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The Localization of Agriculture

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Last week, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack gave a speech on the role of research at the USDA at the launch of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the research arm of that agency formerly referred to as the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES).

Vilsack had this to say in his kick-off speech:

The opportunity to truly transform a field of science happens at best once a generation. Right now, I am convinced, is USDA's opportunity to work with the Congress, the other science agencies, and with our partners in industry, academia, and the nonprofit sector, to bring about transformative change.

It is hard to reject the idea that our country needs more research on agriculture -- specifically, more science-based knowledge from which to make political and regulatory decisions around food. But as his speech continued, Vilsack placed the focus on technology as our aegis. And while technology is not a bad thing, there are still many questions left unanswered that USDA could and should be focusing on -- questions that the agribusiness lobby quite possibly doesn't want answered, as the outcomes could force the public and our politicians to take a harder look at just what it means to build a truly sustainable food system.

NIFA will be headed by a controversial choice, Roger Beachy -- formerly of the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Mo., which receives funding from Monsanto, and was part of the lobbying effort to create NIFA in the mold of the National Science Foundation. Beachy joins a team that already includes Rajiv Shah, formerly of the Gates Foundation. The re-branding of CSREES worries sustainable food advocates who fear U.S. research priorities could shift with the private sector's coaxing further towards a more biotechnology-oriented focus in an attempt to end world hunger, even though more viable solutions to hunger -- a problem of distribution and not yield -- exist on the ground that are both cost-effective and ready to implement now in the developing world.

The government's job is to to give unbiased science center stage, so that we can assess and make informed decisions about agriculture moving forward -- decisions that are in our collective interest as a nation, not just in the interest of one sector of our economy. To begin, the USDA must extend 100 percent funding to formula grants at land grant universities again, thereby replacing the current practice of "matching funds" [PDF] -- requiring these institutions to find a matching donor for between 50 percent to 100 percent of the grant from outside of the government -- which usually ends up being a private industry source. And what might the industry be interested in funding? Shareholders hope they will support things that have the potential to increase the bottom line, instead of research that investigates the way our food system is affecting us, which could detract from it. This is how the industry has controlled the types of research being conducted since matching funds were instituted in 1999 (as an amendment to the National Agricultural Research, Extension, and Teaching Policy Act of 1977).

Vilsack also stated in his speech that in creating NIFA, "we will be rebuilding our competitive grants program from the ground up to generate real results for the American people." In thinking about how to better focus the government's efforts on agricultural research in order to truly benefit the American people, I thought I'd reach out to some key thinkers on agriculture, and find out what they would like the USDA's new research body, NIFA, should be focusing on. Here were their answers:

Biologically focused organic agriculture -- which uses neither chemical fertilizer, pesticides, nor GMO crops -- provides broad ecological services while it sequesters carbon to fight global warming. We need research that documents the greenhouse-gas mitigation aspects of organics, conducted at the whole-farm level to capture the cascading biodiversity benefits of organic systems. This work should be focused on the three most appropriate, farmer-identified organic techniques per bioregion in the 10 most agriculturally significant areas of the U.S. Tied to this multi-disciplinary, 10-year study should be data collection on soil water-holding ability, biological diversity, and productive capacity, in order to qualify and quantify the corollary benefits that come with increases in soil organic matter.
Tim LaSalle, CEO, Rodale Institute

Since I just spent more time than I care to think about sitting through hearings on the proposed Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, I think I would say that USDA should be focusing its research more on scale appropriate food safety programs -- and exploring what we really know about risks posed by wildlife, the use of vegetated buffers, and other practices that some private food safety programs have targeted.  It seems like USDA could serve a useful role in finding ways for diversified, organic, and small farms to prove that their methods can coexist with food safety requirements.
Patty Lovera, assistant director, Food & Water Watch

We need to be studying how best to protect agriculture from the effects of climate changes, which is to say, how can we make farming more resilient? -- which is further to say, how can we successfully diversify our monocultures?
Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma

There are both areas of research that USDA is neglecting as well as a lack of investment in research examining agricultural systems and practices that are critical to addressing the research challenges that Secretary Vilsack outlined in his speech at the NIFA event on Thursday.  On the former, areas of research that USDA is neglecting include long-term agroecosystem trials; the characteristics, barriers, and opportunities for the growth and development of local and regional food systems; public plant and animal breeding (all the non-biotech plant and animal research); organic agriculture; the sustainability of biofuel and bioenergy production; and rural development, just to name a few. While several of these have dedicated funding streams, they pale in comparison to other research programs and the overall research budget at USDA.

On the latter, the Administration on Thursday defined a surprisingly narrow approach to addressing the challenges to overcome with the help of agricultural research. Vilsack laid out significant challenges -- including ensuring global food security through productive and sustainable agricultural systems, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and improving public health and reducing childhood obesity -- and NIFA is structured into separate institutes around these challenges and others. But the tools that Vilsack, Research Undersecretary Shah, and NIFA Director Beachy identified as key to solving these problems were extremely limited to biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computer simulations. Without investing in the development of technologies and practices of sustainable and organic agricultural systems, USDA's research agenda will fall far short of meeting its objectives and will continue to support an agricultural system that contributes to -- rather than mitigating -- these challenges.
Ariane Lotti, who focuses on Agriculture Research Policy at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

Organic and sustainable -- systems agriculture is still woefully underfunded and misunderstood. Likewise, research and education directed towards regional food-system integration is still only getting a trickle of support. Good programs and projects do exist within the agency, but they are still marginal in the scheme of things. These commitments and investments by the research agencies have to be much more significant if alternative systems themselves are going to be scaled upward and outward.

The essential problem of the conventional wisdom is that ecosystem health and community/regional food systems are considered to be lifestyle amenities, not core requirements for sustainability and survival.
Mark Lipson, policy program director at the Organic Farming Research Foundation

I would like to see more research on the reasons for the general decline in nutrient levels in conventional foods, including the decline in protein levels in conventional corn and soybeans.

I would like to see more research done on the factors triggering proliferation in a cow's GI tract of E. coli 0157, as well as one management practices like grazing known to reduce the risk of this bacterium reaching dangerous levels.

