Putting Food on the Public Agenda

I feel like I have been playing catch-up since Jacob was born. Having a baby will do that to you. One day you’re at work, listening to CBC radio all the time, completely up-to-date on all the latest happenings in the big wide world. And then the next day you’re up at 4:30 in the morning, repeating, “Please go to sleep, Baby, please go to sleep, Baby.” Over and over. And when you do have a spare moment to catch up with the world you’re watching all the episodes of Heroes that you missed over the past 6 weeks or something equally important.

So, yes, I am woefully uninformed when it comes to the latest news. I catch the big stuff, such as the Canadian government nearly collapsing, but that’s it. Which is why I may seem a little late to the party with this post. But it’s interesting, so I’m going ahead with it anyhow.

Back in October Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wrote this big open letter to the next American President. And then Obama read it, because shortly afterward he referenced it in an interview.

Pollan’s article itself is long, but it’s worth the read. My attempt at summarizing his argument would be to say the next president should move the US away from industrial agriculture, based in monocultures that rely on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Instead, Pollan argues in favour of what he calls ‘sun-food’ – food that is grown in a sustainable way, that derives its energy from the sun via photosynthesis. Here’s a quote from the article that might explain what I’m getting at:

…the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude…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.

At the end of the article, Pollan suggests that a garden should be planted on the White House lawn. And he’s not the only one. Others are arguing for the same thing. Here’s a great video that was produced for the same purpose:

This Lawn is Your Lawn – 1 minute version for Climate Matters contest from roger doiron on Vimeo.

It’s doubtful than anyone’s actually going to tear up the White House lawn to plant cabbage. And as Pollan himself points out we don’t actually know if sustainable agricultural practices (however you define that) can produce enough food to feed us all. Certainly we could expect food prices to rise, and see a change in the type of food that we eat, which might not be entirely bad. That’s a tough sell, though, in hard economic times.

As for me, I’m trying to make small changes in my daily life. Manageable changes that I hope will have a positive impact. When I buy local, seasonal food (and I don’t always – far from it) I’m voting with my wallet. When I plant a garden I’m reducing my own food bill, teaching my kids, and growing the tastiest tomatoes. This is where I’m at. I do little things, day to day, that make sense to me. I’m not sure it’s practical to expect everyone to make the same changes, in the same way, and at the same time.

While I don’t know if completely upending the food system makes sense, or is immediately practical, I am glad to see this on the public agenda. I am glad that the man who will soon be the ‘leader of the free world’ is at least reading and thinking about these issues. And I hope that it will result in greater awareness about our food and where it comes from. It’s worth at least talking about, that much is for sure.

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