call "food", so as to avoid increasingly negative reaction to fast and processed foods as a result of health concerns, the slow food movement, the organic movement, the locavore movement, and Michael Pollan's own work. 

It is an established fact of modern American life that anything good and just will be ruined by marketing bastards intent on associating their product, undeservedly, with that which is good and just. Doesn't matter if it's indie music, ethical politics, or natural food, everything eventually gets co-opted into a lie to make some douchebag money. That's how it works. That's who we are.

For most of the last year, I've been watching this happen with food. Specifically, the various things mentioned in the definition above, along with stuff like the White House garden. If first hit me when I saw ads for Heinz ketchup, with the tagline that "Heinz ketchup is grown, not made". They touted the fact that Heinz grows all its own tomatoes for its ketchup, as if this should make you feel better. Yet this is marketing bullshit of the highest order. Yes, they grow their own tomatoes. Which means they have their own factory farms. And presumably grow some form of hybridized Monsantomato, spray it with pesticides and pig shit, and ensure that the tomatoes have the right chemical properties, so that when it heads into the processing plant to be MADE into ketchup with a hefty dose of high-fructose corn syrup, it all conforms to their taste parameters.

McDonalds (McFuckingDonalds!) has or had an ad campaign with the tagline "That's What We're Made Of", in which they helpfully inform us that a Big Mac was once a cow, a head of lettuce, and some wheat. Oh, well, that makes it OK, then. Fuck that. I mean, intellectually, I know that a McDonald's pickle was once part of a cucumber, but the fact remains that the final product bears almost no resemblance to either a cucumber OR a pickle. Don't try to tell me your processed food is OK because some of the things it was processed from were at one point food.

I wanted a name for this so that I could refer to it if the future, and after variants on whitewashing and greenwashing failed to sing, I settled upon Pollanation. Because I happen to think that Pollan's distinction between food and edible foodlike substances is a genius thing, and I say that as someone whose diet even a flattering analysis would show is at least 20% edible foodlike substances. DAMN YOU TACO BELL!

So if you take an edible foodlike substance and attempt to convince me that it's food, so that I'll feel better about buying and eating it, you're Pollanating. And just like actual pollenation, someone's getting fucked in a very abstract sense.