Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than
any other sector of the economy -- 19 percent. And while
the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we
feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the
atmosphere than anything else we do -- as much as
37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers
clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities
of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century
industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount
of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an
order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from
natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum),
farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging
and transportation have together transformed a system
that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for
every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one
that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to
produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.
Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food
system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when
you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the
product of photosynthesis -- a process based on making
food energy from sunshine. There is hope and
possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and
America's oil addiction, you have spoken at length
on the campaign trail of the health care crisis.
Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent
of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today,
putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal
of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on
getting those costs under control. There are several
reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one
of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the
cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases.
Four of the top 10 killers in America today are
chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease,
stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no
coincidence that in the years national spending on
health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of
national income, spending on food has fallen by a
comparable amount -- from 18 percent of household
income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit
of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has
produced since the late 1970s may have taken food
prices off the political agenda, this has come at
a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect
to reform the health care system, much less expand
coverage, without confronting the public-health
catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

The impact of the American food system on the rest
of the world will have implications for your
foreign and trade policies as well. In the past
several months more than 30 nations have
experienced food riots, and so far one government
has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and
shortages develop, you can expect to see the
pendulum shift decisively away from free trade,
at least in food. Nations that opened their markets
to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from
previous administrations as well as the World Bank and
the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find
their ability to feed their own populations hinges on
decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor's
precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street.
They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural
sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting
trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases
"food sovereignty" and "food security" on the lips
of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the
Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in
agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a
cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed
like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger
paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies
that have contributed to overnutrition in the first
world are now contributing to undernutrition in the
third. But it turns out that too much food can be
nearly as big a problem as too little -- a lesson we
should keep in mind as we set about designing a new
approach to food policy.

Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring
food prices are being forcibly reminded that food
is a national-security issue. When a nation loses
the ability to substantially feed itself, it is
not only at the mercy of global commodity markets
but of other governments as well. At issue is not
only the availability of food, which may be held
hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent
scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control
over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate
contamination of our food presents another national-
security threat. At his valedictory press conference
in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and
human services, offered a chilling warning, saying,
"I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the
terrorists have not attacked our food supply,
because it is so easy to do."

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 American people are paying
more attention to food today than they have in
decades, worrying not only about its price but
about its safety, its provenance and its
healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among
the public that the industrial-food system
is broken. Markets for alternative kinds
of food -- organic, local, pasture-based,
humane -- are thriving as never before. All this
suggests that a political constituency for change
is building and not only on the left: lately,
conservative voices have also been raised in
support of reform. Writing of the movement back
to local food economies, traditional foods
(and family meals) and more sustainable farming,
The American Conservative magazine editorialized
last summer that "this is a conservative cause
if ever there was one."

There are many moving parts to the new food
agenda I'm urging you to adopt, but the core
idea could not be simpler: 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. True, this is easier
said than done -- fossil fuel is deeply
implicated in everything about the way we
currently grow food and feed ourselves.
To put the food system back on sunlight will
require policies to change how things work at
every link in the food chain: in the farm field,
in the way food is processed and sold and even
in the American kitchen and at the American
dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on
our land every day, and photosynthesis can still
work its wonders wherever it does. If any part
of the modern economy can be freed from its
dependence on oil and successfully resolarized,
surely it is food.

How We Got Here

Before setting out an agenda for reforming the
food system, it's important to understand how
that system came to be -- and also to appreciate
what, for all its many problems, it has
accomplished. What our food system does well
is precisely what it was designed to do, which
is to produce cheap calories in great abundance.
It is no small thing for an American to be able
to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a
double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for
a price equal to less than an hour of labor at
the minimum wage -- indeed, in the long sweep
of history, this represents a
remarkable achievement.

It must be recognized that the current food
system -- characterized by monocultures of corn
and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat,
sugar and feedlot meat on the table -- is not
simply the product of the free market.
Rather, it is the product of a specific set of
government policies that sponsored a shift from
solar (and human) energy on the farm to
fossil-fuel energy.

Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during
the campaign how the land was completely
bare -- black -- from October to April?
What you were seeing is the agricultural
landscape created by cheap oil. In years past,
except in the dead of winter, you would have
seen in those fields a checkerboard of
different greens: pastures and hayfields for
animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of
fruit trees. Before the application of oil and
natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on
crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to
replenish their soil and to combat pests,
as well as to feed themselves and their
neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the
creation of monocultures, and monocultures in
turn vastly increased the productivity both
of the American land and the American farmer;
today the typical corn-belt farmer is
single-handedly feeding 140 people.

This did not occur by happenstance.
After World War II, the government encouraged
the conversion of the munitions industry to
fertilizer -- ammonium nitrate being the main
ingredient of both bombs and chemical
fertilizer -- and the conversion of nerve-gas
research to pesticides. The government also
began subsidizing commodity crops, paying
farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans,
wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary
of agriculture after another implored them to
plant "fence row to fence row" and to
"get big or get out."

The chief result, especially after the
Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain
that could be sold for substantially less
than it cost farmers to grow because a
government check helped make up the difference.
As this artificially cheap grain worked its
way up the food chain, it drove down the price
of all the calories derived from that grain:
the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke,
the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried,
the meat and cheese in the burger.

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led
directly to monocultures of animals: since
factory farms could buy grain for less than
it cost farmers to grow it, they could now
fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could.
So America's meat and dairy animals
migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down
the price of animal protein to the point where
an American can enjoy eating, on average,
190 pounds of meat a year -- a half pound
every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a
certain kind of economic sense, it made no
ecological sense whatever: their waste,
formerly regarded as a precious source of
fertility on the farm, became a
pollutant -- factory farms are now one of
America's biggest sources of pollution.
As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to
take animals off farms and put them on
feedlots is to take an elegant
solution -- animals replenishing the
fertility that crops deplete -- and neatly
divide it into two problems: a fertility
problem on the farm and a pollution problem
on the feedlot. The former problem is
remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the
latter is remedied not at all.

What was once a regional food economy is
now national and increasingly global in
scope -- thanks again to fossil fuel.
Cheap energy -- for trucking food as well
as pumping water -- is the reason New York
City now gets its produce from California
rather than from the "Garden State" next
door, as it did before the advent of
Interstate highways and national trucking
networks. More recently, cheap energy has
underwritten a globalized food economy in
which it makes (or rather, made) economic
sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it
to China to be filleted and then ship the
fillets back to California to be eaten; or
one in which California and Mexico can
profitably swap tomatoes back and forth
across the border; or Denmark and the
United States can trade sugar cookies
across the Atlantic. About that particular
swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped,
"Exchanging recipes would surely be
more efficient."

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.

In drafting these proposals, I've adhered
to a few simple principles of what a
21st-century food system needs to do.
First, your administration's food policy
must strive to provide a healthful diet for
all our people; this means focusing on the
quality and diversity (and not merely the
quantity) of the calories that American
agriculture produces and American eaters
consume. Second, your policies should aim
to improve the resilience, safety and
security of our food supply. Among other
things, this means promoting regional
food economies both in America and around
the world. And lastly, your policies need
to reconceive agriculture as part of the
solution to environmental problems like
climate change.

These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet
they will not be difficult to align or
advance as long as we keep in mind this
One Big Idea: most of the problems our
food system faces today are because of
its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the
extent that our policies wring the oil out
of the system and replace it with the
energy of the sun, those policies will
simultaneously improve the state of our
health, our environment and our security.

I. Resolarizing the American Farm

What happens in the field influences every
other link of the food chain on up to our
meals -- if we grow monocultures of corn
and soy, we will find the products of
processed corn and soy on our plates.
Fortunately for your initiative, the
federal government has enormous leverage
in determining exactly what happens on the
830 million acres of American crop and
pasture land.

