Michael Pollan: We Are Headed Toward a Breakdown in Our Food System

By David Beers, The Tyee. Posted July 4, 2009.

On the personal politics of pint-sized picky eaters:

MP: Kids' relations to food are complex. This generation will have its own neuroses, that's for sure. But it's very concerning that there are such high levels of allergies among kids nowadays. The reasons are as yet unexplained. But I've heard that it has complicated kids' relationships with food because so many have allergies, or think they do.

I've discovered cooking and gardening are great ways to get kids to reorient their relationships to food in a positive way. Kids will eat things that they'll pick in the garden that they'll never eat off the plate. Or they'll eat things that they've cooked themselves. Because I think a big issue for them is control. Food is really, I think, a primary political phenomenon. It is the first time you can control what you take into your body, and the first time you can say no to your parents and assert your identity. So I think food and politics are very intertwined.

On whether Barack Obama is going to be good for food:

MP: We don't know yet. I think Obama gets the issues. He's a great dot connector. He connects the dots between the way we grow food and the health care crisis and the climate change crisis and the energy crisis. He understands that and he's spoken about that eloquently. The question is how much political capital he is going to put into changing the system.

So far the most significant thing is what his wife has done, the way Michelle Obama has been talking about food, especially the importance of giving your children real food. When she planted a vegetable garden at the White House, she was very careful to let the world know that it was an organic garden. And that's a big deal, because organics are fighting words in this battle and in fact the industry came back at her.

A group with the wonderful name of the Crop Life Association, which is the lobbying group for the pesticide manufacturers, was very upset that she was casting aspersions on conventional agriculture. The Crop Life Association really should go by the opposite name, the Bug Death Association. (laughs) They understood Michelle Obama's garden to be a critique of non-organic agriculture. And it was a critique. But their backlash hasn't deterred her. She is going to make food one of her issues.

I was a bit surprised. I thought she was going to be leading with, like, war widows, families of soldiers, which she said was going to be her issue. But this came out first. And she's got great feedback on it and is going to do more, from what I've heard.

On Obama's side, you've got Tom Vilsack who is the Secretary of Agriculture. As the former governor of Iowa, he seemed like a real conventional choice. But in fact he's been quite surprising, too. He's also planted a garden at the Department of Agriculture, which you could dismiss as symbolism, but he's talking a lot about local food and urban agriculture. Most significantly, he appointed as his number two a woman name Kathleen Merrigan, who is a genuine reformer. She founded the organic program at USDA, she wrote the original organic law for Senator Patrick Leahy and she's a real staunch supporter of sustainable agriculture and she's running the Department of Agriculture! That's pretty mind blowing. We'll see. She's up against incredible forces of inertia.

On the health dollar costs of America's 'diet catastrophe':

MP: At some abstract level Obama sees that he's not going to get his health care costs under control unless we change the way Americans eat. Because the crisis of rising costs in the American health care system can be translated very simply as the catastrophe of the American diet, which represents probably half of what we spend on health care in America. We spend about $2 trillion a year. The Centers for Disease Control says that 1.5 trillion goes to treat chronic disease. Now you've got smoking in there, alcoholism, but other than that, chronic disease is mostly food related. So you really can't get control of that system unless you are preventing some of those chronic diseases. And the way you do that, really, is to change the food system. But, you know, it's very, very hard to do.

My bet is that what we'll see from the Obama administration is a lot of support for alternative groups such as local and organic. Money for farmers to transition, money to rebuild local food economies. Whether we'll actually see an attack on conventional agriculture is less likely, given the politics of it. The reason is you can't do anything with the current agriculture committees we've got in Congress. You can't drive any reform through. It's going to take a few years to change the populations of those committees.

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