I would like to see research on how to design the most energy-efficient and soil-building cropping systems in the Midwest involving (1) a traditional corn-soybean rotation, (2) C-S-small grains rotations, (3) C-S-Small grains-Alfalfa-Alfalfa rotations. The goal would be producing maximum animal feed energy and food value for minimal fertilizer and pesticide input.  I would like to see the same work done with the goal of maximizing soil carbon sequestration.  Then, a comparison of the two sets of experimental results, and the management practices and strategies deemed most effective in achieving these two goals, would be both fascinating and valuable in crafting the farming systems of the future.
Charles Benbrook, PhD, chief scientist at The Organic Center

A few research priorities from my perspective: the conversion to perennial agriculture; replacement sources for nitrogen fertilizers; detailed continent-wide soils and climate mapping to determine priority areas for cultivated crops versus grazing areas; productive yet resilient breeds of animals beside the Cornish Cross, White Leghorn, Holstein, Hyper Lean Pig, and Angus and Hereford beef cattle -- with regional emphasis immediately; and a detailed carbon analysis of pasture-raised versus grain fed livestock.
Dan Imhoff, president of the Wild Farm Alliance and author of Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill

The need for independent research at all levels has never been greater. We are living through the failures of much of the corporate dominated research agenda -- whether on biotechnology, expanded production or the repercussions of a free trade model -- when in fact having research that addresses the underlying causes of the food crisis would be truly beneficial here in the U.S. and around the world. Here in the U.S., our taxpayer funds should not be subsidizing more of the same; but building on the succesful on the ground models -- whether focussed on reasons for reserve policies, community food approaches or on the ground conservation and sustainable agricultural practices. The recent results of the IASTAAD report should be reviewed and implemented by our USDA -- not ignored.
Kathy Ozer, policy director, National Family Farm Coalition

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The Localization of Agriculture

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Amanda Little on the farm.

If you pinned a map of the United States to a dartboard, Kansas would be the bull's-eye. Smack dab in the center of the country, the Sunflower State is one of America's most productive agricultural hotbeds -- the fifth-biggest producer of crops and livestock in the country. More than 90 percent of the state consists of farmland endowed thousands of years ago with rich glacial loam. This fertile topsoil is no longer as robust as it once was, having offered up its nutrients season after season, decade after decade, century after century, to produce great bounties of wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, hay, and sunflowers. I could almost sense the exhaustion of the land as I drove through the back roads of northeastern Kansas one chilly November morning -- past sagging wooden farmhouses silvered by age and weather, barbed-wire fences with listing wooden posts, general stores and swinging-door saloons, a Native American heritage museum commemorating the Kansa tribes that once roamed and tilled these prairies, and mile after desolate mile of denuded farmland.

It wasn't that this dormant soil was incapable of producing -- on the contrary, during the previous summer and fall it had yielded one of the most plentiful harvests in Kansas history, many times greater than the bounty of a century earlier, when the land was more inherently fertile. But now, like an aging bull receiving shots of testosterone, this well-worn ground reaps the benefits of modern chemistry -- and good old-fashioned fossil fuels.

That late fall morning, thousands of tractors combed the Kansas countryside, priming the soil for next spring's planting with a "booster shot" of nutrients that would turn the weary earth into some of the world's highest-producing farmland. That chemical nourishment, also known as fertilizer, has transformed America's economy over the last century, and expanded the global population, too, by vastly increasing the food supply.

Nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous are the three most common nutrients in the fertilizers applied to American farmlands, nitrogen being by far the most prevalent. The main form of nitrogen fertilizer is known as anhydrous ammonia, and natural gas is its primary feedstock. Nitrogen fertilizers take many forms, ranging from the Miracle-Gro sold at your local Home Depot to the industrial-strength anhydrous ammonia that's used on tens of millions of acres of U.S. corn and wheat crops.  Each year, American farmers apply 6.2 billion pounds of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers to their croplands.

Ken McCauley's corn fields getting their booster shots.

To see fossil fuels in action on the farm, I paid a visit to Kansas corn grower Ken McCauley.  His vast tracts of land—rolling stretches of bone-colored soil—reminded me of nothing so much as the ocean with their sheer expanse.

To distribute his fertilizer, Ken hitched a 2.2-ton canister of nitrogen to the back of his apple-green John Deere tractor. A series of tubes and wires connected the tractor and fertilizer tank to a mechanism that looked like a giant rake spanning eight rows of corn. The dozens of prongs at the end of the rake were tipped with knifelike cutters that would pierce into the soil, opening it up so that hoses embedded within the blades could blast the chemical nutrients six inches into the ground. The liquid fertilizer freezes into golf ball–sized lumps in the wintertime that then thaw and release into the soil in the spring. It's best to inject the fertilizer in the late fall or early winter, Ken explained, so that the soil doesn't have to be opened up in the spring, which would release precious moisture.

I climbed up into a plush passenger seat in the tractor cab next to Ken's foreman, Nick James. Though the seats were mounted on shock absorbers, they still bounced and pitched as we trundled over the rough, hilly ground. I grabbed the dash to steady myself as we began to move slowly down the field.

Maneuvering a tractor throughout a cornfield is a little like steering a ship through waves -- it's hard to keep the vessel in a straight line on the sloping, bumpy earth and then to repeat that straight line exactly as you traverse the rest of the field, without overlapping any areas on which you've already sprayed nitrogen. Conventional tractors routinely overlap on fertilizer application, wasting precious resources. Ken is able to overcome this costly human error because his tractor drives itself. "See the GPS system?" Nick asked, pointing to a small round blinking device on the dashboard. That device was feeding signals to a satellite monitoring the position of the tractor on the field. The satellite was then automatically feeding those location coordinates into an autopilot system that steers the tractor on a precise course, never double-applying fertilizer to the same patch of soil.

This tractor is high-tech.

Ken's tractor is also outfitted with new computer software that enables him to vary the distribution of nutrients according to soil quality. Ken estimates that about 10 to 15 percent of the fertilizers applied on U.S. farms actually go to waste because they're blindly doused on areas of soil that in fact have sufficient levels of nitrogen. Other agriculture experts I interviewed put that number even higher, saying that up to 35 percent of the nitrogen typically sprayed on farmland goes to waste, draining out of the soil and polluting nearby bodies of water.

As natural gas and oil prices surged in recent years, the costs of fertilizers nearly quadrupled. In 2005, when natural gas prices were low, a 2.2-ton tank of anhydrous ammonia cost under $400. When gas prices shot up in 2008, that same tank of fertilizer cost nearly $2,000. To fertilize Ken's 4,000 acres, that added up to an expense of roughly $500,000 a year -- about 40 percent of his total operating costs of $1.2 million a year. Even with soaring costs, he explained, "fertilizer is the most economical thing we do because it gives you your production on the top end." In other words, while Ken spent nearly half a million dollars on fertilizers in 2008, these additives still created significantly more value in enhanced crop production.