Today most government farm and food
programs are designed to prop up the old
system of maximizing production from a
handful of subsidized commodity crops
grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance
programs like WIC and school lunch focus
on maximizing quantity rather than quality,
typically specifying a minimum number of
calories (rather than maximums) and seldom
paying more than lip service to nutritional
quality. This focus on quantity may have
made sense in a time of food scarcity, but
today it gives us a school-lunch program
that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots
to overweight and diabetic children.

Your challenge is to take control of this
vast federal machinery and use it to drive
a transition to a new solar-food economy,
starting on the farm. Right now, the
government actively discourages the farmers
it subsidizes from growing healthful,
fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies
are prohibited from growing "specialty
crops" -- farm-bill speak for fruits and
vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted
by California and Florida produce growers in
exchange for going along with subsidies for
commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should
instead be encouraged to grow as many different
crops -- including animals -- as possible. Why?
Because the greater the diversity of crops on a
farm, the less the need for both fertilizers
and pesticides.

The power of cleverly designed polycultures
to produce large amounts of food from little
more than soil, water and sunlight has been
proved, not only by small-scale "alternative"
farmers in the United States but also by large
rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale
operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like
Argentina. There, in a geography roughly
comparable to that of the American farm belt,
farmers have traditionally employed an
ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial
pasture and annual crops: after five years
grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the
world's best beef), farmers can then grow
three years of grain without applying any
fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter,
many pesticides: the weeds that afflict
pasture can't survive the years of tillage,
and the weeds of row crops don't survive the
years of grazing, making herbicides all but
unnecessary. There is no reason -- save current
policy and custom -- that American farmers
couldn't grow both high-quality grain and
grass-fed beef under such a regime through
much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that
today's sky-high grain prices are causing many
Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to
grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an
environmental disaster in the making.)

Federal policies could do much to encourage
this sort of diversified sun farming.
Begin with the subsidies: payment levels
should reflect the number of different crops
farmers grow or the number of days of the
year their fields are green -- that is,
taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether
to grow food, replenish the soil or control
erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted
a cover crop after the fall harvest, they
would significantly reduce their need for
fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion.
Why don't farmers do this routinely? Because
in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility
has been so much cheaper and easier to use
than sun-based fertility.

In addition to rewarding farmers for planting
cover crops, we should make it easier for them
to apply compost to their fields -- a practice
that improves not only the fertility of the
soil but also its ability to hold water and
therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting
evidence that it also boosts the nutritional
quality of the food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A.
estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent
of the food they buy; much more is wasted by
retailers, wholesalers and institutions.
A program to make municipal composting of
food and yard waste mandatory and then
distributing the compost free to area farmers
would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the
need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers
in agriculture and improve the nutritional
quality of the American diet.

Right now, most of the conservation programs
run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the
zero-sum principle: land is either locked
up in "conservation" or it is farmed
intensively. This either-or approach reflects
an outdated belief that modern farming and
ranching are inherently destructive, so that
the best thing for the environment is to
leave land untouched. But we now know how
to grow crops and graze animals in systems
that will support biodiversity, soil health,
clean water and carbon sequestration.
The Conservation Stewardship Program,
championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included
in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step
toward rewarding these kinds of practices,
but we need to move this approach from the
periphery of our farm policy to the very center.
Longer term, the government should back
ambitious research now under way (at the
Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of
other places) to "perennialize" commodity
agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat,
rice and other staple grains that can be
grown like prairie grasses -- without having
to till the soil every year. These perennial
grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil
fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil,
while protecting farmland from erosion and
sequestering significant amounts of carbon.

But that is probably a 50-year project.
For today's agriculture to wean itself from
fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight,
crop plants and animals must once again be
married on the farm -- as in Wendell Berry's
elegant "solution." Sunlight nourishes the
grasses and grains, the plants nourish the
animals, the animals then nourish the soil,
which in turn nourishes the next season's
grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can
also harvest their own feed and dispose of
their own waste -- all without our help or
fossil fuel.

