| On Bill Moyers Journal last night, the conversation with food expert Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History Of Four Meals, In Defense Of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) was extremely revealing, not only about the subject of food and its complex relationship with issues from global warming to childhood obesity, but also with the larger patterns of how power works and how new thinking is kept marginalized-even in an atmosphere of "change." Indeed, in its own way, this program threw more light on the recent debates over policy and personnel in the Obama Administration than almost anything I can think of ostensibly written on the subject.
Take this, for example, not even from the dialogue, but just from the introduction:
BILL MOYERS: 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.
Fat chance of that! Pollan's a smart guy. He knows that the Department of Agriculture is agribusiness home turf. He wouldn't stand a chance there-and he said so, directly to Moyers. It's an example of hegemony, pure and simple, and though Pollan never used the word, it's obvious that he understands it well. |
First, let's start by looking back at the campaign incident Moyers referred to:
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."
This was, I think, a prototypical moment in the Obama campaign. Obama's a smart and curious guy-the exact opposite of George Bush. And so he reads this fascinating article and he's naturally inclined to want to talk about it. It's stimulating. But, then comes the pushback from the entrenched powers, and Obama is not about to ruffle anyone's feathers. It's all about common ground with him.
Of course, I understand the reasoning here. I understand the logic of the campaign-don't pick any fights you don't have to in order to win the election. But I also understand that Obama is living in a fantasy world. Power concedes nothing without a demand. And closing ones eyes to enormous problems and the special interests who help create them is no way to bring about fundamental change. So what Obama was up against in this moment was the basic contradiction between the brilliance of his campaign strategy, and it's total inadequacy for addressing a whole range of fundamental problems.
Pollan realizes this, of course. He's thought a lot about the power relations involved, and he knows that the powerful entrenched interests cannot simply be wished away or ignored:
BILL MOYERS: What you won't find in his writings is a Shermanesque-like statement saying that if nominated he will not serve. But let's watch my guest Michael Pollan turn pale as I ask him suppose Obama did yield to legions of admirers and name you Secretary of Agriculture instead of yet one more advocate of industrial farming? Where would you start?
MICHAEL POLLAN: I'm ready for the Shermanesque statement.
BILL MOYERS: Make it. We'll make some news on this.
MICHAEL POLLAN: It's not from me. It's - this is - I would be so bad at this job.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
MICHAEL POLLAN: I have an understanding of my strengths and limitations. Well, you have to understand that that department of the government, the $90 billion a year behemoth is captive of agri-business. It is owned by agri-business. They're in the room making policy there. When you have a food safety recall over meat, sitting there with the Secretary of Agriculture and her chief of staff or his chief of staff is the head of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
It's all worked out together. So, I don't know I mean, I think that the department, in a way, is part of the problem. And they're also very dependent on the legislation that the House and Senate Agricultural Committees cobble together. And so I think you'd get swallowed up there very easily. I think that and I don't want this job either. What Obama needs to do, if he indeed wants to make change in this area and that isn't clear yet that he does at least in his first term I think we need a food policy czar in the White House because the challenge is not just what we do with agriculture, it's connecting the dots between agriculture and public health, between agriculture and energy and climate change, agriculture and education.
So you need someone who can take a kind of more you know, global view of the problem and realize that it's an interdisciplinary problem, if you will. And if you do hope to make progress in all these other areas, you have to make sure that if the Surgeon General is, you know, going on about the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, you don't want to be signing farm bills that subsidize high fructose corn syrup at the same time. So you have to kind of align
Now that's the kind of guy you want in the room when you're trying to create real change. He understands the entrenched forces, he understands the need to do an end run, if any progress is to be made, he understands that the problem is interdisciplinary, he understands, in short, that it's all about strategy, and there's a need to take existing forces and reconfigure them for a unified purpose.
This is the same exact situation with the ongoing economic debates, by the way. It's not that the folks Obama is appointing aren't sincere in the moment or won't willingly carry out his policies. It's that they simply don't see the interconnections that a progressive critic sees. They don't see how responding to the crisis of the moment is intricately interconnected to a dozen different other concerns that need to be coordinated with one another. That's the kind of mentality that Pollan represents with respect to food policy, and how it connects with a myriad other concerns, and the same can be said about the entire policy array, not least, economics.