What would happen if Ken cut out chemical fertilizers altogether? "If you don't put your fertilizer on," he told me, "you'll cut your yields by half or more. No farmer is going to stop using nitrogen altogether. Look at the poor countries -- when you travel to places that don't use the fertilizer you'll see they're raising a third of the yield." He boiled the issue down to six words: "Nitrogen is yield. Yield is nitrogen." And yield, he added, is everything. "Worst thing that can happen to a farmer is getting a reputation for having a low yield. It's like being a race car with a lawnmower engine or a newspaper that's always a week behind." 

Sustainable farming advocates such as author Michael Pollan put forth a different vision for agriculture in America: total reform of the food system, beginning with the dismantling of large single-crop farms and the end of fossil fuel–based inputs. They argue that farmland can be naturally replenished through farming practices including the application of animal manure, which is high in nitrogen. Pollan describes a virtuous cycle of nutrient recycling between crops and animals:

But, he maintains, simply removing fertilizers and other petrochemical additives from industrial farming is not the whole answer: "Only a fifth of the total energy used to feed us is consumed on the farm; the rest is spent processing the food and moving  it around," Pollan wrote in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma. For that reason, he added, the large-scale organic farms that produce most of the organic products in your grocery store are, just like conventional megafarms, "floating on a sinking sea of petroleum."

Reformers want to see a network of small and midsized organic farms that is organized into regional cooperatives. These aggregates would enable small farms to serve local markets but think like big farms, working together to make bulk purchases of equipment and aggregate distribution systems. They want to see crops and animals reintegrated into the same farms, naturally feeding and fertilizing one another, correcting the current system in which cattle, chickens, and pigs are concentrated on huge feedlots, producing an oversupply of nitrogen-rich manure far removed from croplands.  

On the other hand, most agronomists will tell you that we can't rapidly shift to growing food on a global level without chemical fertilizer and fossil fuel–powered machinery. The United Nations has predicted an increase in fertilizer use worldwide of roughly 35 percent by 2030. Jeffrey Sachs, the United Nations special advisor who wrote The End of Poverty, told me plainly that fertilizers will be necessary to human survival for the foreseeable future: "We will not feed 6.7 billion people on the planet without chemical fertilizers." On weathered tropical soils like those of farmlands in large portions of Africa, says Sachs, fertilizers will play a key role. "In all the world but Africa, farmers are using around 100 kilograms per hectare on average of fertilizer. In Africa it's essentially zero, which is one of the real reasons for the massive hunger there."

Perhaps the challenge, then, is not so much to go cold turkey on modern farming methods as it is to significantly improve methods for getting the greatest amount of food production using the least amount of fuel and fertilizer. With the world's population poised to hit 7 billion by 2012, we can't get started soon enough.

This piece was excerpted from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future.

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The Localization of Agriculture

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I really really really didn't want to write another post on Michael Pollan. Don't get me wrong -- I'm a big fan. It's just that reducing the whole of the food movement to Pollan's work naturally ignores so much else that's going on. But don't blame me for this post. Blame Big Ag. These guys just can't leave him alone -- it's verging on an unhealthy obsession. They seem to think that if they can just share a stage with him wherever he pops up, they'll show him (and the audience) how wrong he really is. It's happening all over the country.

First came the brouhaha over Ominvore's Dilemma at Washington State University. Then it happened again at the Univesity of Wisconsin at Madison. In that case, the very presence of Pollan was enough to bring out hundreds of protesting farmers. Now we get word that an industrial livestock producer threatened to withdraw a $500,000 donation to Cal Poly until Pollan's speech to students was transformed into a panel discussion so Big Ag interests could respond.

Big Ag has clearly decided that Pollan is a latter-day Lenin (or perhaps Trotsky?) leading a cadre of food revolutionaries who threaten to overthrow its hard-fought hegemony -- rebut his arguments and perhaps the whole movement will collapse like a bad soufflé. All in reaction to a relatively unassuming guy who's written some articles and a few books. Isn't this all, like, a bit much?

But maybe Big Ag is right in viewing journalism as the gravest threat to the status quo. It's not coming from the USDA. And Congress? Fuggedaboutit. Big Ag's proxies on the Ag committees along with its ample lobbying dollars keeps reform at the margins. But jeezapete, those investigative reports really hit an oligopolist where it hurts! Michael Moss's recent NYT exposé on ground beef has dominated the news cycle, given new momentum to stalled food safety reforms and single-handedly led to capitualtion by Tyson Foods on E. coli testing (at least in its dealings with Costco). Mind you, Costco -- one of the most powerful retailers in the country -- couldn't on its own convince Tyson to test its meat. But a few thousand words from Michael Moss? Done and done.

Though it's certainly not just Michael Pollan bringing the hurt to Big Ag; let's not forget Eric Schlosser as the fast food industry's thorn -- he's probably cut industry sales more than any transfat ban or anti-obesity campaign to date. And of course, one of the great 20th century pioneers of food system reform was Upton Sinclair, a journalist.

Still, despite Big Ag's insistence -- as in a storyline out of pro wrestling -- on meeting its nemesis anywhere, any time and in any forum, it starts to seem like their obsession with Pollan isn't getting them anywhere.

More and more, agribiz reps come out of some Pollan event sounding oddly mollified by what they hear. La Vida Locavore documented this phenomenon in Madison, Wis. Indeed Pollan himself in his latest Big Ag debate -- this time on NPR's Talk of the Nation -- said much the same thing about Madison:

What happened there? They bused in several hundred farmers, all wearing green T-shirts that said, In Defense of Farmers. And they were expecting to hear a very different Michael Pollan ... [T]hey were surprised that what I said didn't conform to what the Farm Bureau was telling them I said … which is to say, I was talking about how to build new agricultural markets, so that they could diversify. I was talking about figuring out ways to get more of the consumers' food dollar into their pockets. Right now, 90 percent of the consumers' food dollar goes to middlemen, processors, marketers. And that in the kinds of alternative agriculture that we're beginning to be talked about in this country, there are great opportunities for farmers...

