For a brief moment during the campaign, reformers thought Barack Obama might include agriculture in the “agenda of change” he would take to Washington. He told TIME magazine that the way we produce our food “is partly contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in health care costs.” The farm lobby roared in protest. Obama buckled, took it back, and said he was “simply paraphrasing an article he read.”
Ah, yes – but what an article! Here it is: nine pages in the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE on October 12. An open letter to the future “Farmer in Chief” – from one of the country’s leading experts on food – Michael Pollan. Significant progress on health care, energy independence, and climate change, Pollan told the candidates, depends on something you haven’t talked about at all – food.
That article triggered such a response that an online movement has sprung up calling on President-elect Obama to name Michael Pollan Secretary of Agriculture.
Pollan’s popular books include: THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: A NATURAL HISTORY OF FOUR MEALS, and this most recent work, IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: AN EATER’S MANIFESTO.
From Bill Moyers’ Journal
