I managed to finish the Michael Pollan interview last night, and I have to say the guy knows his stuff and has some great suggestions, but he’s no pie-in-the-sky idealist. He’s extremely realistic about what can be done, which makes his ideas and suggestions all the more compelling. A few examples and one-liners I took note of:
Eating healthier is more expensive because the crops used in junk food are subsidized by the government. Every five years the Farm Bill comes up, where the government decides which crops will be rewarded with subsidies and which ones won’t. In fact, farmers who receive subsidies aren’t allowed to grow any other crops on their farms besides the subsidized ones. This means that farmers are rewarded for monoculture farms and penalized for growing vegetables and other actual food on their farms.
The era of cheap food is over. We’ve wrung all the financial profit we can out of big agriculture and the results are coming back to bite us. The reason real food seems to cost more is because we were paying artificially low prices for food in the first place (because of the subsidies, again). In fact, Americans spend less of a percentage of their income on food than almost all other countries. For example, Americans spend around 10% of their income on food, while Europe spends 15-18%. In some ways the rising food prices are just a reflection of paying what it actually costs to grow food.
Our food economy is crazy. Because of cheap oil and cheap labor (in other countries), it is not uncommon to find that fish caught off the coast of New England are shipped to China to be filleted, then shipped back to America for consumption. We also do this with chicken.
This isn’t a "left" issue – all kinds of people from all kinds of political and religious persuasions are joining this movement, including evangelical Christians. What could be more "family values" than instead of eating out at McDonald’s, sitting down together as a family, eating real food, grown and raised locally by people you know, and cooked at home.
Part of the answer is returning to eating real food that is grown locally and regionally. But a big problem with this is that there are so few farmers left. For local and regional agriculture to make a comeback, millions of people will need to return to farming. Pollan has several interesting ideas for how we might do this: returning a sense of dignity to the vocation of farming, offering incentives for people to start farming again, etc.
One of his more "fun" ideas was instead of having a White House Lawn the next President should have a 5-acre White House Garden, with a Farmer-in-Chief to grow food right there in front of the White House to send to local food banks. Obviously it’s more of a symbolic action than anything else, but it would be a striking symbol, and oftentimes those kinds of symbolic actions are more important than we realize. Instead of seeing images of the President going out for a run, think about images of the President and his family pulling weeds in the White House Garden…
Whatever happens, according to Pollan, our food economy has to change, because we’ve reached the limits of trying to produce food cheaply. I’ll have to read his books now… maybe over Christmas I’ll have some time. Cheers!
This is crazy! I really want to read his book now. You should watch the documentary called The Future of Food. It talks mostly about genetically modified food, how bad it is for our bodies, and how the government helped this company (Monsanto, makers of Roundup) patent a genetically modified seed. Patenting life? Hmm. This company would go onto farmers property without permission, find traces of their modified seed that the farmers didn’t even know they had (due to cross pollination and other acts of nature) and they would sue these family farms and shut them down.
Yet another reason why we can’t find as many local farms. And not only is the mass-produced food subsidized but it’s also made from a genetically modified seed that we should even be putting in our bodies. Almost all other countries require the labeling of GMO (genetically modified food) in stores. But since most of the people on the board of the FDA used to be or still are on the board at companies like Monsanto, it’s going to be very hard to get it labeled in the US.
Aaron and Jillian always make fun of us for trying to find locally grown organic foods or sometimes growing them or making them ourselves. It’s actually getting relatively easy to find good stuff around Oregon and Washington. Even a lot of restaurants are starting to use good products despite the cost. There’s one brewery that sells it’s spent grains to a specific cattle ranch for feed and them buys back all the same cattle to use in the restaurants! Pretty cool!
Sorry for going off about this. I hope this reply isn’t long than the original post 😉
I’ll have to check out that documentary… thanks for the suggestion. Hope you guys are well!
I made a valiant attempt to read “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” but, man, it’s looooong. Despite his long-windedness, I think Pollan does a good job of putting food issues into terms we can understand. It’s certainly a hot topic now. One of our friends was just commenting that they spends more on eating healthy than they do on their mortgage. Faaaantastic.
I would love to see welfare recipients shipped out to their own 160 acre lots and made to be productive instead under a new Homestead Act.