Michael Pollan writes to the next Farmer in Chief

Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Those two books (as well as Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon) were what started me down the locavore path.

Pollan has a lengthy article, "An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief", in the October 12 issue of The New York Times Magazine.

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.

It is a very lengthy article (at least by Internet standards), but is definitely worth reading. Here are a few interesting facts I gleaned from it:

• Energy: Food production and distribution requires 19 percent of the fossil fuel used in the US, second only to cars.
• Energy: In 1940, 2.3 calories of food energy was produced for each calorie of fossil fuel energy used. Today, producing 1 calorie of food energy requires 10 calories of fossil fuel energy. (In other words, it takes 23 times as much fossil fuel energy today.)
• Climate change: Our food system is the largest source of our greenhouse gas production — perhaps as much as 37 percent.
• Climate change: The world's livestock produce 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined.
• Health care costs: In 1960, health care costs were 5 percent of national income, while food costs were 18 percent of household income. Today, food costs have dropped to 10 percent of household income, but health care costs have risen to 16 percent of national income.
• Security: There have been food riots in more than 30 countries in recent months.
• Nutrition: The average American eats 190 pounds of meat each year.
• Pollution: Factory farms are now one of the largest sources of pollution, which is particularly ironic since in the past manure was a useful fertilizer. Today, animals are no longer raised on the same farms as crops, so waste disposal is a problem and fertilizer is a (petroleum-based) expense.
• Water: Producing one pound of beef requires 5,000 gallons of water.
• Energy: Producing a bushel of grain takes about a half gallon of oil.
• Efficiency: Animals eat 40 percent of the world’s grain. Biofuels (e.g. ethanol) use up 11 percent of the world’s corn and soybean crop.
• Farmers: In the US, only about two million farmers are left. To grow food without cheap fossil fuels will require far more farmers (and gardeners).
• Farmers: The average farmer in the US is 55 years old. We'll need to encourage more young people to become farmers.
• Farmers: There are now 4,700 farmers' markets and 1,500 CSAs in the US.

An excerpt:

Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it’s important to understand how that system came to be — and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

It must be recognized that 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.

Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare — black — from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

That's one aspect of the locavore movement that needs more examination: The conflicting goals of good food vs. cheap food. You can buy an awful lot of mac & cheese for very little money. However, as Pollan points out, that cheap food generally is cheap only because it is subsidized. "We subsidize Happy Meals, not healthy meals." Plus, with oil becoming more expensive, oil-based food is rising in price.

Pollan has several proposals:

1. Resolarize the American farm: Switch from a system dependent on cheap fossil fuels to one based on photosynthesis.
2. Reregionalize the food system: Think global, eat local!
   • Promote four-season farmers' markets, to make it easier to eat local all year.
   • Create agricultural enterprise zones, so that small producers selling locally are not regulated as strictly as multinational corporations.
   • Create a Local Meat-Inspection Corps to serve small-scale processors.
   • Establish a strategic grain reserve, to moderate price swings and speculation.
   • Regionalize federal food procurement, so that a percentage of the food purchased by the federal government and by federally-funded institutions is local.
   • Create a federal definition of "food", so that food stamps and sales tax exemptions only apply to foods with a minimum nutrient-to-calorie ratio (as opposed to, for example, soda).
   • And more!
3. Rebuild America’s food culture: Our great-grandparents bought fresh food and cooked it. Today, we tend to buy processed food and microwave it. I suspect that if you hand the average American a squash or an eggplant, he (or she) would have no idea what to do with it. (I don't entirely exclude myself from that category!)

Another excerpt, this one about rebuilding America's food culture, which I really like (emphasis added):

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to "edible education" — in Alice Waters's phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children's food culture, we'll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.

Of course, with today's "No Child Left Behind" mandates, schools are apparently reduced to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. There aren't any questions on the test about how to grow and cook food, so schools don't have time for that. And, given that school funding referendums are regularly defeated, they don't have the money to do so, either.

Another good excerpt about rebuilding our food culture (emphasis added):

But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn't be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial.

The money quote: "most federal messages about food [...] are negotiated with the food industry." *sigh*

An excerpt that should be of particular interest to members of Food Not Lawns (emphasis added):

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking "victory" over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one's family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.

Some additional tidbits:

• Federal policy prohibits farmers receiving crop subsidies from growing fruits and vegetables. Corn and soybeans only!
• In Argentina, farmers follow an 8-year rotation schedule: 5 years of pasture-grazing cattle, then 3 years of grain. The cattle fertilize the fields, so no petroleum-based fertilizer is needed. In addition, weeds that like pasture get wiped out by the 3 years of tillage, while weeds that like row crops get wiped out by the 5 years of grazing. As a result, virtually no herbicides are needed.

As long as this post is, the article is even longer. However, take the time to read it. It provides far more background, details, and rationale than I could provide here.

Lastly, I'll close with this excellent video from the Eat the View campaign of Kitchen Gardeners International. If you haven't already done so, please sign their online petition.

Comments

[danielle]

"Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the USDA which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry." This just goes to show how much the food industry influences decisions based on economic growth rather than health/sustainability. Priorities are a bit screwed up, and I think the video/petition is a good way to get some attention

[Shelley Thomas]

Okay... I'll take more than an evening reading his article, but it is, as you say, worth it! I think his strongest argument for our current state of affairs is still energy. It seems like what will keep them listening. I think both sides want to save energy... at least until certain other groups start breathing down their necks. One more point I would add to his (I think it may be discussed later) is the impact of corn use/abuse and its impact on world hunger. When we drive the price of grain up, we push down the amount of food other countries can buy to feed their starving... as if their weren't enough dirty politician's goons already hording current supplies!

Next Saturday is our church's Harvest of Talents for World Hunger and I plan on fasting from corn related products in keeping with it. (If it's possible!) We'll see if I get kicked out of my farming community :D.