And you know, when the farmers left that hall, they were kind of surprised, and I talked to some ag-journalists who said, yeah, we were on the bus with them going back, and they said they really didn't find as much to disagree with in what you said than they expected.

Even Blake Hurst, the farmer and author of The Omnivore's Delusion and Pollan's ostensible antagonist on Talk of the Nation, could find common ground:

So I think Mr. Pollan is correct ... I think that farm subsidies, the way they are now, probably do make the price of grain lower than it would be without them...

On the one hand, perhaps it isn't so surprising that Big Ag has singled out Michael Pollan as their Public Enemy Number One -- they have witnessed time and time again the power of the journalist's pen, something that continues to elude their otherwise inescapable sphere of influence. But Big Ag has taken on a writer who -- as a professor first at Yale and now at Berkeley -- has long experience with public speaking, is pithy, quick-witted, not easily flustered and, it turns out, interested in amiably driving a wedge between farmers and agribiz interests. All Big Ag's efforts accomplish is to give Pollan high-profile forums to broadcast his ideas (and punch holes in its own). I'm starting to wonder when Big Ag will figure this out.

And because too much Michael Pollan is never enough, I'll leave you with the next phase in his plot to be the Tsar of all the Media: PollanTV. PBS has adapted Pollan's wonderful Botany of Desire as a documentary mini-series. I guess Big Ag can't escape him even if they wanted to:

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Michael Pollan (left) and Tom Philpott talk food.Celebrated food and ag author Michael Pollan debunked some myths about organic agriculture Tuesday night at a Grist event in San Francisco, in a conversation with Grist food writer Tom Philpott and the audience.

In response to a question about whether we can really feed the world without industrialized ag (ah yes, a perennial), Pollan pointed out that we're not feeding the world with it now.  He said we wouldn't be doing developing nations a favor by exporting a fossil fuel–dependent ag system to them when it's clear that fossil fuels are only going to become more scarce and expensive.  And overproducing government-subsidized food in the U.S. is certainly not the way to solve world hunger -- it just exacerbates it by putting small-scale farmers in developing countries out of business.  Give people in the developing world the tools to do sophisticated organic ag and it will help solve many problems, including undocumented immigration, Pollan argues.

And yes, sophisticated organic ag does exist.  Pollan disputed the idea that organic techniques are anti-technology.  Philpott agreed, pointing out that renowned farmers Joel Salatin and Will Allen use advanced technology to produce organic food -- it's just not the type of technology that Big Ag promotes and profits from.

Asked what the Obama administration is thinking on ag -- sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo, as Philpott puts it -- Pollan said the admin appears to be playing both sides of the street. Pollan related an anecdote in which the president implied that there needs to be a popular political movement for sustainable food before he can make big change -- and suggested to his wife that this might be her issue.  

Where, asked Pollan, are the members of Congress who will take up this issue as their own?  For now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is letting Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and other Big Ag–oriented reps run the show on food and ag policy.  The recent farm-bill fight was a loss, but during the debate the sustainable food movement started to get its message heard in D.C. and rattle some of the vested interests.  The next fight on Capitol Hill will be over the school lunch program reauthorization, Pollan said.  

Though the sustainable food movement seems to be thriving in oases like the Bay Area, Philpott pointed out that still only 3 to 4 percent of food consumed in the U.S. is organic or local.  How do we grow that number and include more people?  Pollan said the movement, like many social movements, was started by elites, but is spreading to other parts of society.  He sees encouraging signs in the heartland and among young people.  But if in 20 years people are still talking about this as an elitist movement, we'll know we really screwed up.  

Grist offers a big thanks to Pollan, host Tony Conrad and the rest of our host committee, our caterer Dominique Salomon (the food was scrumptious!), and everyone who attended and helped to make the evening a success.  Let's keep the conversation rolling.

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The Localization of Agriculture

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Author Michael Pollan is no stranger to controversy. He has broadened the discussion of what we eat, where and how it is grown, big vs. small, organic farming vs. conventional. When he speaks some in the audience will love him, some will not.

Advocates of large scale agriculture see Pollan as the enemy, they believe he stands against everything they see as the future of agriculture. Pollan however is not an absolutist, his basic premise is that people need to think more about their food; where it was grown, how it was grown, was the farmer paid fairly, is it good for you?

Pollan wants people to think about cooking, about food freshness and flavor, about the dinner table as more than a “filling station.”

Knowing your food is not a radical concept, and it should not be a frightening concept. Knowledge is power, the more we know, the better choices we can make.

Farmers should have nothing to hide, and those most upset with Pollan's theories on eating, tout their large scale farming methods as being models of efficiency, environmental protection, animal welfare, and safe food.

Still, they fear his thoughts being mainstream. Granted, Pollan is not a farmer, and does not know all the intricacies of farming; he does not claim to. However, those who denounce him do not know the intricacies of the local, regional and organic farming he advocates.

So, why are they afraid of what he has to say? Pollan admits there is no one right way to farm, there is no one system that will work for all farmers. He maintains that all farmers need to make a living yet be mindful of how they farm, how they raise their animals and how they maintain the environment. If Pollan has an argument with agriculture, it is not with farmers, it is with agribusiness.

Author Wendell Berry notes that “Agribusiness is immensely more profitable than agriculture.” Any farmer knows that the corporate owners of seed, chemicals, fertilizer and the buyers of grain, livestock and milk always seem to make a profit; farmers do not.

Over the past 60 years farmers have seen competition in the market place steadily disappear as corporate mergers concentrated all aspects of agriculture into the hands of a few multinational corporations.

Their profit comes at the expense of the farmer, the farm worker, consumer safety, and the environment.

While farmers defend themselves against what they see as an attack by Pollan, they are really defending agribusiness. When they say they love their Roundup Ready corn, the hormones and the chemicals they are promoting the corporations that always make a profit whether the farmers win or lose.

When farmers disparage small-scale ecological agriculture because it “will never feed the world” they conveniently forget that conventional agriculture has not fed the world either, despite 60 years of promises to do so. They also ignore the findings of IAASTD that indicate the old paradigm of industrial agriculture is a thing of the past.

The industrial model sources food from the world, pits farmer against farmer in a race to the bottom. Globalized commodities converted into processed nutritionally empty foods, make corporations rich, Americans obese, and developing countries destitute.

Pollan just wants farmers and consumers to think. Agribusiness is rich and persuasive, they own both ends of the market place and they want to keep it that way. When people think about what they eat and what they grow, chances are, eventually, they will make the right choice.