If this system is so sensible, you might ask,
why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding
Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing
inherently efficient or economical about
raising vast cities of animals in confinement.
Three struts, each put into place by federal
policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most
important of these -- the ability to buy grain
for less than it costs to grow it -- has just
been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A.
approval for the routine use of antibiotics in
feed, without which the animals in these places
could not survive their crowded, filthy and
miserable existence. And the third is that the
government does not require CAFOs to treat
their wastes as it would require human cities
of comparable size to do. The F.D.A. should ban
the routine use of antibiotics in livestock
feed on public-health grounds, now that we have
evidence that the practice is leading to the
evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases
and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella
poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like
the factories they are, required to clean up
their waste like any other industry
or municipality.

It will be argued that moving animals off
feedlots and back onto farms will raise
the price of meat. It probably will -- as
it should. You will need to make the case
that paying the real cost of meat, and
therefore eating less of it, is a good
thing for our health, for the environment,
for our dwindling reserves of fresh water
and for the welfare of the animals.
Meat and milk production represent the
food industry's greatest burden on the
environment; a recent U.N. study estimated
that the world's livestock alone account
for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases,
more than all forms of transportation
combined. (According to one study, a pound
of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons
of water to produce.) And while animals
living on farms will still emit their
share of greenhouse gases, grazing them
on grass and returning their waste to the
soil will substantially offset their
carbon hoof prints, as will getting
ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of
grain takes approximately a half gallon
of oil to produce; grass can be grown
with little more than sunshine.

It will be argued that sun-food agriculture
will generally yield less food than
fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable.
The key question you must be prepared to
answer is simply this: Can the sort of
sustainable agriculture you're proposing
feed the world?

There are a couple of ways to answer this
question. The simplest and most honest
answer is that we don't know, because we
haven't tried. But in the same way we now
need to learn how to run an industrial
economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have
no choice but to find out whether sustainable
agriculture can produce enough food.
The fact is, during the past century, our
agricultural research has been directed toward
the goal of maximizing production with the
help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to
think that bringing the same sort of resources
to the development of more complex, sun-based
agricultural systems wouldn't produce
comparable yields. Today's organic farmers,
operating for the most part without benefit
of public investment in research, routinely
achieve 80 to 100 percent of conventional
yields in grain and, in drought years,
frequently exceed conventional yields.
(This is because organic soils better retain
moisture.) Assuming no further improvement,
could the world -- with a population expected
to peak at 10 billion -- survive on
these yields?

First, bear in mind that the average yield
of world agriculture today is substantially
lower than that of modern sustainable
farming. According to a recent University
of Michigan study, merely bringing
international yields up to today's organic
levels could increase the world's food
supply by 50 percent.

The second point to bear in mind is that
yield isn't everything -- and growing
high-yield commodities is not quite the
same thing as growing food. Much of what
we're growing today is not directly eaten
as food but processed into low-quality
calories of fat and sugar. As the world
epidemic of diet-related chronic disease
has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of
calories that a food system produces
improves health only up to a point, but
after that, quality and diversity are
probably more important. We can expect
that a food system that produces somewhat
less food but of a higher quality will
produce healthier populations.

The final point to consider is that
40 percent of the world's grain output
today is fed to animals; 11 percent of
the world's corn and soybean crop is
fed to cars and trucks, in the form of
biofuels. Provided the developed world
can cut its consumption of grain-based
animal protein and ethanol, there should
be plenty of food for everyone -- however
we choose to grow it.

In fact, well-designed polyculture systems,
incorporating not just grains but vegetables
and animals, can produce more food per acre
than conventional monocultures, and food of
a much higher nutritional value. But this
kind of farming is complicated and needs
many more hands on the land to make it work.
Farming without fossil fuels -- performing
complex rotations of plants and animals and
managing pests without petrochemicals -- is
labor intensive and takes more skill than
merely "driving and spraying," which is
how corn-belt farmers describe what they
do for a living.

To grow sufficient amounts of food using
sunlight will require more people growing
food -- millions more. This suggests that
sustainable agriculture will be easier to
implement in the developing world, where
large rural populations remain, than in
the West, where they don't. But what about
here in America, where we have only about
two million farmers left to feed a
population of 300 million? And where
farmland is being lost to development at
the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil
agriculture will need a lot more people
engaged in food production -- as farmers
and probably also as gardeners.

