Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
SPEAKER: I'm going to introduce the next speaker, and the final
one for the session on serious sustainability, who
is Michael Pollan.
I mentioned earlier that one of my standards of admiration when
it comes to the world of writing is people who can take
the synthetic view-- synthetic not in the sense of false, but
its combining things and allowing people to see
them in a new way.
I mentioned Jared Diamond's work in that connection.
Although this is not directly on topic, I hope anybody here
who has not yet read David Fromkin's book A Peace to End
All Peace will read that book.
It's a masterpiece of history of the Middle East from the
Ottoman Empire-- from the end World War I onward, showing
the world we deal with now.
I mention this because Michael Pollan who is a Knight
professor of journalism at UC-Berkeley and a friend of
mine from the days-- from the years-- I was teaching there
is one of these writers.
In his recent books, he's given people a different way to think
about their own place in the food chain, the choices they
make individually in consuming food, in growing food, in
preparing food, and how this affects both their own lives
and the whole larger web that we've been talking about today
in these various presentations.
He's given people useful ways to think about
serious sustainability.
These books, of course, are In Defense of Food, which has come
out recently, Omnivore's Dilemma, The Botany of
Desire, and others.
So please join me in welcoming Michael Pollan.
[APPLAUSE]
MICHAEL POLLAN: Thank you, thank you very much.
I'd like to address my remarks today to-- not directly to
you, but if it's OK-- to the President-elect, who I wish
were here in this room today, but-- so I want to address this
to Dear Mr. President-elect.
You may be surprised to learn that an issue that you spoke
of hardly at all during the campaign is going to occupy a
great deal of your time over the next four or eight years.
And that issue is food, the American food chain.
Two reasons for this.
One is that food prices are rising and they're
about to soar.
There have been a lot of rising grain costs that have not been
passed on to the consumer yet-- they're about to be.
And high food prices always create political peril, as
we've known since the French Revolution at least.
The era of cheap food is over in this country, just as the
era of cheap oil is over.
And it is over abroad as well.
I'm not going to deal with the international implications
because we're going to do that at a panel a little bit later.
And the old fixes, which is to say, ramping up production as
fast as you can, are not going to work this time because cheap
food depends on cheap energy, something we can no
longer count on.
And that fact points to a deeper reason that reform of
the American food system will soon become imperative and an
everyday concern of yours.
Without it, without reforming the American food system, it
will be impossible to make progress on the issues you did
talk about during the campaign.
A little.
Energy independence, climate change, and
the healthcare crisis.
Why?
Well, because the way we're feeding ourselves in this
country is at the heart of all three problems-- is the shadow
problem behind all of those.
Let me explain.
The food system, and by that I mean agriculture as well as
food processing, uses more fossil fuel and contributes
more greenhouse gas-- not just C02 but methane and nitrous
oxide, which are more serious in their ability to trap heat--
to the atmosphere than any other industry.
Somewhere between, depending on the study, 17% and 34%.
Meat production alone, according to the UN, is 18%
of the greenhouse gases.
Now how can this be?
Well, as soon as farmers cut trees and plow the soil, they
release a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
But the 20th century industrialization of
agriculture has increased this by an order of magnitude.
The fertilizers that we depend on are made from natural gas.
The pesticides that we depend on are made from petroleum.
Processing and packaging use great amounts of fossil fuel,
and of course, transportation.
This whole regime, what I call industrial agriculture, has
transformed the food system from one that was able to
produce 2.3 calories of food energy for every single calorie
of fossil fuel energy as recently as 1940, into a system
that can only produce one calorie of food energy for
every fossil fuel calorie, at the farm level.
But by the time it gets to the supermarket, it's 10 calories
of fossil fuel energy for every single calorie of food.
And when you get to something like beef, the ratio
is even worse.
It's 55 calories of fossil fuel energy for every
single calorie of food.
When we eat from this modern food system, the one all of us
eat from every day in this country, we are eating oil
and spewing greenhouse gas.
Which is really absurd when you think about it because food is
the original solar technology.
Every calorie you have ever eaten, whether seafood or
terrestrial food, began with photosynthesis,
the chloroplast.
There is a great deal of hope in that very simple fact.
And I'll return to it.
Now food, as I suggested, is also implicated in
the healthcare crisis.
Since 1960, the percentage of national income spent on
healthcare has gone from 5% to nearly 18% today.
We won't be able to insure everyone unless we get
these costs under control.
There are many reasons for this increase, but one of the
biggest and I would argue most tractable, is the cost to the
system of diet-related chronic diseases.
Four of the top 10 killers in America are diet-related
chronic diseases and, in aggregate, they cost the
system in excess of $250 billion a year.
