Food for change
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local ingredients; groceries and other businesses, some large but mostly small and local, that sell sustainable food and other products; and a myriad of people, foundations and small organizations across America that promote and support food system alternatives.

The energy, innovation and creativity that has driven the movement towards an alternative American food system has happened largely without government support — and more often in the face of government policies and regulations that actively worked against it. In some ways that’s been good. But there are things the federal government can do to help move our food system to a healthy, sustainable, environmentally friendly place.

One is to end the Byzantine, blatantly unfair system of subsidies. Currently, taxpayers send $19 billion a year to just 3,100 farmers, virtually all of whom are mega-producers with mega-incomes.

Another would be to make sure that “the fox isn’t guarding the henhouse.” For decades, big agriculture and mega-food corporations have had a revolving door in and out of foodrelated government agencies such as the FDA and the USDA: folks appointed to high-level positions in those agencies who become lobbyists and executives in the very businesses they were supposed to be monitoring, who then go back into government positions in a different administration. For example, seven members of the 13-member USDA committee that determines nutritional guidelines have ties to food or drug companies (or both) or have received funding from them. In formulating food policy, Mr. President, I hope you’ll listen to locally-based folks like we’ve discussed here, as well as national figures such as Pollan and Alice Waters, whose Edible School Yard [www.edibleschoolyard.org]

teaches middle school students to both grow healthy food and cook it. She’s been working with Mayor Daley to institute a similar program in Chicago.

Finally, it’s important to realize that, as Pollan writes, “Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every. . . shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner back from the fast-food industry — the culinary equivalent of home-schooling. It builds on America’s agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century’s most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil future, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us.”

Contact Julianne Glatz at [email protected].