The sun-food agenda must include programs
to train a new generation of farmers and
then help put them on the land. The average
American farmer today is 55 years old; we
shouldn't expect these farmers to embrace
the sort of complex ecological approach to
agriculture that is called for. Our focus
should be on teaching ecological farming
systems to students entering land-grant
colleges today. For decades now, it has
been federal policy to shrink the number
of farmers in America by promoting
capital-intensive monoculture and
consolidation. As a society, we devalued
farming as an occupation and encouraged
the best students to leave the farm for
"better" jobs in the city. We emptied
America's rural counties in order to
supply workers to urban factories. To put
it bluntly, we now need to reverse course.
We need more highly skilled small farmers
in more places all across America -- not as
a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past
but as a matter of national security.
For nations that lose the ability to
substantially feed themselves will find
themselves as gravely compromised in their
international dealings as nations that
depend on foreign sources of oil presently
do. But while there are alternatives to oil,
there are no alternatives to food.

National security also argues for preserving
every acre of farmland we can and then making
it available to new farmers. We simply will
not be able to depend on distant sources of
food, and therefore need to preserve every
acre of good farmland within a day's drive
of our cities. In the same way that when we
came to recognize the supreme ecological value
of wetlands we erected high bars to their
development, we need to recognize the value
of farmland to our national security and
require real-estate developers to do
"food-system impact statements" before
development begins. We should also create
tax and zoning incentives for developers to
incorporate farmland (as they now do "open
space") in their subdivision plans; all
those subdivisions now ringing golf courses
could someday have diversified farms at
their center.

The revival of farming in America, which of
course draws on the abiding cultural power
of our agrarian heritage, will pay many
political and economic dividends. It will
lead to robust economic renewal in the
countryside. And it will generate tens of
millions of new "green jobs," which is
precisely how we need to begin thinking of
skilled solar farming: as a vital sector
of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have
to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm.
The government could help seed a thousand new
polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they
would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the
only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only
crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system
means building the infrastructure for a regional food
economy -- one that can support diversified farming
and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount
of fossil fuel in the American diet.

A decentralized food system offers a great many other
benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is
grown will be fresher and require less processing,
making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in
efficiency by localizing food production is gained
in resilience: regional food systems can better
withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory
is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or
washing 25 million servings of salad, a single
terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a
stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally
susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger
and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable
the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect
our food system against such threats is obvious:
decentralize it.

Today in America there is soaring demand for local
and regional food; farmers' markets, of which the
U.S.D.A. estimates there are now 4,700, have become
one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market.
Community-supported agriculture is booming as well:
there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms,
to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for
a weekly box of produce through the season.
The local-food movement will continue to grow with
no help from the government, especially as high fuel
prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well
as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are
several steps the government can take to nurture
this market and make local foods more affordable.
Here are a few:

Four-Season Farmers' Markets. Provide grants
to towns and cities to build year-round indoor
farmers' markets, on the model of Pike Place in
Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in
Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the
U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local
distribution networks in order to minimize the
amount of energy used to move produce within
local food sheds.

Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival
of local food economies is being hobbled by a
tangle of regulations originally designed to
check abuses by the very largest food producers.
Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell
it to their neighbors without making a huge
investment in federally approved facilities.
Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive
to scale and marketplace, so that a small
producer selling direct off the farm or at a
farmers' market is not regulated as onerously
as a multinational food manufacturer. This is
not because local food won't ever have
food-safety problems -- it will -- only that
its problems will be less catastrophic and
easier to manage because local food is
inherently more traceable and accountable.

Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single
greatest impediment to the return of livestock
to the land and the revival of local,
grass-based meat production is the disappearance
of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat
processors have been buying up local abattoirs
only to close them down as they consolidate,
and the U.S.D.A. does little to support the
ones that remain. From the department's
perspective, it is a better use of shrinking
resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant
slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional
abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The U.S.D.A.
should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps
to serve these processors. Expanding on its
successful pilot program on Lopez Island in
Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce
a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from
farm to farm, processing animals humanely and
inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make
regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in
the market with feedlot meat.

Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the
same way the shift to alternative energy
depends on keeping oil prices relatively
stable, the sun-food agenda -- as well as
the food security of billions of people
around the world -- will benefit from
government action to prevent huge swings in
commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve,
modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,
would help achieve this objective and at the
same time provide some cushion for world
food stocks, which today stand at perilously
low levels. Governments should buy and store
grain when it is cheap and sell when it is
dear, thereby moderating price swings in both
directions and discouraging speculation.

Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the
same way that federal procurement is often
used to advance important social goals (like
promoting minority-owned businesses), we
should require that some minimum percentage
of government food purchases -- whether for
school-lunch programs, military bases or
federal prisons -- go to producers located
within 100 miles of institutions buying the
food. We should create incentives for hospitals
and universities receiving federal funds to buy
fresh local produce. To channel even a small
portion of institutional food purchasing to local
food would vastly expand regional agriculture and
improve the diet of the millions of people these
institutions feed.

Create a Federal Definition of "Food." It makes
no sense for government food-assistance dollars,
intended to improve the nutritional health of
at-risk Americans, to support the consumption
of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some
people will object that for the government to
specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks
of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the
purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps.
So why not prohibit something like soda, which is
arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because
it is, nominally, a food, albeit a "junk food."
We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless
foodlike substances by calling them
"junk food" -- and instead make clear that
such products are not in fact food of any kind.
Defining what constitutes real food worthy of
federal support will no doubt be controversial
(you'll recall President Reagan's ketchup imbroglio),
but defining food upward may be more politically
palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought
to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order
to be regarded as a food by the government, an
edible substance must contain a certain minimum
ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy.
At a stroke, such a definition would improve the
quality of school lunch and discourage sales of
unhealthful products, since typically only "food"
is exempt from local sales tax.

A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should
double in value whenever swiped at a farmers'
markets -- all of which, by the way, need to be
equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer
card readers that supermarkets already have.
We should expand the WIC program that gives
farmers'-market vouchers to low-income women
with children; such programs help attract farmers'
markets to urban neighborhoods where access to
fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should
also offer tax incentives to grocery chains
willing to build supermarkets in underserved
neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the
elderly should build on a successful program
pioneered by the state of Maine that buys
low-income seniors a membership in a community-
supported farm. All these initiatives have the
virtue of advancing two objectives at once:
supporting the health of at-risk Americans and
the revival of local food economies.

III. Rebuilding America's Food Culture

In the end, shifting the American diet from a
foundation of imported fossil fuel to local
sunshine will require changes in our daily
lives, which by now are deeply implicated in
the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy
food. Making available more healthful and more
sustainable food does not guarantee it will be
eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need
to use all the tools at our disposal -- not just
federal policy and public education but the
president's bully pulpit and the example of the
first family's own dinner table -- to promote a
new culture of food that can undergird your
sun-food agenda.

Changing the food culture must begin with our
children, and it must begin in the schools.
Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy
announced a national initiative to improve the
physical fitness of American children. He did
it by elevating the importance of physical
education, pressing states to make it a
requirement in public schools. We need to bring
the same commitment to "edible education" -- in
Alice Waters's phrase -- by making lunch, in all
its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum.
On the premise that eating well is a critically
important life skill, we need to teach all
primary-school students the basics of growing
and cooking food and then enjoying it at
shared meals.

To change our children's food culture, we'll need
to plant gardens in every primary school, build
fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of
lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again
cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce
a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal
student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange
for two years of service in the public-school lunch
program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch
spending per pupil by $1 a day -- the minimum amount
food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite
a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food
freshly prepared.

