Farmer in Chief?

Can we credit the decision by the Obamas to plant a vegetable garden at the White House to Michael Pollan's Times piece in October, called "Farmer in Chief"? I say yes, and I say it's good news.

In Praise of Wendell Berry, the Original Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan has become unavoidable and it's hard to argue that that's a bad thing. Here he is being interviewed by a Times blogger, and here he is being interviewed by a blogger for Gourmet. And here is In Defense of Food, the book he calls "An Eater's Manifesto," at number 1, top of the pops, on the Times best seller list.

With Pollan getting ink by the barrel and pixels by the billions, Gourmet, in its print edition only, does us the enormous favor of reminding us that before Michael Pollan there was Wendell Berry, who, as an essayist, poet, writer of really good novels, and farmer, has bona fides that Pollan doesn't (not that Pollan claims to have them). Here's an excerpt from Gourmet's story about Berry, which was written by John T. Edge:

... Berry has argued tirelessly for independent communities, small family farms, and local foods. His outlook marries agrarian and environmental ideologies, but he doesn't settle for either. A traditional agrarian values small farms and argues that they are essential to the politcal and social well-being of the nation; Berry claims they are key to our ecological health. Environmentalists often concern themselves with the against-all-odds protetion of wilderness; Berry believes land was meant to be worked by man.

While I'm sure that's not all he believes about land, it's an important point, and what Berry means by it is that land was meant to be worked by man and not by machines, namely huge grain combines. Small is beautiful.

I have a notebook in which I used to jot down quotations from things I was reading. Here are a few from Berry:

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

The Appalachian Group to Save the Land and the People ... What impressed me was the complexity of purpose announced in its name: it proposed to save the land and the people. This seems to me still an inescapable necessity. You really cannot specialize the work of conservation. You cannot save the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land. To save either, you must save both.

Good cooking must be said to begin with good farming.

We have these Wendell Berry books on our shelves: The Gift of Good Land; What Are People For?; A Continuous Harmony; Recollected Essays; Home Economics; Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community; and In the Presence of Fear (all books of essay); and Fidelity: Five Stories; A Place on Earth; The Wild Birds; and Nathan Coulter, all fiction.

Praising Berry doesn't diminish Pollan -- in fact Pollan acknowledges Berry as one of his inspirations. He's well worth checking out.

Listening to Michael Pollan

By luck I was in the car shortly after noon today and heard Leonard Lopate interviewing Michael Pollan about his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. I think Pollan is great, and the interview was worth hearing. You can get the podcast here.

On Sustainability

Michael Pollan starts another excellent piece, about the dangerous way we produce our food here in America, in yesterday's Times magazine with a discussion of the word "sustainability":

The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places.

He goes on to tell two stories of unsustainability -- the MRSA staph infection and the die-off of honeybees -- that, after you finish reading, turn out not to be so unexpected after all. Here's his Times piece. Read his other stuff here to see how it all all fits together.

Eating Close to Home

Those of us who think we’d be better off if our sources of food were closer to us should read the latest dispatch from Michael Pollan, who explained in Sunday’s Times Magazine why the Farm Bill about to come before Congress is bad not just for us elitists who can afford to shop at farmers markets for half the year but also for less well-off people looking to make the most out of their food money (and for the country's immigration problems, by the way).

Among many other good points, Pollan says that federal farm subsidies have made it possible for the price of corn-syrup-sweetened soft drinks to fall over the years while the price of real food has risen steeply:

...the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent.

Here’s also a link to a January story in the Times mag whose subtitle should become the slogan of anyone interested in seeing the American way of eating improve: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

In fact just go here and read through the list. Pollan's one of the most important journalists working today.