Today it costs New York City, the City of New York,
$500,000 for every new case of type 2 diabetes.
And one in three children born in the year 2000 are predicted
by the CDC to have to grapple with type 2 diabetes.
Surely it's no coincidence that in that same period, since my
boyhood, when healthcare costs were rising from 5% to 18%,
spending on food as a percentage of national income
was plummeting from 17% to 9.5% today.
So this era of cheap food has cost us in many ways.
That's the bad news.
Here's the good news.
The American people increasingly suspect that
this system is broken.
They are very concerned about the provenance of their food,
the safety of their food, the welfare of animals in
their food system.
There is more political constituency, I think, for
change in the food system than politicians have yet realized.
And we see in the marketplace that the market for
alternatives-- organic pasture-based, local, and all
the others-- is thriving today.
The even better news is this.
The same policies that will reduce agriculture's
contribution to climate change and the energy crisis will also
dramatically improve public health.
We can make progress on all three fronts at once.
Make the system safer, more secure, and more sustainable
not only here in America but in the developing world as well.
What we won't be able to do again is ever make food as
cheap as it has been or something we can ever
take for granted again.
Here's the core idea.
And I'm going to speak in terms of proposals, mostly,
for the rest of my talk.
We need to wean the American food system off it's heavy 20th
century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of
contemporary sunshine.
Easier said than done, I know.
It will require changes at every link in the food chain--
in the field, in the marketplace, and
in the culture.
But it can be done as long as photosynthesis still works.
I want to briefly just sketch how we got here.
How did we take the solar system and put it on oil?
When you were a candidate, you flew many, many times
over the state of Iowa.
And you may have noticed something very peculiar
about the landscape there.
Between the months of October and April, the land is black.
There is nothing growing.
A spectacular waste of solar energy.
Go back 50 years, 60 years, and you would have seen
a checkerboard of green.
You would have seen pastures for animals.
You would have seen cover crops to fix nitrogen in the soil.
But today, fertility is restored after that intensive
growing season with fossil fuel fertilizer.
Which has eliminated the need to use photosynthesis
to capture nitrogen and put it in the fields.
Since World War II, our society's-- our government's--
policies have been towards maximizing in production of a
very few commodity crops, especially corn and soy,
grown in vast monocultures underwritten by fossil fuel.
These monocultures could not survive without it.
They need the fertility.
Otherwise they would be exhausted, so oil
remedies that problem.
And they would be afflicted by insects, as monocultures
invariably are, and they need pesticides to deal with that.
And this whole regime is really a legacy of World War II.
The conversion of munitions to fertilizers that went on right
after the war, and nerve gas research to pesticides.
It has been said, rightly, that we are still eating the
leftovers of World War II.
It's a very powerful regime and I want to give it its credit.
It is the reason-- we need to acknowledge its achievement--
it is the reason that an American can get-- go into a
McDonald's and get a bacon double cheeseburger, a large
fries, and a super-sized coke for less than an hour's
work at the minimum wage.
In the long course of human history, that's an
incredible achievement.
And it's not something people are going to
be eager to give up.
It all is the result, though, of this cheap subsidized grain
grown in these monocultures with fossil fuel.
That's what makes possible the feedlot meat, very cheap
feedlot meat, the sweeteners, and the processed food.
But the costs.
The costs are very high.
Monoculture in the fields leads to monoculture in the diet.
Nearly 1/3 of the calories in the American diet today consist
of hydrogenated soy oil, which we know is lethal, and
corn sweeteners, which we know are also lethal.
These are the building blocks of fast food and the reason
they have been so cheap is because this is what we pay
our farmers to grow in overproduction.
This system also squanders oil and pollutes the atmosphere.
Fossil fuel, of course, is what makes possible a national
and a global system.
Is the reason that Iowa can get by growing corn and
soy and nothing else.
Or that California can feed New York City instead of the Garden
State, New Jersey, as they used to.
Or why Alaskan salmon is shipped to China to be
filleted before it comes back here to be eaten.
Or why America exports sugar cookies to Denmark and imports
sugar cookies from Denmark.
An odd trade that an economist once said about, wouldn't it be
more efficient to swap recipes?
Indeed.
But the cheap fossil fuel system that made this make
financial sense, these weird supply chains,
is coming to an end.
A box of broccoli could be shipped from the Salinas Valley
to the Hunts Point Market in New York, a year ago,
for three bucks.
It is now $10.
The reason-- with that in mind-- some of the cleverist
growers in this area have started to buy crop
land in New England.
They're going to grow broccoli there.
What a novel idea.
A little closer to where it's consumed.
You can grow broccoli anywhere.
