The Next President Will Also Be the Farmer in Chief
p>Michael Pollan, author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,†has written an open letter to the next President of the United States.
p>In it, he points out that among the major issues facing the new Commander-in-Chief will be one that has barely been mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, as federal policies have kept prices low and food off the national political agenda.
p>But the era of cheap and abundant food may be drawing to a close. And the next President, like so many other leaders through history, may need to confront the fact that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security.
p>For the complete letter, click the link below.
p>Pollan’s assessment of the problem is very accurate. 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.
p>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 1970’s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.
p>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.
p>It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy./p>img src=”wild>/aggbug.aspx?PostID=71139″ width=”1″ height=”1″>br>a runat=”server” href=’/blogs/public_blog/The-Next-President-Will-Also-Be-the-Farmer-in-Chief-71139.aspx#comments’> img runat=”server” border=”0″ alt=wild>
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