In this video, via A Blog Around the Clock, Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense of Food) addresses the president elect about a vital issue that has been mostly ignored throughout this campaign cycle: food. The video is relatively long (almost half an hour), but worth watching in its entirety.
Michael Pollan argues that the way we produce and distribute food in this country is not only unhealthy, inefficient, and endangered, but that it takes an underestimated toll on many vital systems currently in crisis. Namely the energy, climate change, and health care crises.
Our modern, specialized mono-cropping agricultural system is dependent upon the same cheap fossil fuels that we’re running out of and must be seeking independence from. It results in myriad severe pollutions. As we’ve learned many times in the past few years from wide-scale food scares (e. coli, etc.), mass, centralized production puts consumers at risk. It’s not wise to keep all you’re eggs in one basket… And government subsidies to big, corporate food producers encourage what’s cheapest for them, not what’s good for the average eater.
All of this and rising food costs on top of the recent economic meltdown. And elder generations of farmers are not being replaced.
But the prospect of inescapable doom is countered with possibilities for real reform. This, Pollan explains, will necessarily be an important imperative for the next presidency. Pollan proposes the following actions/shifts:
1. Government rewards for diversified farming–Quit subsidizing corporate monoculture!
2. A return to nurturing animal/plant symbiosis–Re-unite farm animals and crops!
3. Include farming in carbon trading schemes.
4. Organize a strategic grain reserve.
5. Support efforts to recruit farmers–these are the “green-collar jobs” we need, after all.
6. Work to preserve available farmland.
7. Re-regionalize the food system.
8. Move “food culture” away from mindset that food should be quick, cheap, on-demand, or the “cheap energy mind”.*
He’s got some cute ideas for managing the White House itself, too.
(See the video for more detail).
Our food system is an integral part of many others which are failing. Michael Pollan is correct; reforming the food system will be a much bigger deal for the next administration than has previously been suggested.
*I find it hard to fully reconcile this one as a core tenet considering the implications that it has for people who are poor and don’t have the luxury of time for things like the slow-food movement etc., but that’s another post, I think…
Posted under Economy, Politics
This post was written by Emily on October 20, 2008
Yeah!
I actually think of Michael Pollan almost everyday. He wrote somewhere something to the effect of, “If your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, it’s not food.” So I regularly evaluate whether my great-grandmothers would consider something food, and make my selections accordingly. It’s a good system.
Hah! I hadn’t heard that one, that’s funny.