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Michael Pollan On Vilsack, Agriculture — And Food

Daniel Wolf (Clodhopper) wrote:

As a lifelong American farmer, I listened with keen interest to Renee's interview with Michael Pollan. He talked about his disappointment with Obama's selection of former Iowa Gov. Vilsack as agriculture secretary. He views it as a loss of a golden opportunity to mold the process of producing bountiful, nourishing, and above all affordable food into a form he would be happy with. There was a taste of sour grapes to the interview, perhaps because Mr. Pollan missed his chance to be secretary of food. To appease him, perhaps he could receive a consolation prize. How about an all-expenses-paid trip to Zimbabwe to view first-hand the likely results of his proposed policies. Thursday, December 18, 2008 9:04:56 PM

..................michaelpollan....................

Michael Pollen Speaking

Michael Pollen returns to Colorado, to be exact Boulderado.

May 21, 2009, 7:30 PM @ Boulder Unity Church/ Boulder Bookstore, Located at 1107 Pearl Street Boulder, CO 80302

Michael Pollen is the quintessential botanical author. When an ex-girlfriends mother gave me a copy of "Botany of Desire," I immediately feel in love. Four books later, a letter to the president-elect and numerous lectures around the country his influence is becoming a movement. With the Westword launching a web feature called "Urbavore's Dilemma" a cleaver take on Pollen's Omnivores Dilemma, described by Westword as the movements bible, his impact is unmistakable.

If you want grow your perspective on the current food policies, ear Pollen's interview "When corn is king" By Matthew MacLean.

Think GlobalAct Local
Avantgardner

Pollan: Nutrition 'Science' Has Hijacked Our Meals -- and Our Health By Terrece McNalley Posted April 3, 2008

Farmer in Chief

I can't describe the excitement when I first read Michael Pollens letter to the President-Elect in The New York Times Magazine... For me it was monumental, he tied everything together the oil crisis, health care, food security, foreign trade, and you know what he offers as a solution.. local food economies. Mr. Pollen you are truly an American and an inspiration to us all. Not to mention that Erwan Frotin from The New York Times is a amazing photographer.

My favorite part. "Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we're not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized."

"Sipping on Petroleum"
Avantgardner

Dear Mr. President-Elect, It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration--the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact--so easy to overlook these past few years--that the health of a nation's food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention. Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon's example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won't work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on -- but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain. http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=97

Why Mow?

This is a paraphrase of Why Mow? from Michael Pollen. Mr. Pollan works are very inspirational. I would like to endorse his new book in Defense of Food.

"Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants"
Avantgardner

I tired of the endless circuit, pushing the howling mower back and forth across the vast page of my yard, recopying the same green sentence over and over: “I am a conscientious homeowner. I share your middle-class values...

…The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed…I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor-waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give-and-take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot.

Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.

~Michael Pollan, Second Nature