A healthy food policy for the next American president

Last week, the New York Times magazine featured Michael Pollan's excellent article titled, "Farmer in Chief." It’s an open (long) letter to the president-elect urging for a national food agenda.

His compelling argument is that food policy is a critical issue, and unless we address our industrial food system, we won’t be able to make significant progress resolving the main issues of our day—health care, energy independence national security and climate change.

Pollan argues that the current food system relies on cheap fossil fuels (used for fertilizers, pesticides and shipping from great distances) to produce cheap, highly processed and convenient yet unhealthy food calories.

But the era of cheap and abundant food is coming to a close as oil prices go up. We cannot continue to degrade our environment the way the industrial farm and animal feedlots do, and the cost to our health of eating fast food is much too great.

Pollan urges the next American president to wean the American food system off the fossil fuel diet, and put it on a “diet of contemporary sunshine.”

There are many great ideas in this piece, but I want to concentrate on the suggestions Pollan makes that pertain to ordinary people who aren’t policy makers.

Pollan states that the American people are paying more attention to what they eat today more than ever, and are concerned about foods’ healthfulness and safety. The incredible growth of the market of alternative kinds of foods—organic, local, humane—proves that the public is ready, and indeed asking for change in the food environment.

Pollan calls for rebuilding our food culture: teaching children about real food at school, going back to cooking meals from raw ingredients and developing an interest in growing food and farming.

And finally, he calls the next president to take a leader position, teaching by example,

“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.”

Our next president will have a lot on his plate, but it’s essential that he also find room for a national food agenda.

In the meantime, there is much we can do to work around our current industrial food industry that’s based on fossil fuel-grown grain processed into what Michael Pollan calls “food like substances.”

We can do our share by creating markets for better food (buy and support locally grown, healthy, organic food), by paying attention to how healthful our food is (or isn’t), by getting back to creating our meals from real ingredients, and by rejecting highly processed foods (that aren’t food at all).

I urge you to go to the source, and read the rest of this terrific article.

Ayala