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Michael PollanNPR’s Guy Raz: What if health care is overhauled and it doesn’t change the American diet in any way?

Michael Pollan: We’ll go broke. If we don’t get a handle on these health care costs, the new system or the old system, we’ll go broke. And that’s why I think that really food is the elephant in the room when we’re talking about health care.

First in The New York Times last week and then on NPR this weekend, Michael Pollan made that point that if we want to fix our health-care system, we have to fix our food system.

From his op-ed in the Times:

[T]he fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. ...

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry. ...

Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

But even with that grim diagnosis, Pollan is optimistic about the future, arguing that if insurance companies are required to accept everyone, as called for by even weak health-reform legislation now in Congress, then the insurance industry will become a powerful ally in fight for better food and against the agribusiness lobby.

Grist’s Tom Laskawy is less optimistic, noting that the poor and the elderly—the most unhealthy groups—are likely to keep getting their health coverage from the government (Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA) and not the insurance industry.

Still, both Pollan and Laskawy are encouraged by New York City’s new anti-soda ad campaign, which Laskawy says is supported by health insurance companies.  Will we see more such public-health campaigns around the country, no matter what happens with health-care reform in Washington, D.C.?

Here’s an ad from NYC’s campaign:

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The Localization of Agriculture

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Tool of oppression--or liberation? In his recent essay on cooking, which I commented on here, Michael Pollan basically argues that people need to cook--that they give up more than they gain from fleeing the kitchen. And he suggests that the current generation is really the first to shun cooking. Yet things might not be quite so neat. Fresh Air recently replayed Terry Gross' 1989 interview with Julia Child--very much worth a listen. Child reminds us yet again what a brilliant, funny, cultured lady she was--my dream aunt.

In the interview, we find out that Child herself didn't grow up cooking. She says: "I grew up in the teens and '20s, when most people had--middle class people--had maids or someone to help." She reveals that her mother cooked seldom, and then only two dishes: Welsh rabbit (a kind of cheese sandwich) and baking-soda biscuits. As for herself, "I didn't do any cooking then at all."

I take two things from this. The first is that if Child could become a wizard in the kitchen without any exposure to it as a youngster, there's hope for today's crop of kids. (Of course, the young Child was eating food made from scratch--"sensible New England fare; roasts and things," she she says--not processed junk.)

The second is this: the question of who cooks, and who doesn't, has always been a vexing one. I suspect that through most of history, cooking was generally something to be avoided--an activity people strived to be able to pay (or force) someone else to do. And that history, no doubt, explains much of the appeal of fast food and convenience food. In Child's time, "middle class people had maids or someone to help" cook; today, everyone does. Just walk into a McDonald's with the equivalent of an hour's minimum wage in your pocket, and you can eat like a king (at least in calorie terms).

This idea of cooking as a virtue--as something one should do, like exercising and tooth brushing--seems quite new. Not wrong--just new. And that means that by giving up cooking, we're not becoming less human, as Pollan suggests, but succumbing to an all-too-human impulse.

Nevertheless, given population growth and the social, ecological, and public-health devastations of industrial agriculture, the mass flight from the kitchen doesn't seem like an impulse we can indulge very much longer. Pollan was right: people do need to revalue the craft of cooking, to embrace it as a quotidian pleasure, not a mere chore. But if we manage convince them of that, we'll have achieved something new, not returned to a lost past.

---------------

Also on the topic of culinary nostalgia--the idea that everything was fine on the farm and at the table until the rise of the food industry--I've been reading Lawrence Goodwyn's 1978 classic The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. (I got hold of it as a gift of my friend and mentor Ken Meter.)

The book is worth reading for many reasons--not least of which is its ability to stamp out the idea of past agrarian bliss. In the following passage, Goodwyn could be describing the plight of today's commercial farmers amid tightly consolidated livestock and grain markets. Instead, he's describing the plight of farmers on the western frontier (today's Midwest) in the 1870-1890 period ... amid tightly consolidated livestock and grain markets. 

Everywhere the farmer turned he seemed to be the victim of rules that somehow always worked to the advantage of biggest business and financial concerns that touched his world. To be efficient, the farmer had to have tools and livestock that cost him forbidding rates of interest. When he sold [his produce], he got the price offered by terminal grain elevator companies. To get his produce there, he paid high rates of freight. If he tried to tried to sell to different grain dealers, or elevator companies, or livestock commission agents, he often encountered the practical evidence of secret agreements between agricultural middlemen and trunk line railroad operators.

As bad as things were in the Midwest, Goodwyn informs us, they were worse in the in the territory they were fleeing from, the South.

As every passing year forced additional thousands of farmers into foreclosure and thence into the world of landless tenantry, the furnishing merchants came to acquire title to increasing portions of the Southern countryside. Furnishing men had so many farms, and so many tenants to work them, that it became psychologically convenient to depersonalize the language of agricultural production. Advancing merchants spoke to one another about "running 100 plows per year," a crisp phrase that not only referred to thousands of acres of land, but also to hundreds of men, women, and children who lived in peonage.

By the end of the 1880s, Goodwyn writes, millions of farm families lived under such conditions, over a "1500-mile swath of the Southland, from Virginia to Texas."

The book goes on to narrate the story of the populist movement--the alliance of farmers and urban workers to challenge the power of the trusts and the banks. I haven't finished the book yet; something tells me the story doesn't end well.

History offers many lessons--but few lost paradises. But the only way I know to maintain genuine hope while moving toward an uncertain future is to maintain a clear-eyed view of the past.

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Where is everybody?Photo: Shindz, via FlickrWhen I think hard about what it would take to create a just and sustainable food system, two big obstacles spring immediately to mind: 1) we need more people growing food; and 2) we need more people cooking it, too.

In his latest blockbuster in the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan takes on the second one. I can sum up his 9,000-word jeremiad in one: cook!

There's a lot of wisdom in what he says. Pollan traces the evolution of cooking from quotidian ritual to spectator sport--complete with guys on TV huffing and puffing while a breathless announcer narrates the action for the audience at home (presumably munching on takeout pizza).

Clearly, if the erosion of the cooking habit documented by Pollan proceeds apace, the sustainable-food movement must at some point bang its head against hard limits, and accept its station as a stable niche amid an ever-congealing industrial-food model. Growth in the market for products like rainbow chard and pastured pork shoulder relies ulimately on people who know what to do with them (and have the time and desire to do it). If such people are only a small percentage of the population--and Pollan pretty much demonstrates that they (we) are--then the popularity of farmers markets, CSAs, food co-ops, etc., can only continue growing dramatically for so long.