But it is not only our children who stand to
benefit from public education about food.
Today most federal messages about food, from
nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are
negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon
general should take over from the Department
of Agriculture the job of communicating with
Americans about their diet. That way we might
begin to construct a less equivocal and more
effective public-health message about nutrition.
Indeed, there is no reason that public-health
campaigns about the dangers of obesity and
Type 2 diabetes shouldn't be as tough and as
effective as public-health campaigns about the
dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control
estimates that one in three American children born
in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public
needs to know and see precisely what that sentence
means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of
which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle.
A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a
blunt public-health message, even at the expense of
offending the food industry. Judging by the success
of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the
health care system could be substantial.

There are other kinds of information about food that
the government can supply or demand. In general we
should push for as much transparency in the food
system as possible -- the other sense in which
"sunlight" should be the watchword of our agenda.
The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food
product include a second calorie count, indicating
how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production.
Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food,
and people ought to know just how much of it they're eating.
The government should also throw its support behind putting
a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned
either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings
up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that
product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the
farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production;
in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals'
diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the
CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where
they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food
chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among
eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more
conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the
veil is another.

Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the
White House. If what's needed is a change of culture in
America's thinking about food, then how America's first
household organizes its eating will set the national tone,
focusing the light of public attention on the issue and
communicating a simple set of values that can guide
Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil.

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched,
and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified
with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from
fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family
exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is
possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of
the year, and that good food needn't be fussy or
complicated but does depend on good farming. You should
make a point of the fact that every night you're in town,
you join your family for dinner in the Executive
Residence -- at a table. (Surely you remember the
Reagans' TV trays.) And you should also let it be known
that the White House observes one meatless day a
week -- a step that, if all Americans followed suit,
would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking
20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year.
Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web,
listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well
as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation
is critical to developing the sun-based regional
agriculture we need, the White House should appoint,
in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer.
This new post would be charged with implementing what
could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step
in building a new American food culture. And that is this:
tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House
lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and
vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943,
she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended
up making a substantial contribution to feeding the
nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that
Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of
the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt
the American food industry.) By the end of the war,
more than 20 million home gardens were supplying
40 percent of the produce consumed in America.
The president should throw his support behind a new
Victory Garden movement, this one seeking "victory"
over three critical challenges we face today: high
food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population.
Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all,
offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce
their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate
change. (We should offer grants to cities to build
allotment gardens for people without access to land.)
Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to
enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work
of feeding themselves and changing the food system --
something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them
to shop a little differently.

I don't need to tell you that ripping out even a section
of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans
love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most
beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water
and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for
the purposes of this memo, the White House would not
disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans
feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still,
and making this particular plot of American land productive,
especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds
now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than
that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land,
of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to
feed one's family and community. The fact that surplus
produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will
be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food
banks will make its own eloquent statement.

You're probably thinking that growing and eating organic
food in the White House carries a certain political risk.
It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather
than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula
by its proper American name, as generations of
Midwesterners have done: "rocket.") But it should not
be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes
leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the
food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue:
for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the
counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals
intent on taking control of its family dinner and
diet back from the fast-food industry -- the culinary
equivalent of home schooling. You should support
hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat
meat -- meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever.
There is also a strong libertarian component to the
sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from
the burden of government regulation in order to stoke
rural innovation. And what is a higher "family value,"
after all, than making time to sit down every night to
a shared meal?

Our agenda puts the interests of America's farmers,
families and communities ahead of the fast-food
industry's. For that industry and its apologists to
imply that it is somehow more "populist" or egalitarian
to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills
than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd.
Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does
only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only
cheap because of government handouts and regulatory
indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention
the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment
on which its putative "economies" depend. Cheap food is
food dishonestly priced -- it is in fact
unconscionably expensive.

Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across
the aisle. It builds on America's agrarian past,
but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated
future. It honors the work of American farmers and
enlists them in three of the 21st century's most
urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to
improve the health of the American people and to
mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of
us in this great cause by turning food consumers
into part-time producers, reconnecting the American
people with the American land and demonstrating that
we need not choose between the welfare of our
families and the health of the environment -- that
eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to
the benefit of both.

Farmer in Chief
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: October 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html

 

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