Is A Sustainable Food Strategy on Obama's Menu?

A PRIUS in every garage and a farmers market in every neighborhood!
This is our moment! This is our time for slow food! Or so, people hope
from President-elect Obama.

Obama
has raised hopes he will inspire Americans away from fool's gold-en
arches and toward farmers markets and community supported agriculture
(where people buy a share in a farm's annual harvest). Obama is the
most healthy eater to enter the White House in a long time, unlike
George H.W. Bush who castigated broccoli as he craved pork rinds,
unlike ravenous Bill Clinton, who gained 30 pounds in his first
presidential campaign, and unlike the junior George W. Bush, who, pun
intended, butchered the meat of his message on food. He once said, "I
know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."

Obama
purchased peaches, pears, apples and nectarines from farmers markets on
the campaign trail. Grass-roots organizing in farmers markets helped
him turn Indiana from a red state to a blue state and cruise to victory
in Wisconsin. Physician Rob Stone told the Los Angeles Times, "Obama's
played Bloomington like a violin. Last summer, his people put out a
table at the local farmers market and they've been showing up every
weekend."

In Madison, the Capital Times and the Wisconsin State
Journal featured Joe Melloy, Jim Witkins and their Obama table at the
farmers market, where they gave out $1,000 worth of Obama buttons and
bumper stickers they paid for themselves. "You don't wait for the
cavalry to arrive," Melloy said. "You are the cavalry."

The
grass-roots cavalry as well as wealthy food gurus want to see Barack
and Michelle Obama become American Gothic, even creating a symbolic
White House farm. Michael Pollan, author of the best-selling "In
Defense of Food," wrote an open letter to the next president in The New
York Times magazine decrying fossil-fuel-sucking, disease-promoting
agribusiness, and calling for more support of local foods and farming
that relies more on the sun than "Sunoco."

Obama
told Time magazine he read Pollan's analysis that "our entire
agricultural system is built on cheap oil . . . contributing more
greenhouse gases than our transportation sector . . . creating
monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now
vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge
swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the
explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type
2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity."

But Obama could
not withstand the blowback from agribusiness. His campaign issued a
statement that he "was simply paraphrasing" Pollan and did not "blame
farmers" for obesity. He calculated he could not risk being framed
again as an elitist, this time about bitter farmers clinging to corn
and combines. In 2007, Obama complained at an Iowa farm stop about the
price of arugula at Whole Foods when there was not a single Whole Foods
in the whole state of Iowa.

Obama's nomination of former Iowa
governor Tom Vilsack for Agriculture secretary further leaves unclear
if he has a food strategy. Vilsack is a relatively open-minded
farm-belt politician on alternative energy. But Monsanto's vice
president of global plant breeding, Ted Crosbie, said Vilsack has "a
very balanced view of agriculture."

The problem is that
agribusiness is grossly unbalanced, flooding Capitol Hill with $1
billion of lobbying efforts the last 11 years, according to the Center
for Responsive Politics, reaping $177 billion in subsidies the last 12,
according to the Environmental Working Group. There is so little
accountability in farm payment programs that the Government
Accountability Office reported in October that the United States
Department of Agriculture paid out a total of $49 million to 2,702
potentially ineligible people whose adjusted gross income was more than
$2.5 million and derived less than 75 percent of their income from
farming, ranching, or forestry.

The result is government waste
and grossly unbalanced supermarket shelves, full of sugars, starches,
and fats that are cheap to produce but costly to our bodies and our
healthcare system. Can a community organizer from Chicago support
community supported agriculture? First, he must display the courage to
defend what the likes of Michael Pollan have to say, without apology.