Why I love Barack Obama

To be fair, there are a lot of reasons (universal health care, women's rights, the economy, the integrity with which he ran his campaign, etc.), but this one struck home today.

If you haven't read Michael Pollan's article, Farmer in Chief, which ran in the New York Times on October 9th, I highly recommend that you do. It's long, but it's well written and chock full of fascinating ideas and statistics. Here's a short excerpt to whet your appetite:

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed 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.

Pollan goes on to discuss the American diet's effect on our health system and our economy, finally outlining a plan for the president-elect 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."

If I had written a letter to the candidates, this would have been it. Bravo Mr. Pollan! Your essay resounded with many of us, even if no politician actually reads it.

But wait, what was that? One of the candidates actually read Pollan's article? In it's entirety? And then promoted it during a speech? Seriously??


...and now you know why I'm in love with the man. Here's what he had to say during his interview with Time magazine:

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 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.

Photo credit: Treehugger.

An Attempt to Make Fare Fair

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. - Michael Pollan

This phrase from Michael Pollan's New York Times article, Unhappy Meals, hit me in January 2007 like a ton of bricks. As a recent college grad who was already following the "not too much" part of his advice in an attempt to combat her senior thesis stress-eating and who had been raised by a couple of hippies with a massive garden in the backyard, "eat [real] food" seemed like a logical argument. More than logical really... inspiring. Eat real food, he implores - not that chemical-laden, bio-engineered, artificially colored stuff you find at your supermarket.

In his article, Pollan shows how major commercial conglomerates turned a roast chicken dinner into a Lean Cuisine in the name of Health and how that move actually produced a fatter nation that has lost its historical food culture in the process. Divorcing the soil from the sterile, waxed, and preserved vegetables we find in our grocery stores left a society that couldn't identify whole, healthy foods from the ones Kraft told us to eat.

Pollan's philosophy of nature-knows-what's-good-for-you - combined with memories of my grandmother's home-cooked meals and the fresh ingredients that chefs like Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver, and Giada deLaurentis were propagating - fueled my approach to food for the next year as I moved to Washington, DC, started frequenting local markets, and began a workshare at Claggett Farm. As I started making my meals from scratch, I fell in love with bread baking - the physical and mental therapy of kneading dough - and experimented with the vegetables and herbs I was bringing home. Questions like, "What the heck am I going to do with a whole pumpkin?" became the norm on Sunday afternoons as I prepared my weekly dinners.

It wasn't until March 2008 however that I figured out the real implications of Michael Pollan's command to eat "mostly plants."

In an effort to better understand the underpinnings of the organic/locavore movement that I was now fully a member of, I decided to start doing some research and began with a book that I found randomly - fortuitously? - at an old, ramshackle bookstore by Capitol Hill's Eastern Market. It was Francis Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet (1991), which spells out the waste and pollution embedded in our agricultural system, particularly with regard to raising cattle. Did you know that it takes 17 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef? And did you know that grain production in the US is unsustainable, gravely impacting our environment? Mark Bittman made a similar (brilliant, hilarious) assessment during his 2008 TED speech, that you can watch here.

Now, I'm not a vegetarian, but I have made the decision to only eat organic meat that comes from sustainable farms where the animals are allowed to graze and are not (force-)fed grain. Since that kind of meat is pretty expensive and exceptionally difficult to find without planning in advance, I'm afraid that I no longer eat a lot of meat - a sacrifice happily made however to contribute to a greater goal that I believe is just beginning to find its feet.

Pollan, Lappe, Bittman, and a host of other eco-conscious foodies are now working to illuminate the role that our everyday food choices play in the life of our planet, encouraging us to return to our culinary roots where peas don't come in cans, chickens aren't injected with preservatives, and tomatoes can be orange, or purple, or green. Choosing food that is not chemically or biologically altered preserves our natural resources, our ecosystem and the co-evolution of plants and wildlife. It also combats pollution and health problems.

My continued research on America's food policy will provide the basis for much of this blog. Being an amateur baker and occasional cook, however, I also plan to post recipes and culinary techniques in an effort to share my love of homemade food and to inspire others toward the same end. I hope that these musings are helpful and that together we can create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable world.