Photo by Kris KrügWhere does your burger come from? Journalist and food writer Michael Pollan has traced back the source of much of what we eat, and says that the ultimate answer is oil. Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, argues that it takes massive amounts of petroleum-derived fertilizers and pesticides to run industrial farms and feed lots, with dire consequences for human health and the Earth’s climate.Check out Pollan’s multimedia presentation below, from the Poptech conference in Camden, Maine last month.[Editor's note: After some Reuters fact-checking, Pollan withdrew his Poptech assertion that "A vegan in a Hummer has a smaller carbon footprint than a meat-eater in a Prius," and his statement has been edited out of the video. The erroneous meme has nevertheless continued to spread on Twitter]Click here for Reuters Poptech coverageClick here for more Poptech videosMore on the Future of Food:Is Monsanto the answer or the problem?The fight over the future of foodIs Africa selling out its farmers?India’s food dilemma: high prices or shortages

Photo by Kris Krüg

(Updated below with Michael Pollan’s response)

You want some petroleum with that Big Mac?

Journalist and food writer Michael Pollan broke down the hidden cost of America’s best-known burger on Saturday to an eager audience at the Poptech conference. He traced the Big Mac’s origins all the way back to the oil fields, used to make fertilizer that is crucial to the corn grown for cows in massive feeds lots.

“Our meat eating is one of the most important contributors we make to climate change,” said Pollan, who is best known for his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

“A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.”

A dead baby albatross is a tough act to follow.

Nike’s Lorrie Vogel took the stage at Poptech this week to talk about the company’s sustainable product design efforts.

Immediately preceding her was an devastating presentation from photographer Chris Jordan, who shared a series of photographs from Midway Atoll of baby albatrosses who had died from ingesting plastic from the massive Pacific Garbage Patch.

Conference organizer Andrew Zolli, visibly moved, asked for a moment of silence and then Vogel took the stage to talk about her efforts as general manager of Nike’s Considered team.

She was frank about the challenges that Nike and other manufacturers face, especially the company’s reliance on petroleum-based polyester and resource-heavy cotton. It takes about 700 gallons of water and 1,100 square feet of land to produce the cotton for one Nike T-shirt.

Interviewed two days later, she said the albatross moment spurred her biggest takeaway from the conference:

Have you ever seen 500 people stunned into a complete and devastated silence?

Photographer Chris Jordan shared a sobering tale of his journey to Midway Atoll with the Poptech conference on Thursday, where he captured horrifying images of baby birds killed by plastic from the Pacific Trash Gyre. The crowd, which had been listening to a day of Big Ideas, was dumbstruck.

If you’ve never heard of the Gyre — also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the Pacific Trash Vortex — odds are you will hear a lot more soon. It is an oceanic trash pile in the north Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas, trapped in a remote, circular current. (Check out this explainer from Good)

As Jordan explained, it’s not a floating garbage dump as you might imagine it. Most of the debris is made up of tiny pieces of plastic and other litter which is floating in a suspension beneath the surface of the water. Some researchers have found that water in the Gyre holds six times more plastic molecules than phytoplankton, the single-celled organisms at the bottom rung of the marine food chain.

Jordan traveled to Midway Island, near the site of the pivotal World War Two naval battle, to document the death of baby albatrosses on the island’s nature reserve. The birds scoop the plastic out of the water and feed it to their babies.

It’s difficult to look at Jordan’s pictures of the birds, with the ingested plastic outlasting their decomposing bodies, without wondering: “Could that have been my bottlecap?”

From Jordan’s website:

Can’t get enough of behavioral economist Dan Ariely? That certainly seems to be a common condition at the Poptech conference in Camden, ME this week.

Ariely gave a mind-bending talk about the counter-intuitive notion that paying people more can actually make them perform more poorly — at almost the exact moment that Obama’s pay czar was unveiling plans to slash the bonuses of top banking and automotive executives by about 90 percent.

Here’s more from Ariely, on everything from the unforeseen consequences of the pay restrictions to the difficulty of measuring human happiness.

Video # 1: “We have a group of people who have been very successful at playing a lot of shenanigans on us.”

Video #2: “If you can be really funny for 10 minutes, I’ll give you $10,000.”