Michael Pollan's proposal for the next president's food policy is long and thick and comprehensive, so it's a bit hard to sum the whole thing up in a blog post. But if there's a takeaway, it's how much of our food production really is a result of current government policy -- agricultural subsidies, safety regulations, food stamps, and even the definition of "food" itself -- and so how much our diets would change if those policies were to shift. In other words, it's not that need to create a food policy. It's that we need to recognize that we already have one, and it's not working very well.The solutions Pollan offers aren't necessarily liberal or conservative. He argues, for instance, in favor of "Agricultural Enterprise Zones," noting that "the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer." This is, in essence, a conservative idea, but a good one. Similarly, Pollan says that the next president "should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat — meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever." Also, isn't it time Americans could choose to eat raw milk cheese?Then there are ideas that fit more neatly into traditional liberal understandings of building incentives into social policy. "Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers’ markets — all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers’-market vouchers to low-income women with children...Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies." He also argues for a federal definition of "food" that takes nutritional content into account. Food stamps and school lunches should not support soda, he argues, as junk food is not food in the sense that we're trying to subsidize it: What we're looking for is nutrition, not just calories. Image used under a Creative Commons license from The PMA. TOWARDS A NATIONAL FOOD POLICY.
Michael Pollan's proposal for the next president's food policy is long and thick and comprehensive, so it's a bit hard to sum the whole thing up in a blog post. But if there's a takeaway, it's how much of our food production really is a result of current government policy -- agricultural subsidies, safety regulations, food stamps, and even the definition of "food" itself -- and so how much our diets would change if those policies were to shift. In other words, it's not that need to create a food policy. It's that we need to recognize that we already have one, and it's not working very well.The solutions Pollan offers aren't necessarily liberal or conservative. He argues, for instance, in favor of "Agricultural Enterprise Zones," noting that "the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer." This is, in essence, a conservative idea, but a good one. Similarly, Pollan says that the next president "should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat — meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever." Also, isn't it time Americans could choose to eat raw milk cheese?Then there are ideas that fit more neatly into traditional liberal understandings of building incentives into social policy. "Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers’ markets — all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers’-market vouchers to low-income women with children...Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies." He also argues for a federal definition of "food" that takes nutritional content into account. Food stamps and school lunches should not support soda, he argues, as junk food is not food in the sense that we're trying to subsidize it: What we're looking for is nutrition, not just calories. Image used under a Creative Commons license from The PMA. 
