Michael Pollan's Letter to the President
Decatur Metro | October 14, 2008 | 12:23 pm
Oh how I love this photo. Take THAT corn subsidies!
In this week’s New York Times Magazine “Food Issue”, Michael Pollan writes an open letter to the next President of the United States restating his case for total reformation of the food industrial complex.
Anyone who has read his “Omnivore’s Dilemma” will notice that much of the article is little more than a summation of the book’s argument, slightly updated for 2008. But for those that hear words like “slow food” and “organic” and think its an exclusively liberal, yuppie enterprise, I would challenge you to take a few minutes to read the 9-page article (yes, 9 pages) and then tell me that there’s not also quite a bit of conservative and libertarian thought embedded in the idea too.
At the local level, we already have a wide selection of CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) delivering around town, an organic farmer’s market, the Oakhurst Community Garden, farm-to-table restaurants that promote local eating, and a city commission that is currently pursuing the idea of allowing residents to farm small parcels of city-owned land that aren’t really usable for anything else.
What else can we be doing to lessen our dependence on the oil-based food industry?
Here’s a question that popped into my mind…what’s CSD’s lunch menu look like these days? Well, here’s the October menu for the elementary schools…corn dogs?
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My son is a sixth grader at the middle school. He and his friends have been discussing doing fund raising projects to help improve the quality of meals served at the school. They see it as an economic issue since they believe that the school must be doing their best to provide quality food and are simply underfunded in that area.
Wow…an impressive agenda for a sixth grader Alan! When I was in sixth grade, I don’t think I could stop eating chicken nuggets long enough to even think about the quality of the food I was eating.
I need to learn more about where funding for lunches comes from…
Hiya chief –
I think you’ll like this:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ann_cooper_talks_school_lunches.html
And, if you’re interested in overhauling the food system, especially the subsidies you might want to fuel the fire by Google’ing: Distributional effects of WTO agricultural reforms in rich and poor countries.
The punch line of that study is this: The authors simulated what would happen if one could get rid of the (often unfair) subsidies and barriers on global prices and trade volumes. They then mapped the outcomes onto household surveys in 15 different and mostly poor countries. The result: Free trade (in the real sense of the term) in farm goods would reduce poverty in 13 countries while raising it in two.
The global food systems is a mess and its not just bc of oil. Read _Stuffed and Starved_ by Raj Patel for a full account of how messed up it is.
Thanks Oakie ol’ buddy ol’ pal! Very good TED video…I love that website!
It seems pretty easy to make the case against lunch room food, and I think few would argue that it couldn’t be improved, its just the very difficult matter of “how”. But if Berkeley can bring in a chef to reform its kids’ lunch menu and Decatur is Roy Blunt’s Berkeley…perhaps we could someday follow in their footsteps. The movement would probably pay for itself with press.
Thanks also for the book recommendation…from the Amazon blurb it sounds like Patel comes to many of Pollan’s same conclusions, through a slightly different and more opinionated lens. I’ll check it out!
I would love to see the CSD serve great food in lunchrooms. Then I could stop packing 4 lunches each morning!