why food (really) matters.

I'm a huge fan of Michael Pollan, though I've only read his magazine articles and not his books (including In Defense of Food). Mostly I'm a fan because I buy into what he's saying 100%. His simple philosophy: Eat moderately, mostly local foods, and mostly plants.

So I devoured (pun intended) Pollan's lengthy article in a recent NYTimes Sunday Magazine, written as an open letter to the next president. He cites some jaw-dropping statistics:

• It takes a staggering amount of fossil fuel to produce the U.S. food supply; food is second only to cars in terms of fuel usage.
• As the cost of food has cheapened, what we spend societally on healthcare has gone up by the same amount. Cheap food = less healthy food = a less healthy society.
• Food production used to be fueled by the sun. Now it's fueled by petroleum, from petrochemical fertilizer to the diesel that runs the trucks that carry California strawberries to New Jersey.
• Food production used to be local. Small, independent, regional meat processing outfits that prepared and distributed (locally) the meat raised by small farmers have been replaced by huge contained feeding operations (like the godawful Fair Oaks Farm that dominates both sides of the landscape along I-65 in Northern Indiana), which require the use of antibiotics on the animals (they're kept in such close quarters and fed unnatural feed so they're prone to sickness) and which produce unmanageable amounts of waste.
• Speaking of which, food production used to be a closed loop: Cattle graze in winter on grassy pasture, keeping weeds under control and naturally fertilizing the earth; come spring, the pasture is plowed under and vegetable crops are planted, which need less fertilizer and weed control because of the land's winter activity. Rinse, repeat. Now, massive animal operations and monoculture (i.e., corn-only) farms misuse this natural cycle—the confined animals create a huge waste problem (there's no natural outlet for the manure) and the huge cornfields require fertilizer (there's no grazing). It creates two massive and linear problems of infertile land and enormous waste—no closed loop anymore.

I could go on. But instead I'll sit here and feel smug that we shop at a local market, buy local meat, bread and produce, and support our local agriculture.

Read Pollan. He's way smarter than I am.