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05 Dec 08

The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...12policy-t.html - Preview

pollan open letter

Food policy
commodity crops
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- After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent
- 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
- Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today
- Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.
- surfeit of cheap calories
- at a steep cost to public health
- precipitous embrace
- food sovereignty
- It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that
- at the mercy of global commodity markets
- twinned crises in food and energy
- healthfulness
- pasture-based
- a political constituency for change is building
- The American Conservative magazine editorialized
- 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
- resolarized
- Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system
- in the long sweep of history
- a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy
- pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees.
- 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.
- This did not occur by happenstance
- fence row to fence row
- get big or get out
- factory farms
- fatten animals
- from farm to feedlot
- Herman Daly
- a healthful diet
- policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.
- Resolarizing the American Farm
- 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land
- government farm and food programs
- food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch
- a new solar-food economy
- farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing “specialty crops” — farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables
- rice-and-fish farmers in China
- giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina
- eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops
- row crops
- an environmental disaster in the making
- fossil-fuel-based fertility
- Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy
- municipal composting of food and yard waste
- garbage heap
- zero-sum principle
- soil health
- carbon sequestration
- Conservation Stewardship Program
- Land Institute in Kansas
- perennialize
- Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFO
- a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce
- carbon hoof prints
- ruminant animals
- sun-food agriculture
- world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease
- 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
- driving and spraying
- farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day
- Post-oil agriculture
- The sun-food agenda
- land-grant colleges
- to reverse course
- we erected high bars to their development
- food-system impact statements
- tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do “open space”) in their subdivision plans
- skilled solar farming
- post-fossil-fuel economy
- Reregionalizing the Food System