Pollan quotes a grizzled food-marketing researcher who essentially declares the death of cooking:

A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that's exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.

For this guy, "cooking" in the postmodern world means popping a handful of, say, Tyson "honey battered breast tenders" onto a cookie sheet, to be served alongside some pre-chopped veggies from a bag, piping hot from the microwave. It's hard to refute him.

Pollan does a better job than usual of avoiding nostalgia--the trap of appealing to an Edenic, pre-industrial-food past in which everyone tended a veggie patch, cooked like angels, and ate like Alice Waters. He acknowledges, for example, that men have always generally avoided the rigors of the kitchen. And he makes more or less clear that for economic reasons, a lot of people these days have little choice but to spend so much time earning a living that cooking has become something of a luxury.

Yet he does manage this whopper:

Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air--1963--was the same year Betty Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique," the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.

Wait a sec. I think Kate Harding on Salon's "Broadsheet" blog gets it right when she says Pollan's "penis is showing" here. "Funny," writes Harding ...:

I always thought Friedan became a feminist icon because she articulated what millions of women already felt, not because she brainwashed them into believing that repetitive, menial, unpaid labor might not be the best use of their talents.

That's true. Cooking is drudgery; but it's not just drudgery. For me, cooking is a soothing way to finish a long day of writing or working in the field: I like nothing more than to lay hands and transform the fruits of the garden. But if my day were devoted to conjuring up three square meals for a brood of kids and a grumpy husband and perhaps grandparents, I might sing a different tune.

Or consider the South. How many white families in the pre-industrial food era left the cooking duties to an African-American servant?

In addition to paying more heed to the complexities of our historic relationship to food, there's another point Pollan could have made better: just at the point when the industrialization of our food was gaining critical momentum, at the precise point that he opens his essay, with middle class women rediscovering the pleasure of cooking under the tutelage of Julia Child, a renaissance was born: a kind of re-enchantment of food.

I made an attempt to write about it more than two years ago in a column called "Recipe for a Revolution: How a cookbook renaissance heated up the sustainable-food movement." (Like Pollan, I even recounted a tale of being jolted out of a fixation on processed food by a mother who cooked guided by Julia Child on the weekends.) Confronted by the scorched-earth culinary landscape of Fast Food Nation, a small but significant portion of the last two or three generations has reacted by making a fetish of delicious food. For them--well, for us; I count among them--cooking is far from a marginal or dead activity; it lies at the center of life.

Pollan skillfully demonstrates that our culture is lurching toward a post- (or post-modern) cooking era: the age of "semi-homemade" has dawned. Yet there is this subculture of passionate home cooks. It is largely white and middle class, but not completely, as the success of projects likes Milwaukee/Chicago's Growing Power, Brooklyn's Added Value, Oakland's People's Grocery, and many others show.

It is in this context that we should consider the question on which Pollan ends his essay:

Once it has been destroyed, can a culture of everyday cooking be rebuilt? One in which men share equally in the work? One in which the cooking shows on television once again teach people how to cook from scratch and, as Julia Child once did, actually empower them to do it?

This is a vexing and important question--and i don't think we can reverse the food industry's destruction of the earth's resources and exploitation of people and animals without answering it. For if we don't learn to cook again, the industry is only too happy to do it for us.

I think the answer lies in the old riddle of creating new economic models--ones that don't require people to spend long hours in services or IT jobs before commuting home hungry and tired and ready for little else than pre-fab entertainment and food.

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I don't think our goal should be to make all food in America as cheap as cheap food is now.  ... If the goal is cheap food, we're going to hurt our farmers, we're going to hurt the environment, we're going to hurt the public health.  The goal should be to give people the money so they can afford to buy good food. 

We're in this kind of reverse Fordism situation.  You know, Fordism was this idea that Henry Ford said, "I'm going to pay my workers enough so they can afford to buy my cars."  It raised everybody's boats.  This was the social compact in America, an economic compact, up until the '70s, and then it collapses. 

We have the opposite, it's kind of the Wal-Mart model, which is, "We're going to pay you so little you can only afford to buy our crummy food." And that's the kind of cycle we're in.

The answer is to give people the buying power.  

-- Michael Pollan, in an interview on The Splendid Table

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A quiz, dear Grist reader, to determine if you should see the new documentary 'Food, Inc.' (You start with 0 points. Total your points as you answer the questions.):

Farmer Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia.Photo: Food, Inc.

Total your score …

Over 1 million points: Should you see Food, Inc.? Yes.  Right now.  Run. Run out to the movie theater and buy a ticket for you and anyone around you. Let's face it, you’re interested in food issues, a little afraid of E. coli, and against your better judgment, you're never going to pick up that copy of the OD ever again. That's why Food, Inc. is here; it's essentially the movie version of OD, with a little bit of Fast Food Nation thrown in for good measure (Eric Schlosser is a producer of the film).

Besides the politics, Food, Inc. is a riveting documentary.  Fast-paced and chock full of detail, the film does not shy from shocking, rarely-seen footage.  Want a glimpse of a modern-day chicken coop? What about the meat filler in your hamburger? Ever seen someone slit a chicken's neck? Welcome to our food system.  This is where your lunch came from.

Between zero and 1 million points: Chances are this movie wasn't really made with you in mind*.  You know more about food politics than the filmmakers do, and Food, Inc. is an awaken-the-masses-with-bright-colors-and-scary-footage documentary.  Much like what "Who Killed the Electric Car?" did for electric vehicles, the film's aim is surely to bring the food debate to the mainstream.

Even if you effectively have a PhD in biological pest management, there is still something to be gained from seeing Food, Inc. When I saw the film, I was surprised to learn that batteries contain corn products, and that within 12 years the amount of Roundup Ready soy grown in this U.S. spiked from 2 to 90 percent of all U.S. soy beans. (For the record, Monsanto was very displeased with how it was characterized in the film and has since published a counter website) Plus, you can take your non-foodie friends and watch their jaws drop when they see a CAFO on the big screen.

* Exception! Do you utter Michael Pollan's name in the same breath as "communist" or "arugula"? Do your paychecks come from the globe's dominant GMO seed purveyor? Did you consider "3" at all? If so, you should make it a priority to see the inside of a CAFO or hear farmers speak frankly about your company's products. Even if you shudder at the word "organic," you should see Food, Inc. to flesh out your understanding of the food system.

