The next man in the White House will have to do something no president has had to do since Nixon: Focus on food. Food policy is central to energy independence, the environment and health care -- all issues the new president will have to address. 

The way we currently grow, produce, process, package and transport food uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy, except the auto industry. It also contributes nearly 40 per cent of the greenhouse gases we produce. And when it comes to health care, we shell out 10 per cent more than we did in 1960 to keep ourselves well -- in large part due to the expense of preventable chronic diseases.

Journalist and author Michael Pollan addresses all this in an article written to "Mr. President-Elect” in The New York Times, published on October 12. Pollan's piece, though lengthy, is one I wish everyone would read. He does a great job outlining the way our current food system works and how it got to where it is today. Some excerpts:

The current food system -- characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field, and cheap calories of fat, sugar, and feedlot meat on the table -- is not simply the product of the free market. Rather it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

[snip]

Cheap energy... enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer... This did not occur by happenstance. After World World 11, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer -- ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer -- and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides.

The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce... The chief result...was a flood of cheap grain what could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference.

As Pollan points out, the era of cheap, oil-based food is drawing to a close. Even if we wanted to pay the environmental and health price to keep it the way it is, we simply aren’t going to have the cheap fuel -- or the water -- to do so.

But every crisis provides an opportunity, and Pollan recommends three principles to guide a 21^st century food system:

• Focus on quality and diversity (and not just quantity) of the calories  we produce and consume
• Improve the resilience, safety, and security of the food supply by (among other things) promoting regional food economies
• Reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems

Pollan also addresses some of the harder questions, such as the matter of whether or not the world can be fed with a decentralized food system. And he has some specific suggestions for the next president about how to turn things around, including following Eleanor Roosevelt’s example. In 1943, Roosevelt planted a garden at the White House sparking the “Victory Garden Movement,” which helped feed the nation during wartime.

Here's the article again. (It may require registering to read.) Do print it out, read it over the weekend, and tell me what you think. 

One person has commented on this article.

   Quote(1) Sounds reasonable enough.
October 16th, 2008 | 4:38pm

Driving from Detroit to Peoria over the summer, I noticed it was all cornfields and soybean fields. The field owners seemed to be in a propaganda war over which was more awesomely patriotic: soy biodiesel or ethanol.

Bring back Freedom to Farm, I say!

 Written by Joe Marier

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