Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. - Cyril Connolly
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Farmer in Chief
Thanks to my laptop issues, this post is a little dated because the article ran two weekends ago, but it is so important, I want to post it now.
Revered food writer, Michael Pollen, wrote an article in the Sunday NYT Magazine's Food Issue two weekends ago, aimed at the next President, and what their food and farming policies should look like.
In short, if you think food policy is not important in this year's election, then you might as well give up on energy independence, climate changes, and healthcare, because it all starts with the food we grow and eat. Here's just some of what he says:
1. Climate Change: After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent...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.Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third.
2. Healthcare: 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.
3. Foreign Policy: Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third.
4. National Security One word - China?? Seriously, our nation's food system is perhaps the most vulnerable to potential acts of terrorism of anything we have.
His overall message:
we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.
I urge you to read the entire article. Everyone needs to know this.
