Finally, the moment you have been waiting for all weekend–the breakdown of Michael Pollan’s “Farmer-in-Chief.”

Let’s cut straight to the quick. How can Pollan make the argument that to address the food system is to address climate change, terrorist threats, the need for energy independence, and the health care crisis?  After all, a rather significant gap seems to exist between Freedom Fries and greenhouse gases.  As Pollan points out in his article, however, the gap is far smaller than you would think…nonexistent, in many cases.   Understanding that, we’re left with an important question:  should a Freedom Fry mean something beyond a snub to the French?

Food, Climate Change, and Energy Independence

If you’ve been reading Simple Spoonful since way back yonder in the early days, it will come as little surprise that modern agriculture–particularly meat–is bad for the environment. According to the 2006 UN report Livestock’s Long Shadow, the mass production of meat is a leading cause of loss of biodiversity, probably the largest source of water pollution, and the largest contributor to greenhouse gases in the world (yes, even outstripping all forms of transportation combined).  As Pollan mentions in “Farmer in Chief,” Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs, or factory farms) have also helped make plant-based agriculture damaging to the environment.  Specifically, Pollan revives Wendell Berry’s astute observation that moving animals off the farm on onto feedlots took a mutually beneficial situation–animals eating pasture in fallow fields and dutifully fertilizing them for future crop rotations–and created two problems: impoverished soil on the farm due to a shortage of cow dookie and a pollution problem on the feedlot due to the sheer mass of livestock-created sewage. Modern farming attempts to band-aid over this problem by dumping natural gas-based fertilizer and oil-based pesticides on the fields and dealing with the livestock sewage…well, often not at all.  Sludge is often stored in huge lagoons that contaminate ground water, get into streams, and has contributed to coral reef bleaching where those streams eventually run out into the ocean.  One billion tons of livestock sewage every year is not recycled. That’s one billion tons to leach its way into our ground and water at toxic levels.  If you haven’t yet, click through the link in the last sentence.  It takes you to a page on the Organic Consumer’s Association site which relates, among other things, a tale of an eight-acre pig waste lagoon in North Carolina which burst, flowed into a nearby river, and killed an estimated 10-14 million fish instantly.

That’s not all, however.  In addition to the dependence on fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides and the massive greenhouse gas contribution from the livestock industry, we also need to consider how the subsidy-encouraged monocultures in most of the central US has led to shipping of crops all over the country and the world and created a huge demand for the fossil fuels to ship them there.  Why, as Pollan points out, is New York getting its produce from California instead of from New Jersey, the Garden State?  Because cheap gas made it possible.

His Solution

Reregionalize the food system and stop shipping basic food crops to the four corners of the country.  Encourage local food cultures.  Move livestock off CAFOs and back to the farms for a closed loop of plant and animal growth.  Make animals pasture-fed, cut down on the consumption of meat, recruit more talented, intelligent people to farming, and teach the new generation of farmers in school about the importance of polycultures and how to keep the land healthy by maximizing solar, plant, and animal inputs instead of fossil fuel inputs.

Food and National Security

Because of the mega farms and CAFOs, the vast majority of our produce moves through a small number of packagers and distributors.  Likewise, most of our meat moves though a small number of slaughterhouses and packing plants.  This means that when something goes wrong, we have two huge problems.  First, a staggering number of people can be affected by one outbreak of e-coli or salmonella as so much food passes through one contaminated area.  Second, the source can be extremely hard to trace.  Remember the tomato debacle from this last spring and summer?  Oops–I meant the jalapeño and serrano debacle.  From April to August, people in 43 states, D.C., and Canada were sickened with salmonella. This was an accident, a result of contaminated groundwater in Mexico.  Imagine the possibilities if someone chose to attack us through our centralized food supply using biological agents.  It’s not that local food cultures are immune to salmonella or deliberate acts of contamination.  However, contmaination of locally distributed food will affect fewer people and be far easier to trace.  Pollan quotes Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services in 2004 as 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.”  Additionally, with the recent concerns about melamine and food safety from China, many people are looking to eat food which has been raised and prepared closer to home.

His Solution

Decentralize the food system.  He offers several concrete steps to implement to achieve that end, including USDA grants to encourage farmer’s markets, reshaping regulations to encourage small producers instead of virtually shutting them out, establishing local meat-inspection corps and traveling abattoirs to fill the gap left by the shutting down of local meat processing plants, both requiring a base level of locally-purchased foods from government facilities such as military bases, school lunch programs, and federal prisons, and offering incentives to universities and hospitals to buy from local producers. He also marks the importance of preserving farmland around all our cities.

Food and Health Care

Pollan is also convinced that reforming food means improving heath care.  After all, many chronic illnesses such as heart disease, cancers, stroke, and Type II diabetes are linked to diet.  If we improve nutrition, he argues, we can improve health.  By improving health, we can cut down on health care expenses.

His Solution

He again points to better food–fresher and minimally processed–in school lunches, arguing for increasing the allowance for per-pupil spending on lunches and offering some loan forgiveness for culinary school graduates who commit a couple years to cooking in public schools.  He also argues for doubling the value of food stamp debit cards whenever they are swiped at farmer’s markets and coordinating Community Supported Agriculture memberships for low-income seniors to protect some of our most at-risk citizens from developing preventable illnesses.

Wrapping Up

Pollan also makes some suggestions as to what the new president can do to lead by example, including hiring a White House chef who is passionate about local foods and listing White House menus on the web that acknowledge the local farms from which the ingredients came.  He even suggests ripping up five acres of the South Lawn and planting a garden to feed the First Family, as well as contribute to local food banks.  He emphasizes the importance of transparency in the food system–at every step, including providing a bar code on each product that would let consumers see every step of the journey their food took–even the stop in the slaughterhouse, in the case of meat.  In short, Pollan balances critique and criticism in this article with concrete suggestions for reform.  If you haven’t yet read the whole “Farmer in Chief” article, give it a whirl.  Although the economy is painful and our budget likely to be dismal when our new president takes office, I think some of Pollan’s propositions are things that can and should be implemented during the next four years.  After all, a lot of money is currently subsidizing oil, as well as monocultures of corn and soy.  Another significant chunk is being allocated to dealing with diet-related diseases.  If we address some of these issues, surely we will free up some revenue for food restructuring vital to individual and national health and security.

Finally, what about that Freedom Fry?  What would a Freedom Fry be in my book?

I’d like to think that a Freedom Fry would be a potato grown sustainably on a farm near my home, one a skilled farmer was justly compensated for (or which I grew in my own backyard garden), one fresh and full of nutrients from a thriving soil, one I cut and baked myself.  I’d like to think that the “freedom” in its name was a reflection of freedom from fossil fuel dependence, freedom from pollution and depletion of soil and water so common today, and freedom from fears of food safety disasters.  All those types of freedom require some action on the part of the consumer.  We need to change how we shop, how we set standards, how we eat, and how we look at food in general.  As we think about what we want to ask from the government to help secure food reform now, it’s time to think about what each of us is willing to commit as well.  Let’s hear from you in the comments: what do you think Pollan’s best ideas are?  What do you think Americans should commit to for food reform to happen?  What have you done, or what are you interested in doing to support sustainable change?