These companies-- these growers-- recognize
what we all will soon.
Which is that we are simply going to have to squeeze the
oil out of our food system.
So how do we do it?
Well, I'm going to very quickly take you
through some proposals.
And I'm going to be sketchy and elliptical about it.
But I hope to plant some ideas with you.
On the farm.
Now in nature, which is productive year after year
without fossil fuel, the key to fertility-- renewing
fertility-- and the key to dealing with pests, of
course, is biodiversity.
These problems don't exist in nature.
There are no monocultures in nature.
And we need to learn to mimic those systems on the farm.
The power of cleverly designed polycultures-- growing many
crops in complex rotations or in symbiosis between species,
animal and plant, to produce lots of food from little more
than soil, sunlight, and water, has been proven at
many, many scales.
At the scale of alternative farmers in this country.
At the scale of very large rice, fish farmers in China.
And at the scale of beef production in Argentina.
Where they grow in an eight-year rotation-- or they
did until high grain prices moved them all into soy.
They would do five years of cattle on pasture-- produce the
best beef in the world-- and then they could grow three
years of grain without any fertilizer at all.
And there were no weed pests either because the weeds of
pastures could not survive the weeds of grow
crops and vice versa.
So this is a large scale approach that has been proven
although it's in danger today, as I said, by the economy.
Now I need you to understand that the most sustainable
agriculture is not your grandfather's farming.
We are not talking about turning back the clock.
It is based on the latest knowledge of ecology,
entomology, and soil science.
It involves complicating what fossil fuel made very simple.
It is indeed post-industrial.
We need to come to understand that a smart crop rotation is
as ingenious a technology as a genetically modified seed.
We need to see it as such and support this research.
I think the only reason we haven't is that it is a
research that produces processes and not, sorry to
say to all of you, products.
It is mostly about processes.
And it's very hard to make money off of a new process.
Government heavily subsidized the shift to monoculture.
And now, it can do the opposite-- needs to
do the opposite.
Subsidized change.
Very rough outline.
We need to start rewarding farmers for diversification.
For the number of days fields are green, for the number
of crops they grow.
We need to bring animals back onto farms.
An enormous mistake was made-- the elegant solution of the sun
feeding grass and the grass feeding animals and the animals
feeding us and the soil was, as Wendell Berry said, neatly
divided into two problems.
A pollution problem on the feedlot, a fertility deficit
on the farm, made up for by fossil fuel.
We need to begin subsidizing farmers not by the bushel for
what they produce but for the ecological services
they provide.
For example, sequestering carbon.
You know, we have 700 million acres of crop
land and range land.
And if they are managed correctly, that could
become the biggest carbon sink in the country.
So it's very important we include farming in any carbon
trading scheme so that we penalize bad farming and
reward good farming.
Because farmers can make a lot of money selling carbon credits
if we include them in that scheme.
If they do rotational grazing and other very important steps.
We need a strategic grain reserve.
Why?
Just the way-- the same reason we have a strategic
petroleum reserve.
We need to be able to even out these swings
in commodity prices.
Because very high prices and very low prices both force
farmers to overproduce.
So we need predictability on prices just as we're trying to
do with our petroleum reserve.
We need to put more farmers on the land.
The hard part of this is not the amount of food
you can produce per acre.
It's the amount of food you can produce per farmer.
And we only have a million or so farmers left.
And I think that really is the hard part.
We need to train farmers.
We need to recognize that the complex farmers who can do this
kind of work are the green economy jobs that we're
all talking about.
We must number them in that program.
And we need to preserve every acre of good farmland near the
city because we're going to need it.
We're going to need that broccoli growing
land near Manhattan.
It may not be that New Jersey can ever feed New York City
again, but it can help.
In the same way we recognized the importance of preserving
wetlands, and erected a very high bar to their development,
we will need to do the same thing with every acre
of good farmland.
You will have to justify why you're going to
plant a house on it.
So that's what we need to do at the farm level.
Now, you're probably saying, can we feed the world this way?
And I can't give you a complete answer to that question and
in fact, the most honest answer is, we do not know.
We haven't tried.
We've been trying something very different.
But keep in mind a few things.
Half of our cropland worldwide is going to feed animals.
A quarter of the food grown in America is wasted.
There is a lot of slack in this system.
And we also have models of polycultures that are
substantially more productive then simple monocultures.
In the case of climate change, we also don't know that we can
run an industrial civilization without cheap fossil fuel.
But we're going to try to find out and we need to do the
same thing in agriculture.
At the marketplace level-- second level I want to briefly
talk about-- we need to re-regionalize the food system.
If you simply diversify farms and don't give them ways to
sell their produce, it's not going to work.
