Michael Pollan’s missive to the next President on the future of American food policy is well worth reading, and not just because it quotes me:

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.”

He makes a similar point about the potentially trans-ideological character of the push for good food a bit later on:

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?

It probably goes without saying that there are certain aspects of Pollan’s argument with which I disagree: I’ve argued before, for example, against the idea that we should simply shift federal subsidies toward the “good” kind of farming, a move which would come right out of the same sort of central planner’s mindset that Pollan rightly tags as having done so much to get us in this mess in the first place:

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.

That obviously wasn’t those policies’ ultimate intent, though: they were primarily meant as a way to encourage the production of the most food at the lowest possible cost to consumers, and in that they clearly succeeded. And so it seems to me that the lesson here should be obvious: large-scale governmental policies can have severe consequences that often belie even the best of intentions, and given the ever-present possibility of regulatory capture it’s probably best not to trust our federal overseers with any more power than they absolutely need.

The same goes in spades for proposals like this one:

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.

… which if you’re looking to raise the cost of food unnecessarily and play right into the hands of the biggest companies out there, sounds like a terrific idea – but otherwise …

Seriously, though, the essay is really excellent, and lots of the other stuff that Pollan suggests – schoolyard gardens, a Victory Garden on the White House lawn, policies that bring the sticker price of meat more in line with its actual cost, recycling food waste for compost, using our land grant colleges to educate farmers rather than mere agribusinessmen, and so on – is really, really right on. Give the letter a read, and report back on what you think.

     Filed under: agriculture, energy, environment, food, government/law