THE FOOD ISSUE
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Farmer in Chief
October 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html
Dear Mr. President-Elect,
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.
Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food
are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply
follow Nixon's example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your
secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it
takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the
old approach won't work this time around; for one thing, it depends
on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another,
expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require
you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which
brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address
food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of
the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you
will not be able to make significant progress on the health care
crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are
issues you did campaign on -- but as you try to address them you
will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat
food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy -- 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do -- as much as 37 percent, according to one study. 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. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis -- a process based on making food energy sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.
In addition to the problems of climate change and America's oil
addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the
health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent
of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant
drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans
depends on getting those costs under control. There are several
reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest,
and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable
chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are
chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2
diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national
spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national
income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount -- from
18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the
surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced
since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political
agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot
expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage,
without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern
American diet.
The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will
have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor's precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers.
Expect to hear the phrases "food sovereignty" and "food security" on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two
years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food
can be nearly as big a problem as too little -- a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.
Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being
forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a
nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only
at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as
well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be
held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals
in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of
imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents
another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do."
This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you've inherited -- designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so -- are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades,
worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food -- organic, local, pasture-based, humane -- are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that "this is a conservative cause if ever there was one."
There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I'm urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: 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: in the farm
field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and phootosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely
it is food.
How We Got Here
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.
This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, 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. One secretary of
agriculture after another implored them to plant "fence row to fence
row" and to "get big or get out."
The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood
of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost
farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the
difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the
food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from
that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in
which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.
Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of
animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost
farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than
farmers could. So America's meat and dairy animals migrated from
farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the
point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of
meat a year" a half pound every day.
But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic
sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly
regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a
pollutant "factory farms are now one of America's biggest sources
of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals
off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution
"animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete" and neatly
divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a
pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with
fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.
What was once a regional food economy is now national and
increasingly global in scope -- thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap
energy -- for trucking food as well as pumping water -- is the
reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than
from the "Garden State" next door, as it did before the advent of
Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently,
cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it
makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska,
ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to
California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can
profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark
and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic.
About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped,
"Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient."
Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it
is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the
environmental or public-health price, we're not going to have the
cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much
less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis
provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents
opportunities that must be seized.
In drafting these proposals, I've adhered to a few simple
principles of 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.
These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult
to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea:
most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its
reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring
the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun,
those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health,
our environment and our security.
I. Resolarizing the American Farm
What happens in the field influences every other link of the food
chain on up to our meals -- if we grow monocultures of corn and soy,
we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates.
Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous
leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres
of American crop and pasture land.
Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up
the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized
commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs
like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than
quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather
than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional
quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food
scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds
chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.
Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and
use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on
the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers
it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving
crop subsidies are prohibited from growing "specialty crops"
farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price
exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for
going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers
should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops -- including
animals -- as possible. Why? Because the greater the
diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers
and pesticides.
The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts
of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been
proved, not only by small-scale "alternative" farmers in the
United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and
giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina.
There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm
belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year
rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years
grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world's best beef),
farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any
fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the
weeds that afflict pasture can't survive the years of tillage, and
the weeds of row crops don't survive the years of grazing, making
herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason -- save current
policy and custom -- that American farmers couldn't grow both high-
quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of
the Midwest. (It should be noted that today's sky-high grain prices
are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow
grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the
making.)
Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified
sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect
the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of
the year their fields are green -- that is, taking advantage of
photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control
erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the
fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for
fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don't farmers
do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility
has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility.
In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should
make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields -- a
practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also
its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is
mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the
food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14
percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers,
wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting
of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost
free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the
need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and
improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.
Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are
designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in
"conservation" or it is farmed intensively. This either-or
approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching
are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment
is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops
and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity,
soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation
Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in
the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these
kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the
periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the
government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land
Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to "perennialize"
commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other
staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses -- without having
to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise
of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil,
while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant
amounts of carbon.
But that is probably a 50-year project. For today's agriculture to
wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop
plants and animals must once again be married on the farm -- as in
Wendell Berry's elegant "solution." Sunlight nourishes the
grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then
nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season's grasses
and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and
dispose of their own waste -- all without our help or fossil fuel.
If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to
Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is
nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities
of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by
federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of
these -- the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it --
has just been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A. approval
for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in
these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable
existence. And the third is that the government does not require
CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of
comparable size to do. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of
antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we
have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-
resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and
salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the
factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other
industry or municipality.
It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto
farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will -- as it
should.
You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and
therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the
environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the
welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food
industry's greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study
estimated that the world's livestock alone account for 18 percent
of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined.
(According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000
gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will
still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and
returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their
carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A
bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce;
grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.
It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less
food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key
question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort
of sustainable agriculture you're proposing feed the world?
There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and
most honest answer is that we don't know, because we
haven't tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an
industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but
to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food.
The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has
been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help
of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same
sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based
agricultural systems wouldn't produce comparable yields.
Today's organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of
public investment in research, routinely achieve 80 to 100 percent of
conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed
conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain
moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world -- with
a population expected to peak at 10 billion -- survive on these
yields?
First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today
is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming.
According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing
international yields up to today's organic levels could increase
the world's food supply by 50 percent.
The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn't everything
and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as
growing food. Much of what we???re growing today is not directly
eaten
as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As
the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated,
the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves
health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are
probably more important. We can expect that a food system that
produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce
healthier populations.
