If you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s October 9th Open Letter to the Next President in the New York Times, I can’t recommend it more highly. This champion of food writers, a man who has been one of the great heroes of illuminating the unfortunate realities of our food supply through his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (and many other books and articles) will actually be in Maine tomorrow night, speaking at Bates College. (I’m gutted I can’t be there. I found out about it too late.)

Michael Pollan finally says it outright: “Food is a National Security issue.” He notes that more than 30 nations have experienced food riots because of shortages in the past several months, and one government (Haiti) has fallen. He makes the point so clearly as to be unmistakable, that our policies up to now which have encouraged massive flows of cheap, subsidized commodity grain to flow unencumbered across global free-trade zones, has been a mistake. The results of this oil-dependent, unsustainable, non-local food supply system is that the poorest on our planet are starving right now.

Food Prices Soar-- The Economist graphic

As this article from the Economist notes, “Last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16% (see chart 1). These were some of the sharpest rises in food prices ever. But this year the speed of change has accelerated. Since January, rice prices have soared 141%; the price of one variety of wheat shot up 25% in a day.”

Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Programme, the largest distributor of food aid, said recently;

“For those on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. And for those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster.”

There are 1 billion of us who live on $1 a day or less and 1.5 billion more who live on $2 to $1 a day. That’s 2.5 billion people our of 6.7 billion– 37% of the whole population of the planet. This doesn’t even count the people in this country and other parts of the developed world who are hungry. The higher food prices here at home have been painful for us, yes, but the huge number of hungry people on the planet can be severely politically destabilizing, especially when this issue is superimposed, as it is, on global economic and environmental crises.

Michael Pollan’s article offers some stellar suggestions on how to turn this situation around, domestically and globally. His main thesis this that we need to radically shift our current oil-dependent agriculture habits (fertilizing, harvesting, shipping, processing) to sun-based habits that were employed for the many millennia preceding World War Two. It was only then, 60+ years ago, that we adopted these unsustainable habits.

It was not THAT long ago. My dad’s lifetime. Everything my dad ate as a child was organic, because pesticides were only invented at the end of WWII, when they need a peacetime purpose for chemical weapons. All prior soil fertility came from the age-old system of crop rotation and animal waste. All farms were polycultures, with animals AND vegetables doing their symbiotic thing. Most food sheds were regional and local. The US food policy over the last 60 years has lead precisely to the current disaster. It was a MISTAKE to encourage farmers to “get big or get out” and “plant fence row to fence row,” to subsidize farmers to grow commodity crops that now end up as processed food for our overweight consumers. It seemed like a good idea, but it was not long ago that we started on this path, and it’s time to admit the error and get the hell off it.

Yes, change takes time but we are motivated like never before! It’s not just the potential (and actual) political turmoil that is fueling (no pun intended) the turnaround. The second area of food-as-national-security-issue that Michael Pollan didn’t entirely elucidate is that when our citizens consume ourselves into a stupor on industrial commodity foods, it’s hard to be on the cutting edge of anything.

In William Dufty’s classic, Sugar Blues, he recounts how there was a German botanist, Leonhard Rauwolf, who travelled in 1573 through the heart of the Ottoman empire– the first human civilization to really get a taste for cane sugar in a big way. Rauwolf wrote, “The Turks use themselves to gluttony and are no more so free and courageous to go against their enemies to fight as they had been in former ages.” Dufty goes on to speculate about the role that sugar had in the decline of the Arab Empire.

Notice how recent that was: 435 years ago. We haven’t had sugar for very long. In fact, Dufty goes on recount how empires after the Ottoman rose an fell on the sugar trade; first went Portugal and Spain (the Arabs left sugar cane behind when they left Iberia to the Europeans.) The sugar trade started with massive profits and then imploded for each of those Iberian monarchies, not unlike the sugar high and low we are all familiar with after a good binge. Next came Britain. Now it’s us.

In 1700, the average American consumed 4 pounds of sugar per year and now the average is 170 pounds per American per year (and somebody else is eating mine!) We are now using ourselves to gluttony. The reasons are many fold, a combination of personal responsibility and policy that favors the food industry over the health of our citizens, but the result is the same. Our food is undermining our ability to be sharp, to think clearly and to forge our destiny. This is also a matter of national security.

Michael Pollan again; “You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.” In fact, he continues, “unless you (make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities,) you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.”

This is big. Food is huge. We underestimate its importance to our future at our peril.

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