President Obama's got an awful lot on his plate. Sadly, it's all lousy leftovers from the previous administration: rotten bailouts, curdled wars, moldy policies. Is there any room for grass-fed, grassroots-led reform?
The eat-better-brigade's hoping our new Commander in Chief will be "the prize delivery guy...delivering fresh, steaming change in 30 minutes or less" as Raj Patel put it in a speech last Friday at the Farming For The Future conference in Pennsylvania. Patel bemoaned the monocrop monarchy that rules from our school cafeterias to our diners and dining rooms. He ended with the rousing declaration that we are "not consumers of democracy, we are its proprietors."
Who's minding the store, though? Will Obama even attempt to emancipate eaters from the military industrial complex cabal that helped Big Ag give small farms the boot? Our government's policies have played a scandalously large role in exiling wholesome, unprocessed, uncontaminated foods to the fringes of our culture.
I'm just too immersed in the foodie activist world to be able to gauge how effective a film like Food Fight is at explaining the bizarre state of the American diet. This movie strives mightily to explain how we arrived at this sorry state in which our government's policies (i.e. your tax payer dollars) have managed to foster a system of agriculture that enables big food companies to make a killing while quite literally killing us with their disease-inducing "food" products.
I put "food" in quotes because food is defined as a "source of nutrients" or "solid nourishment," and much of the processed crap that fills the supermarket shelves not only doesn't meet this definition, it's so bad for you that it's practically poison.
That's why real food fanatics generally heed the advice of Michael Pollan, the dean of clean food and one of Food Fight's stars, to steer clear of conventional supermarkets. We prowl our farmers' markets instead, scooping up vegetables so fresh that the soil still clings to their roots. We buy our other basics at the local health food store or Whole Foods, or maybe Trader Joe's.
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