The final point to consider is that 40 percent of the world???s grain
output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world???s corn and
soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels.
Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based
animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for
everyone ??? however we choose to grow it.
In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just
grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre
than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional
value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more
hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels ???
performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests
without petrochemicals ??? is labor intensive and takes more skill
than merely ???driving and spraying,??? which is how corn-belt
farmers
describe what they do for a living.
To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more
people growing food ??? millions more. This suggests that sustainable
agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world,
where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they
don???t. But what about here in America, where we have only about two
million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where
farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a
day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food
production ??? as farmers and probably also as gardeners.
The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation
of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American
farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn???t expect these farmers to
embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that
is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming
systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades
now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in
America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation.
As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the
best students to leave the farm for ???better??? jobs in the
city. We
emptied America???s rural counties in order to supply workers to
urban
factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need
more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America
??? not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a
matter
of national security. For nations that lose the ability to
substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely
compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on
foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives
to oil, there are no alternatives to food.
National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland
we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will
not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need
to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day???s drive of our
cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme
ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their
development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our
national security and require real-estate developers to do ???food-
system impact statements??? before development begins. We should also
create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate
farmland (as they now do ???open space???) in their subdivision
plans;
all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have
diversified farms at their center.
The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the
abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many
political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic
renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of
new ???green jobs,??? which is precisely how we need to begin
thinking
of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-
fossil-fuel economy.
II. Reregionalizing the Food System
For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more
than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a
thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they
would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in
town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take.
Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a
regional food economy ??? one that can support diversified farming
and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel
in the American diet.
A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as
well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and
require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be
lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in
resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of
shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger
patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single
terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison
millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental
contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more
vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our
food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.
Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food;
farmers??? markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now
4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food
market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are
now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an
annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the
season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help
from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and
out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet
there are several steps the government can take to nurture this
market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:
Four-Season Farmers??? Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to
build year-round indoor farmers??? markets, on the model of Pike
Place
in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply
these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local
distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used
to move produce within local food sheds.
Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food
economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally
designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers
should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without
making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-
safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace,
so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a
farmers??? market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational
food manufacturer. This is not because local food won???t ever have
food-safety problems ??? it will ??? only that its problems
will be
less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is
inherently more traceable and accountable.
Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment
to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local,
grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional
slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up
local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the
U.S.D.A. does little to support the ones that remain. From the
department???s perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources
to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour
than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The U.S.D.A. should
establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors.
Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget
Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs
that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and
inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat
fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.
Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to
alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable,
the sun-food agenda ??? as well as the food security of billions of
people around the world ??? will benefit from government action to
prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve,
modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this
objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food
stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments
should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear,
thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging
speculation.
Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal
procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like
promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some
minimum percentage of government food purchases ??? whether for
school-
lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons ??? go to producers
located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should
create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal
funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of
institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand
regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people
these institutions feed.
Create a Federal Definition of ???Food.??? It makes no sense
for
government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the
nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption
of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object
that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot
buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of
tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something
like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because
it is, nominally, a food, albeit a ???junk food.??? We need to
stop
flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling
them ???junk food??? ??? and instead make clear that such
products are
not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food
worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you???ll
recall President Reagan???s ketchup imbroglio), but defining food
upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as
Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to
be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must
contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of
energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of
school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since
typically only ???food??? is exempt from local sales tax.
A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value
whenever swiped at a farmers??? markets ??? all of which, by
the way,
need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers
that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that
gives farmers???-market vouchers to low-income women with children;
such programs help attract farmers??? markets to urban neighborhoods
where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also
offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets
in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the
elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state
of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-
supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing
two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans
and the revival of local food economies.
III. Rebuilding America???s Food Culture
In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported
fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily
lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture
of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and
more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less
appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal
??? not just federal policy and public education but the
president???s
bully pulpit and the example of the first family???s own dinner
table ??? to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your
sun-
food agenda.
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.
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.
There are other kinds of information about food that the government
can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much
transparency in the food system as possible ??? the other sense in
which ???sunlight??? should be the watchword of our agenda. The
F.D.A.
should require that every packaged-food product include a second
calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into
its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our
food, and people ought to know just how much of it they???re eating.
The government should also throw its support behind putting a second
bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store
or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole
story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of
crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its
production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the
animals??? diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the
CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The
very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture
of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain
is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying
technology to pierce the veil is another.
Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White
House. If what???s needed is a change of culture in America???s
thinking about food, then how America???s first household organizes
its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public
attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that
can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil.
The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you
would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food
movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local
ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well,
such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington
to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn???t be
fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make
a point of the fact that every night you???re in town, you join your
family for dinner in the Executive Residence ??? at a table. (Surely
you remember the Reagans??? TV trays.) And you should also let it be
known that the White House observes one meatless day a week ??? a
step
that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in
carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a
year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing
the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.
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.
You're probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations
of Midwesterners have done: "rocket.") But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry -- the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat -- meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher "family value," after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal?
Our agenda puts the interests of America's farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry's. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more "populist" or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food
costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of
elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and
regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the
exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its
putative "economies" depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced -- it is in fact unconscionably expensive.
Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It
builds on America's agrarian past, but turns it toward a more
sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American
farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century's most urgent
errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the
American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists
all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-
time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American
land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment -- that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.
Michael Pollan, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto."
|
|
|