I've been a Michael Pollan fan since I read "The Omnivore's Dilemna." So I was thrilled to see that he's written an open letter to the next president of the United States, addressing our greatest emergency since the Great Depression: the food crisis.
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.
Read the full letter here.
Three great ideas from the article:
• Resolarize the American Farm - grow as many different crops as possible, and use soil, water and sunlight.
• Re-regionalize the Food System - build the infrastructure for a regional food economy
• Rebuild America's Food Culture - Change the way we look at food, and we'll see Americans begin to look differently at what's going into their mouths.
Those of you who have read his books know that he supports sustainable agriculture, organic farming, and local food economies. It's better for the environment and better for your health. Some major points of the letter:
• The food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy - 19%. This isn't just in moving food from the farms to the grocery stores, as you might expect. We use an awful lot of petroleum-based fertilizers to grow a lot of corn. This produces 37% of the greenhouse gases - more than any other human activity. (Petroleum-based fertilizers also wash out into the ocean and kill oxygen, further exacerbating the problem of using fossil fuels.)
Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
• Our health care crisis can be linked to our consumption of cheap calories. The top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. While food prices have gone down, our health has suffered. There is research to show that our farming practices makes our food less healthy. Accelerated growth of vegetables makes them less flavorful and less nutritious. Accelerated growth of cattle, along with feed for which the cattle is not evolved to eat (corn) means that the meat of the animals we eat has less vitamins and less flavor. Pollan believes that the meat we eat today is inferior to meat produced before the industrial food revolution.
• Factory farms are one of our biggest sources of pollution.
There's more, including the idea that nations will begin building 'food sovereignity' to strengthen their own economies, and that free trade of food will disappear. But the basic premise is that we need to wean America off a diet of fossil fuels, and back to a diet of simple sunshine. Eliminate the monocultures of soy and corn, and begin again with crop diversity.
The idea I liked best from the article? Put a Victory Garden at the White House. Put it on the South Lawn. Grow vegetables at the White House!
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.