From the man who gave us the phrase "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" comes a memo to the next president on why food matters, and much more so than you'd think. Michael Pollan makes a compelling case for why food policy matters in making "significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change":
[W]e 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.
Pollan correctly ascribes many of the food system's ills to its incorrect, systemic assumption that cheap fossil fuels are here to stay:
Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating.
That would indeed go some way toward all three of Pollan's solutions:
I. Resolarizing the American farm
II. Reregionalizing the food system
III. Rebuilding America's food culture
In the end,
[c]heap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.
That's a lesson in externalities, if there ever was one. Nothing would hit home quite as much as changing the way we eat.