Under 0 points: I urge you to reconsider some life choices. But what the hell? Yes, you too should see Food, Inc.

Watch it: Food, Inc. opened in theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco on June 12. The film opens in Seattle and other cities across the country Jun 19.  Check the film website to find a screening.

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EVEN MORE UPDATES: Now that the NYT has weighed in, I guess it's fair to say this story broke through to the mainstream. I'll spare you all the assurances from WSU that this Bill Marler-funded resolution proves that the driving issue really was financial. In my view, Marler graciously provided a fig-leaf to a university administration that was very much caught by surprise that anyone would have ever noticed what they'd done. There remain too many bits of evidence that the book was originally canceled due to political pressure. Indeed, Spokane's newspaper even claims to have identified the culprit:

That political pressure apparently was brought to bear by a member of the board of regents, Harold Cochran, who disapproved of the author’s characterization of agribusiness. Cochran owns and operates a 5,500-acre farm near Walla Walla, is a founding stockholder in the Bank of the West in Walla Walla and is a member of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers.

There likely wasn't a Big Ag conspiracy (althought what does this say about Walla Walla?). It was all caused by few people who thought they could fly under the radar and keep an irritating book out of circulation on campus. But reality, or rather the Internet, intervened. I leave you with none other than Pollan himself to put this whole scandale littéraire into perspective. Said he to the NYT:

Holding a common reading program “at a land grant university is especially important because we are in the midst of this national conversation about the future of food and agriculture, and land grant universities have a critical role to play,” he said. “That’s why this really mattered to me.

UPDATE 5/27 9PM EST: It's official WSU announces that it "will reinstate the original plan for distribution of its Common Reading book, 'The Omnivore’s Dilemma,' as a result of a private contribution to support the program." Nothing like a little help from your friends.

UPDATE 5/27 8PM EST: The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that WSU has taken up food safety lawyer and alumnus Bill Marler on his offer to pay the costs of bringing Michael Pollan to the WSU campus to speak about Omnivore's Dilemma. Marler, on his own blog, also claims that all 4,000 books will be distributed as planned.

-----

So much for academic freedom -- at least where books about our industrial food system are concerned. It's hard to believe this really happened, but according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the president at Washington State University canceled a "common-reading" for all incoming freshman of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma due to political pressure budgetary constraints. Really:

An explanation on the university’s Web site is vague and implies the withdrawal of the book was due to budget constraints. But some people on the campus say that the university, which has a prominent agriculture college, bowed to pressure from agribusiness interests.

They also question the budget argument, noting that the university has already purchased more than 4,000 copies of the book. ...

Many people connected with the common-reading program were evasive; either they did not return calls or insisted that they could not talk about the issue.

And while there were reports that Pollan was proving too expensive to bring as a speaker (thus implying his greed was a factor in the cancellation), others observed that there was never any money budgeted for events -- the cost of the books were the only expense. In other words, all the money that was to be spent HAD BEEN spent (on the books).

And if you still have any doubts that it was political, I offer this passage:

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Patricia Freitag Ericsson, an assistant professor of rhetoric and professional writing who also sits on the implementation committee, said that in a meeting on May 4, an administrator told panel members that the common-reading program would be canceled, in large part because of political pressure arising from this year's book choice. Members of the committee were upset. She says the committee was also told that potential books for next year’s common-reading program would be sent to the provost, who would make the selection.

Letting the provost dictate such details is an excellent idea. Best to let a grown-up, preferably one with a firm sense of which "political pressures" to bend to, decide what books are safe to read. University faculty do have an awful tendency toward a dangerous intellectual curiousity coupled with a suspicious openness to new ideas. We certainly wouldn't want young minds to be overthrown by "revelations" about the world they inhabit. Oh, and did I mention that Washington State is a land grant institution? Personally, I'm going to take this as a harbinger of good rather than of doom. Book banning and censorship are a declaration of intellectual bankrutcy after all. If that's what Big Ag thinks it needs to do to win, then they must be even more desperate than I thought.

UPDATE: Parke Wilde at US Food Policy gets the skinny from some WSU colleagues. And the Ethicurean points out that UC-Berkeley has assigned the Omnivore's Dilemma for ITS incoming freshman.

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With his bestselling book In Defense of Food debuting in paperback, Michael Pollan spent Thursday on the TV/radio circuit in Manhattan.

Here he is on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC:

My favorite bit is when he touches on antitrust in the food industry. "You have more concentration in the food industry than any other industry," Pollan says. "There's this tight little hourglass -- lots of farmers, not many buyers."

He appeared on Amy Goodman's show Democracy Now:

Amy asks him about the swine flu controversy. Michael's response, from the rush transcript:

And, you know, it’s very interesting. Last year, eighteen months ago, the Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get that mutation, which sooner or later is about to happen, it very quickly—you have so many different—so much genetic material coming together, so concentrated, and then so many pigs can catch it, and that this is a—you know, we’ve created these Petri dishes for new diseases. And here we go.

He also appeared on the Colbert Show, and sparred sportingly with the funnyman host.

The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Michael Pollan colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Gay Marriage

The best part comes when Colbert gets Pollan's mom, who's in the audience, to admit that her son was fed formula, and not breast milk, as an infant. Good stuff!

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Climate Citizen: Michael Pollan on agriculture and health care

Farmers claim to be stewards of the environment, some would say it's best friend; others, its worst enemy. The truth is we can be both.

Humans have never left a small footprint, we have always tried to shape the environment to suit our needs. Initially farming had one purpose, food; farming provided a more stable diet than the hunter-gatherer existence.

As we became more "civilized" our effect on the land became more pronounced and more devastating. We thought the oceans were too vast, the soil too deep and the forests so thick that we could never harm them and, of course, we were wrong.

We used to grow food and fiber, now we raise commodity crops and commodity livestock. Farmers, for the most part, no longer sell to the consumer, they sell to processors who slice, dice, mince, preserve, pasteurize, color, flavor, package and deliver what they call food.

Agricultural production is neither controlled by nor is it supportive of farmers or consumers. Farmers have no control over prices so they do what they must to survive. Consumers buy what the global market provides, is there a choice?

