Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief
Michael Pollan describes the upcoming food crisis in an open letter to the next President of the United States.
This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation.
The core of his solution is:
… we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine