[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Farmer in Chief

[Bill Totten]

The Food Issue

by Michael Pollan

The New York Times (October 12 2008)

(The original version of this article, at the URL at the end of this
post, contains links to several reference materials.)

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 - nineteen 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 ten 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 from 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 five percent of
national income in 1960 to sixteen 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 ten 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 five percent to sixteen percent of national
income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount - from
eighteen percent of household income to less than ten percent. While the
surfeit of cheap calories that the US 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 thirty 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 IMF) 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
photosynthesis 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 USDA estimates that Americans throw out fourteen 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 USDA 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 fifty-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 FDA 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 FDA 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 UN study estimated that the world's
livestock alone account for eighteen 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 eighty 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 ten 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 fifty 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 forty percent of the world's grain
output today is fed to animals; eleven 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 twenty 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 USDA 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 USDA 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 USDA 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 USDA should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve
these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez
Island in Puget Sound, the USDA 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 FDA 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 twnty
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 USDA, which
feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end
of the war, more than twenty million home gardens were supplying forty
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, a contributing writer for the magazine, 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
(2008).

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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