A new food agenda for the next President
Michael Pollan writes an open letter to the next president on our oil-based food policies. Yes, you read that right, food policies, and I have to say that while it’s pretty long, the letter is a must-read if you’re interested in organic or whole food, energy, or healthcare & nutrition — or all 3. And it turns out Barack Obama got Pollan’s memo. via kottke.
A few excerpts after the jump.
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent…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.
…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. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain…If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.
…what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.
Tokya Dammond wrote:
I agree with what Obama has said, as it is supported by science. Historically, governments have had agricultural policies designed to lower the costs of food for their supporters. Feed your supporters and you shall lead - kind of captures the policy. We then tried to make food less and less expensive - which led to the subsidy (yes - taxes given to the farmers that would produce the most) - which lowered the price of food on the supermarket shelf (but which we pay out of our taxes anyway). One of the problems is that we subsidize things with our taxes that are not necessarily good for our health - like corn (the stuff we feed our beef cattle), sugar, and wheat (rich in carbs). That ends up being the less expensive food - so we eat too much of it - so we get unhealthy (not a balanced diet at all). The other major problem is that the science behind increasing farm production is based on adding fertilizers and pesticides that are made with petrochemicals (natural gas, oil). We use so much non-solar energy, that our food system is now a huge consumer of energy. So, if we want energy independence, we should reduce our need of petrochemical based supplies and return to the Sun as our source. We can do it..it has been proven that we can produce more nutrients (as measured not by pound, but by nutrients per food unit (nutrients in an orange, loaf of bread, glass of milk) if we use a sun based system (read organic food) rather than a petrochemical based system. When you remove the Ag Policy part (the tax subsidy to our food producers) and let the economics work, organic has a better return on investment as measured by cost of producing nutrients we need to stay healthy.
Posted on 06-Nov-08 at 2:21 pm | Permalink
David Morton wrote:
Just to be clear, the excerpts are from Michael Pollan’s piece in the NYT. “President-Elect Obama” (magic to my eyes) simply referenced the letter in the Time interview.
Posted on 06-Nov-08 at 3:25 pm | Permalink