Would that be something! Here is Stowe Boyd on this:
[from Farmer-in-Chief by Michael Pollan]
There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: 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. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves.
To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.
Obama, at least is listening. I can only hope that he has the sense
to get Pollan involved in food policy (and Buffett on the economic
mess) when he (fingers crossed) moves into the White House: (Stowe)
[from Swampland -- The Full Obama Interview by Joe Klein]
Obama: There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic: Pollan] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector.
And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.
That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
Obama gets the fact that we are insecure when our food system is
erected on giant energy inputs: cheap oil, and the fertilizer and
pesticides that industrial agriculture needs.
At core is the false bookeeping, where spewing pollution into the air and water, and consuming irreplaceable resources (oil and water) don't figure into the costs of food. We have to get back to small scale but intensive, low input, solar-based farming. Obama seems to get most of that, and hopefully, Pollan will get some of his time in the next few months. (Stowe)
Now this would be a "Change"!
