An Open Letter to the Farmer in Chief

I haven't even finished wading through the whole thing yet but Michael Pollan's centerpiece essay to the NYT Magazine's Food Issue out this weekend is already too good not to pass on.  No one gathers in seemingly disparate chords and ties them into beautiful intelligible little bows on complicated food related issues like Pollan and this essay doesn't disappoint.  I'll try to post a few excerpts later on but seriously, its worth your time.  In fact the whole issue looks really good, with a focus on actual food policy rather than the usual food porn that ends up in high profile mags like the NYT. Highly recommended.

Pollan on the Farm Bill

I haven't posted much on the Farm Bill lately because, honestly, I couldn't maintain my focus once things devolved into veto threats, veto attempts, veto overrides, veto overrides of the wrong bill, etc., etc., etc - all over a bill that no one seemed happy with.  So, I'm going to punt this one to Michael Pollan who posted some of his thoughts on the bill to his list-serv yesterday as well as a good summary piece by Deborah Eschmeyer - you can read them here.

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Update:  If you like your reading with fancy formatting and hyperlinks, it looks like both pieces have now been posted to Grist.  Pollan here, Eschmeyer here.

Copenhagen Consensus 2008

Apparently not having received the bad news from William Easterly the Copenhagen Consensus 2008 winds up tomorrow.  The Times has a good intro.  You can find video here.

Why Bother?

This isn't the best thing that I've ever read by Michael Pollan but it is, I think, rightly reasoned on a number of levels and applicable to more than just the topic at hand.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

I'm curious as to what effect Pollan's interactions with people like Wendell Berry, whom he draws upon heavily in this article, and Joel Salatin has had on his faith or lack thereof.  

Defending Food

Michael Pollan at Google on Tuesday discussing his new book.