Farmer in Chief - Dear Mr. President-Elect

[otohara]

In case you missed Bill Moyers last night - Michael Pollan was on disusing connecting the dots
in regards to our food policy, big agriculture, lobbyists, fast food, obesity, the environment.

Any way, the show revolved around a NYT's Magazine an open letter to the Prez-Elect he wrote back in October, here:

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1

The show from last night can be watched here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html

Michael Pollan website: http://www.michaelpollan.com/

Petition to make Pollan Secretary of Agriculture: http://www.petitiononline.com/MPoll4Ag/petition.html

[grasswire]

1. thank you for pursuing this

Pollan was so inspiring! There can be another way of doing the people's business, with no kowtowing to agriconglomerates.

[Thrill]

2. Send it to Change.gov

[tyne]

5. Amen

[bluedeminredstate]

3. While visiting family, I went to a Wegman's yesterday in the D.C. area

Call it the Home Depot of gourmet food. I've never seen anything like it. I saw everything a human being on any continent could possibly want or need for their preferred diet. Twenty kinds of mushrooms, fish from the Pacific, Atlantic, Artic, produce that I couldn't begin to now how to cook, hundreds of teas, a sushi shop, an Asian "wokery", Indian food, etc., etc.
All I could think about was how much fuel was used to fly, truck, or ship this stuff to our shores and then to the individual Wegman's. It was astounding that the prices weren't unreasonable either. The packaging and cardboard for every little box of specialty food also got my attention along with the army of very pleasant workers running this cruise ship of eating.

When the oil runs out then what?

[jwirr]

7. Then we had better learn to plant and harvest what grows in our own

areas.

[BumRushDaShow]

4. Sorry, I'd rather have someone experienced in agriculture

and not a glorified journalist/activist to run the Department. He has some interesting ideas, many of which have actually been suggested by others (e.g., trying to buy only foods grown within 100 miles, etc), but he has some misconceptions regarding certain practices, for instance from the article:

.For today’s agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm — as in Wendell Berry’s elegant “solution.” Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season’s grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste — all without our help or fossil fuel.

How did Salmonella get into the spinach, lettuce, and other greens not long ago? Because animals were apparently grazing up field and their wastes, which naturally carry various types of Salmonella, got into the water supply of an actively growing field, and was absorbed into the leaves of the greens.

The whole issue of developing and distributing wholesome food, thanks to the advancement of the science of analyzing what is there in minute quantities, has gotten way more complex than the article suggests. Bringing back the small family farm would certainly take us in the right direction as this would keep foods more local. But in this day and time and with this highly capitalistic society, it would almost lead to imposing a communistic system to wrest control from the corporations with gov't-purchased land (from those corporations) close to localities, which would then be designated for establishment of smaller farms. If the gov't then sold that land to the small farmer, then that communistic "taint" might go away. But loopholes would need to be closed (there are states/municipalities that allow individuals to buy large parcels of land for personal use with taxation at a lower "farm rate", but with the promise of a minimal amount of that land farmed, and this is where usable land goes fallow and is unproductive). In any case, it would be a major struggle to try to undo what has been done when dealing with private land and eminent domain.

[otohara]

8. glorified journalist/activist

Harsh words for an Oxford, Columbia guy who also is a professor at UC Berkley.

He covers all the things you speak of.

Don't worry, he doesn't want the job - you're safe for now.

[BumRushDaShow]

9. What does what school he went to have to do with it?

He could be a Nobel Prize winner in English for all I care except that it helps that someone be a bit more familiar with the nuts and bolts of that which he would profess to change.

And it's not about "me" being safe, it's about this damn country. Ideologues of any stripe don't belong in positions of government. That's why we're in the destroyed state that we're in right now with Shrub having implanted his ideological wackjobs in every single agency at every single Department, and down to a level of granularity previously unheard of.

Ideologues in an advisory capacity? Sure. Some are visionary in certain aspects. But not heading up the nuts and bolts.

[mrs_p]

6. like his books

but heard he is not really a team player - not willing to help others in the field. like he thinks he is the only one who can think about these matters. i don't really want him for any government position, but would like more of his ideas reflected in policy.