Pollan goes on to note, and then explicate, a variety of different significant points--from the health effects of food:
All these chronic diseases which is now what kills us basically pretty reliably in America are adding more than $250 billion a year to healthcare costs. They are the reason that this generation just being born now is expected to have a shorter lifespan than their parents, that one in three Americans born in the year 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control, will have type 2 diabetes, which is a really serious sentence. It takes several years off your life. It gives you an 80 percent chance of heart disease. It means you are going to be spending $14,000 a year in added health costs.
to the energy/environmental costs:
when you look at the food economy's use of fossil fuel, which is about 19 percent, you've got a lot of diesel transportation. But it's more than personal transportation, absolutely. And, you know, we don't see that when we look at our food system.
to the national security implications:
National security, well, there's a there's a tremendous danger when you centralize your food supply....
Well, having a highly centralized food system such as we have where one hamburger plant might be grinding 40 or 50 million burgers in a week, where one pre-bagged salad plant is washing 26 million servings of salad in a week, that's very efficient, but it's also very brittle or very precarious. Because if a microbe is introduced into that one plant, by a terrorist or by accidental contamination, millions of people will get sick. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to your food safety. You want to decentralize.
This is what real transformation is about: the relationships between things totally change, the ways the interconnect and interact--or don't--totally change to reflect a new understanding of the world, to solve old problems and create new possibilities.
That is change we can believe in. And the mere fact that Obama was fascinated, and wanted to talk about what Michael Pollan had written, that is a hopeful sign, a promise of a possible beginning, that we have to fight to preserve and expand upon. Otherwise, the special interests will either scream in public, clear their throats in private, or both, and the subject will be closed.
Pollan also stresses that are things people can do to make change in their own lives, both at the personal level, and in bottom-up community-building ways. Community organizer that Obama once was, one suggestion Pollan made seems particularly intriguing--and remarkably powerful, a way that the First Family could set an example that could inspire a mass movement:
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, look, the president's bully pulpit is a very important thing. And, you know, I think the first family could set an example with who they appoint White House chef. Is it someone who's really associated with this, you know, local food movement? Who would not only cook wonderful, healthy food for them, but who, at state dinners, would kind of shine a light some of the best farmers in this country and elevate the prestige of farming. I also think that we need, in addition to a White House Chef; we need a White House Farmer.
BILL MOYERS: Are you suggesting that the president should rip up the South Lawn?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Not all of it. Not all of it.
BILL MOYERS: All right, say five acres.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Five acres. They've got 17 acres to play with. I don't know exactly how much. But I'm saying five acres. Put in a garden, organic garden. Hire a good farmer to grow food there. I think that that would send a powerful message. You know, this has happened before. Eleanor Roosevelt put a victory garden in, in the White House in 1942.
BILL MOYERS: ...during second world war
MICHAEL POLLAN: It was over the objections of the Department of Agriculture, who thought it was going to hurt the food industry if people started growing food at home. You know, God forbid.
BILL MOYERS: Some things never change
MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, I know. So they were on the wrong side of that issue, too. But she persisted. And she said, "This is really important for the war effort. I want to encourage people to grow food." And she put in this garden. And by the end of the war, there were 20 million victory gardens in America.
People were ripping up their lawns, planting vegetables, raising chickens, and by the end of the war, they were producing 40 percent of the fresh produce in America was being produced in home gardens. So it's not trivial, it could make a tremendous contribution, especially in hard times.
Let me repeat that again: "People were ripping up their lawns, planting vegetables, raising chickens, and by the end of the war, they were producing 40 percent of the fresh produce in America."
There is tremendous potential in mobilizing the American people for a common purpose, and this is a shinning example of how that can be done. The ideas are out there. Not just Pollan's ideas on food. In virtually every field you can imagine, there are people thining about how things connect together now, and how they could be reconnected in much better, much more empowering ways.
The issue is not "pragmatic" vs. "ideological". It's tunnel vision vs. visionary. And there's nothing pragmatic about a lack of vision.
"Where there is no vision, the people perish." |
