Items Tagged With Michael Pollan

Dear Mr. Pollan,

  As a candidate for President this year, I felt obliged to reply to your now famous letter printed in the New York Times this Sunday, as it was addressed to a Mr. President-Elect.  As a potential President-Elect, I read your letter closely, and hope that my fellow candidates have done so as well. 

 Mr. Pollan, I want you to know that I have been campaigning on a platform that seeks to reform the food system much like you have suggested in your letter.  I was more than happy to see that you addressed the President-Elect in your letter, as I believe that the changes in policy that are necessary for real Grass-fed Change to take hold in this country will be made when we have the cooperation of our President.

 I’ve listened to the voices of my constituents across the country, the voices of those who are ready for grass-fed change and the voices of those who want to make a living as grass-fed farmers and ranchers.  I ask them, “What is the greatest hurdle to achieving a true Grass-fed America?”  I have heard a resounding reply: subsidies. 

  We, the farmers, the animals, and other grass-fed believers know that the current subsidy and loan distribution is too heavily weighted in favor of the big corporations.  We know   that the status quo in Washington is keeping us from achieving what we call Grass-fed Change and what you call diversified sun farming.  The powerful lobbies in Washington ensure these subsidies are kept in place, however, it is in the authority of the President to stand up and steamroll these lobbies to redistribute the subsidies in a way that favors an agricultural self reliance that is crucial to maintaining the health of our people and land. So I applaud you, Mr. Pollan, for addressing the President-Elect in your reform proposal, and letting him know how crucial his role will be in preventing a serious crisis on our homeland, and that it must begin with reforming the policies of our farmland.  The people are waiting.

I thank you for the for the solid and radical advice laid out in your letter.  It has been very encouraging to me.

Sincerely,

Mr. Angus La Cense

Founder, The Grass-fed Party

P.S.  I enjoyed your proposal for a White House South Lawn Victory Garden.  If I am elected, I promise that my family will set an example for your polyculture sun farms.  I promise to unabashedly graze my meals on the White house lawn, keeping the soil healthy and ensuring that tax-payers dollars will be saved as we will not be needing any oil or chemicals, but only sun to produce the food that will keep my neighbors and my family healthy, safe, and self-reliant.

Agricultural policy is not an easy subject to undertake but Michael Pollan was able to eloquently tackle it in his new article Farmer in Chief making a compelling case for us all to reevaluate how we grow, consume and purchase our food.  There are three major points that he brings up that are possibly the biggest issues we face as a nation: health care, energy independence and climate change.   He argues "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." I say right on! Grass-fed farming is about turning sunlight into food, and in the process it can heal the earth, our bodies and our rural economies.

What then is preventing us from grass-fed change? It really comes down to our agricultural policy, specifically our subsidies that make grains, and corn particularly artificially inexpensive.

Growing food in America accounts for 19 percent of our oil consumption and most of our CO2 pollution.  Farm subsidies have perverted how we produce food; it has made corn artificially inexpensive, even though their tolls on our bodies and soil have been astronomically expensive.  Farm subsidies, and corn by default, has infiltrated every aspect of our agricultural process, because we pay agribusiness to grow it cheaply, we can feed it to our cows, pigs and change its chemical composition and put into fruit juice and baked goods. It is time to revaluate our corn subsidies, because there are great implications to being so dependent on fossil fuels that are not only environmental, they are also strategic and patriotic. Why should we be giving foreigners our hard earned money when there is a better way to grow our food?

It really comes down to our agricultural policy, we have for years stressed a system that benefits "efficiency" over inefficiency, by paying large farms to grow grains at massive quantities. So few Americans really understand agricultural policy, or care to see its implications on our daily lives it is our subsidies that are making fossil fuel hungry farming efficient not the system itself.  A good friend of mine grew up on a wheat farm in northern North Dakota, this girl drove a combine as a kid (so cool!), their farm was a small family-run operation of about 1100 acres and they received little to no subsidies from the federal government however the larger agribusiness like ADM did.  Throughout her teens she saw family-run wheat farms buckle under economic pressures while larger agriculture corporations flourish, expand and consolidate. This is story of the past 50 years, consolidation and yet it is in our agricultural sector that this consolidation has been the most obscene, where we have massive feedlots feeding cows corn, and pig farms so industrial they pollute whole communities, that you and I, the citizens of America, can have the most impact.  It is impossible to buy our TV's from local producers but it is possible to buy our meat and vegetables from farmer's who are opting out of our agricultural industrial process.  Change is a foot and there is so much to be gained; it is time to get our politicians to listen.