If the grain elevator says, all we take are corn and soy, no
one in Iowa is going to grow anything else.
So we need to shorten the food chain.
Decentralizing the food supply has many benefits besides
saving fossil fuel.
It is a matter of security.
We understood after 9/11, the GAO studied the food system
because there was great concern about its vulnerability
to terrorism.
And the conclusion was that we have such a highly centralized
food system that it's very easy to contaminate it.
And we've seen that when-- you know, contamination of, whether
it's lettuce in the Central Valley-- you know, when you're
washing the nation's entire salad in one big sink, you're
going to communicate disease to a lot of people when
you make a mistake.
So a decentralized food system is more resilient to shocks.
And I think one of the things we know is that the future is
going to be very unpredictable.
And we need to value resiliency and not just efficiency.
Now, the market is driving this trend toward the
re-localization of food, but right now the government
is standing in the way.
And there's a lot the government can do.
There's a thicket of regulations that makes it very
hard for local food producers.
You have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars before you
can smoke a ham and sell it in your community because of food
safety regulations designed to deal with very large players.
We're running out of abbatoirs, regional abbatoirs.
If we're going to bring animals back onto the farms, there have
to be places to slaughter them.
And the fact is now, four companies slaughter 84% of the
beef, and they don't like little regional abbatoirs.
And they're closing them down.
So the government has to support that with
mobile abbatoirs.
And we need to regionalize food procurement.
The government should-- in the same way we advance other
important social goals by requiring that a certain
percentage of spending by the military or by schools or by
the park service-- we should make sure that a certain
percentage is going to local food, food grown
within 100 miles.
And lastly, we need to change the food culture.
Because we are all implicated in this culture of fast,
cheap, and easy food that is grown, processed, and moved
around with fossil fuel.
We need to learn to eat from a shorter, more
local, food chain.
So how do you do that?
Well, I'm sorry she's not here today, she was going to be, but
Alice Waters kind of had an idea here and I
think it's smart.
We need to start with kids.
50 years ago, President Kennedy, concerned about the
physical fitness of America, launched a program
to improve it.
And how did he do it?
Well, he made physical education a required--
a mandatory-- part of the school day.
We need to do the same thing with lunch.
We need to give them credit for lunch.
We need to teach them the basics of growing, cooking--
growing and cooking food and then enjoying it
at shared meals.
It won't be cheap.
It'll probably cost another dollar a day per student.
But it will pay off in healthier students better able
to learn, reduced healthcare costs, and sturdier
local food economies.
We need to teach adults too.
And one idea would be to put a second calorie count on every
food package on the nutrition label.
So you can see how many food calories are there and how many
fossil fuel calories are there.
So you can see when you buy that hamburger that it's got 55
calories of fossil fuel in it.
Carbon footprint is much more complex than food miles but we
can figure out a metric that will let consumers who care
about this move their dollars toward more solar-based food.
And then, Mr. President-elect, there is of course
the bully pulpit.
There's a lot that the White House can do to set an example.
The choice of White House chef-- and I would nominate
Alice Waters for White House chef-- that chef can elevate
the issue and shine a light on farmers and show how eating
locally grown food is not so hard as people think.
And that well-prepared meals depend on
well-grown sun-fed food.
We also need a new post, White House farmer.
And that farmer should have the authority to take the best five
acres of the South Lawn and convert it to a garden.
Five acres would feed the White House.
And there would be plenty left over to feed-- offer
food to local banks.
Eleanor Roosevelt, you know, planted a victory
garden in the '40s.
She did it over the objection of the USDA who said she was
going to louse up the food economy.
She did it anyway, and helped spearhead this move
towards victory gardens.
Which are not trivial.
There were 40 million of them and they were growing 40% of
the nation's produce from the shortest food chain of all.
Gardening is not trivial.
A victory garden not only grows all that food and sequesters
all that carbon, if it's done right, it teaches the habits of
mind and body we will need to navigate the uncertain
waters ahead.
Teaches self-sufficiency as well as interdependence,
neighborliness.
They help us get over, I think, the cheap energy mind which is
so specialized it leaves us feeling helpless to act in
the face of climate change.
Looking to experts to solve our problems.
Most of us can't imagine contributing directly and
physically to our own support.
Can't imagine living with less fossil fuel.
Best of all, I think, a garden reminds us just
how much is given.
That the sun still does shine down on our yards.
Photosynthesis does still work its wonders wherever it does.
Reminds us that our relationship to nature is
not necessarily zero sum.
That in fact, there is a free lunch.
And that is of course solar energy and photosynthesis.
If there is any part of modern life that can be freed from its
reliance on oil and re-solarized, surely,
surely it is our eating.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.