November 13, 2008
election shock: rhetoric and action [potentially] not identical [if rumors are correct and entrails read properly]
Some of us in the anti-corn-subsidy-voting-bloc (yeah, we're a small constituency) have hoped that Obama's references to having read and assimilated some of Michael Pollan's writing on food would lead to a shift in the department of agriculture from prioritizing the needs of (very large corporate) producers of food to prioritizing the needs of eaters of food (that would be "everyone not employed by Con Agra et al").
Obviously, we do not know what policies the Obama administration will actually implement (because, at this moment, there is no Obama administration), but the initial signs, as Ezra Klein explains, are not exactly promising:
Yesterday, I wrote about the troubling possibility that Tom Vilsack could be appointed Secretary of Agriculture. Vilsack, of course, is the former governor of Iowa, which means the sum total of his agricultural experience has been building loving relationships with large corn producers in a state where they have a hammerlock on the political structure. And building those relationships has meant being a ceaseless and effective advocate for corn subsidies......At the end of the day, Secretary Vilsack will implement President Obama's agenda, whatever that might be. Which is why I see commentary on the Vilsack pick as commentary about Obama's priorities, not Vilsack's skills. And there's only one real signal from this sort of a pick: Your subsidies are safe.
If the Vilsack pick is actually the pick (as far as I know, it is actually a rumor of a pick) and it means what it seems to mean, then that is a real disappointment. Because I was looking forward to a president who would say things like this:
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael 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.
And then do something about it. [1] Regardless of the accuracy of this rumor and one's interpretation of its significance, this provides an excellent place to point out that Pollan's recent Times Magazine article on food and the presidency is well worth reading, though it covers perhaps more ground than it could encompass completely coherently and is probably not Pollan's tightest piece of writing (but since Pollan is actually a really, really good writer, that means its just "above average" not "fantastic"):
Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it's important to understand how that system came to be -- and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage -- indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.It must be recognized that the current food system -- characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table -- is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.
...
Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America's meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year -- a half pound every day.
But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant -- factory farms are now one of America's biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution -- animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete -- and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.
[1] I added a bunch of qualifiers up in the previous paragraph because I think getting too upset over how we think policy might play out based on rumors about who might be appointed before the administration in question begins is rather silly.
More:
::Slightly older Ezra Klein on food policy, one of those random areas (like zoning policy) where left-leaning folk are more likely to hew to the naturally right-wing position (in this case, doing away with subsidies that distort the food market) than right-wingers are.
::Also it would be fantastic if Obama required his various Secretaries and Chiefs and advisors to come to all the White House meetings wearing animal costumes. Yes, that is an actual picture of Tom Vilsack.
