We Are What We Eat-- And So Is Our Society, Of Course

yum yum?

My friend Phil asked me to join him and Go Vegan radio host Bob Linden for dinner last night. I never get out so, of course, I jumped at the chance. We decided on a suitable vegan-ish restaurant in the area, Cafe Alf on Sunset Blvd in Echo Park. As I was leaving my home, a blogger buddy, Hekebolos, called and told me another blogger friend, OrangeClouds, was visiting L.A. and why don't we go for dinner. I explained that I was walking out the door to meet some other friends and why not join us. So we all got together and it turns out OrangeClouds is the foremost food policy blogger I know and Bob Linden can take any problem-- the mortgage crisis, a passing fire engine, the high cost of energy, the problems with the Bible-- and explain it in terms of the propensity of society's toleration of meat and dairy consumption. It was a lovely evening.

My friend Phil promised to write a post for DWT and he even finished a few fabulous sentences: "Medieval Christians killed off the entire wolf population in Europe. The same mentality exists here in a remote 15th century part of America today. Why? Because of a brain defect passed down through generations of witchburners, animal slaughterers and ... because the bible has a scary story about wolves."

Meanwhile I did get a thought provoking e-mail from OrangeClouds-- let's call her Jill-- that included a link to her blog, La Vida Locavore, on which I found a question far more important, in every way, than what the margin of victory Obama is likely to have in North Carolina: Can Organics Save Us From Global Warming. She asked me what I knew about the members of the House Agriculture Committee and sent me their names. I was appalled when I went through it.

My first thought was, no wonder we have mucked up the food industry even worse than the banking industry. Then I thought that no one could even find a committee this bad unless they actually set out to do so. There are 25 Democrats and 21 Republicans, most of whom are unspeakably in the pocket of the big-- and destructive-- corporate farming industry. Most of the Democrats on the Committee are in that pocket too. In fact, you couldn't find a worse bunch of Democrats. There is exactly one who I would trust, Wisconsin freshman Steve Kagen. The rest are a bunch of reactionaries, mostly Blue Dogs and worse. I know most people don't know one of these monstrosities from another, but people who pay close attention at DWT are sure to recognize some names of tried and true villains:

- Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN)
- Tim Holden (D-PA)
- Joe Baca (D-CA)
- John Barrow (D-GA)
- Leonard Boswell (D-IA)
- Nancy Boyda (D-KS)
- Dennis Cardoza (D-CA)
- Travis Childers (D-MS)
- Jim Costa (D-CA)
- Henry Cuellar (D-TX)
- Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
- Brad Ellsworth (D-IN)
- Bob Etheridge (D-NC)
- Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
- Steve Kagen (D-WI)
- Nick Lampson (D-TX)
- Tim Mahoney (D-FL)
- Jim Marshall (D-GA)
- Mike McIntyre (D-NC)
- Earl Pomeroy (D-ND)
- John Salazar (D-CO)
- Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD)
- David Scott (D-GA)
- Zachary Space (D-OH)
- Timothy Walz (D-MN)
- Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
- Charles Boustany, Jr. (R-LA)
- K. Michael Conaway (R-TX)
- Terry Everett (R-AL)
- Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE)
- Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
- Sam Graves (R-MO)
- Robin Hayes (R-NC)
- Timothy Johnson (R-IL)
- Steve King (R-IA)
- Randy Kuhl (R-NY)
- Robert Latta (R-OH)
- Frank Lucas (R-OK)
- Jerry Moran (R-KS)
- Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO)
- Randy Neugebauer (R-TX)
- Mike Rogers (R-AL)
- Jean Schmidt (R-OH)
- Adrian Smith (R-NE)
- Tim Walberg (R-MI)

I guess the best thing a wag might say about this list is that at least it keeps these people and their atrocious instincts and corporatist attitudes off committees where they could do the nation grievous harm. But that wag would be dead wrong. They are on a committee where their atrocious instincts and corporatist attitudes are doing this nation-- all of us-- grievous harm. A feature in today's NY Times (linked above) by Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto gets right to the point of linking the health care crisis, energy independence, climate change and... how we grow, process and eat our food-- is this a coincidence or what?

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy-- 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do-- as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis-- a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount-- from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. 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.

It's worth reading Pollan's whole feature, which is in the form of an open letter to Barack Obama. After all he wants change, right? And there is no more fundamental change than re-examining our eating habits. And like our financial system and economy, our food policies aren't fundamentally sound, or even sustainable, either.