We produce more than enough to feed the world. Yet, not everyone shares the bounty. Not everyone has the money or the access. Equally as sad, by the time the processors are done with their slicing, dicing, coloring and flavoring much of the "food" they deliver assaults, rather than supports our health.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) claims agriculture is one of the biggest threats to the environment. The National Cattleman's Beef Association (NCBA) says agriculture does not harm the environment.

The University of Minnesota cites a seven fold increase in use of nitrogen fertilizer, a three fold increase in phosphorous fertilizer and a near doubling of irrigated cropland between 1961 and 1996. Since the introduction of Genetically Modified crops in 1996, fertilizer and pesticide use have steadily increased.

WWF notes global agriculture uses 70% of the worlds water and threatens the oceans with agrochemicals and the atmosphere with greenhouse gases from livestock production.

The US Geological Survey points to fertilizer, manure and agricultural runoff from the Mississippi basin as being responsible for the Gulf "Dead Zone".

The United Nations estimates that farm animals world-wide generate 18% of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions. Couple that with emissions from transportation, refrigeration, clearing land for crops and pastures and livestock do not appear as environmentally benign as NCBA would have us believe.

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO's) have a negative affect on our health as well. The 2004 outbreaks of avian flu in Laos and Nigeria occurred on CAFO's and the current swine flu epidemic has Mexican lawmakers pointing the finger at CAFO's while Mexican health officials back them up.

CAFO's, crop production, water, processing and transportation comprise an industrial agricultural system that is no friend of the environment. The argument supporting the system,"we need to feed the world", is a lie. As the system industrialized, world hunger increased.

In the end the question is, who will decide if agriculture will protect or destroy the environment?

We can continue to allow multinational agribusiness corporations and industrial agriculture to control our food system. We can continue to accept CAFO's, mono-culture cropping and the inherent environmental damage they cause. Or we can think about the environment and humanity when we make our food choices. We can, as Michael Pollan says, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants".

We need to think before we eat.

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I haven't had a chance to weigh in on the issues raised by Andrew Martin's recent NYT feature on the food movement. Despite the giddiness that comes with hearing that "a prominent food industry lobbyist... said he was amazed at how many members of Congress were carrying copies of 'The Omnivore's Dilemma,'" some felt that the article, with its focus on Alice Waters -- who becomes more controversial by the day -- and Michael Pollan as food movement "leaders," was a hit piece. Personally, I think of it as a reality check.

Obamafoodorama is on to something in seeing that the real response to the Martin piece was the article in the WaPo on Food Democracy Now's founder Dave Murphy (who goes entirely unmentioned in the NYT article). As Ob Fo points out:

Ob Fo zeroes in on Murphy's policy chops as providing the crucial Fifth Element that will bring the food movement into its own. But though Murphy's policy expertise is crucial to his recent success and a key to bringing about reform, I think his importance goes beyond his grasp of the interlocking, interdisciplinary nature of food policy. In a nutshell, he understands politics.

And that's the missing piece. Forgive me a bit of oversimplification when I say that up until now the media has portrayed the food movement as a fad -- a bourgeois leftover from the '60s counterculture. This may be why every article on alternative or organic or local food or food policy must by law use the word "hippie" at least once -- even if it's in the negative (as in "believe it or not, these particular foodies aren't hippies.") It's a movement that has been perceived to offer a choice to those who are in a position to make it, i.e. affluent, educated consumers. Here's how, Waters or Pollan tell us, you can opt out of the industrial food system. It was nothing more than a media phenomenon, a self-help -- rather than a social -- movement.

And why wouldn't it be seen that way? "Foodies" certainly haven't historically been players in the halls of power -- more like a sideshow. As Ezra Klein has observed, it's perfectly rational for politicians to cater exclusively to the needs of Big Ag -- there aren't any political advantages to opposing them. In that way, the food movement is the opposite of the environmental movement. In most parts of the country, simply branding a politician as anti-environmentalist is an effective political bludgeon. The environmental movement can bring serious political, legal and monetary firepower to bear when required. The food movement, to this point, has been almost totally lacking in those abilities. And that's why people like Dave Murphy hold the key.

Or rather why his 90,000 strong mailing list holds the key. As Murphy (and hopefully others like him) are able to mobilize people to directly pressure members of Congress, the movement can begin to gain traction with the congressional committees that have held agricultural reform hostage lo these many years.

Yet, from the perspective of a "movement," it's still early in the game. It may indeed be generous to posit, as Michael Pollan did in the NYT article, that the food movement now is where environmentalism was in the '70s. By that point, after all, the Sierra Club was already over seventy years old and had been lobbying legislators and combating developers since the Roosevelt administration - Teddy Roosevelt, that is. Unfortunately, we don't have another 70 years to wait. Dave, if you're listening, you've got your work cut out for you.

But the tipping point, if in fact we've reached it, may be in the broadening of the food movement base that has occurred over the last decade. As the sustainable ag folks come together with the fair trade folks come together with the international development folks come together with the climate change folks come together with the public health folks come together with the nutrition folks come together with the food safety folks, the movement begins to approach critical mass. Now that these previously disconnected groups have looked around and realized that they're all playing on the same field, an economy of scale, social movement-style, kicks in.

The great failing of the NYT article is the way it seemed to minimize this phenomenon. As Tom Philpott wrote, Martin almost totally ignored, for example, the issue of class except to conclude, as Philpott put it, that "fresh, local, and organic food must be a niche market for the well-off and the food-obsessed." Martin didn't address any of the evidence here and abroad of the viability of programs to bring such food to working class and low-income people. Nor, for that matter, did Martin mention anything having to do with international trade, fair or otherwise, and its role in the food system's unsustainability. Even health and nutrition got shortchanged as they had to play second-fiddle to the fight over ag subsidies, which Martin suggests is "the heart of the movement."

Indeed, in Martin's eyes, sustainable agriculture has as yet failed to "prove" that it can feed a growing world. Martin let the head of the National Corn Growers Association dismiss organic agriculture with the wave of a hand without even attempting to acknowledge the body of research that suggests it can indeed feed us all. At the same time, Martin observed that:

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if those numbers were reversed, I'd bet dollars to donuts that sustainable ag could feed us all just fine. My gut instinct is that the momentum really is shifting. Of course, we'll know the compost worm has truly turned when the chief executive of the National Corn Growers Association is the one forced to explain how they can possibly feed us all in the coming time of climate disruption, peak oil and depleted soil. Well? I'm waiting ...

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