BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL. I'm grateful to Deborah Amos for sitting in while I was away these past two weeks - it's good to be back.
This is an odd Thanksgiving weekend, shrouded by ambivalence. We always have much to be thankful for as Americans: the right to vote, the Constitution, no dictatorship or caste system, the freedom to thank our God or no God at all. But the contradictions of our society are starkly self-evident this weekend. Not since the Great Depression have so many people been so haunted by insecurity.
Look at these long lines of people at a food bank in San Francisco. Some 32 million Americans - at least one in nine households - had trouble at some time in the last year putting enough food on the table. And that was long before the current meltdown. As the economy sours food banks across the country have seen a 25% increase in demand, with middle class families accounting for most of the growth.
At the same time many families are having trouble finding enough to eat, many of our biggest farmers have never had it so good.
The Government Accountability Office - our government's top watchdog - is out this week with a new report on how the agricultural department is managing farm subsidies. Not well, it seems, not well.
BARACK OBAMA: There's a report today that from 2003 to 2006, millionaire farmers received $49 million in crop subsidies even though they were earning more than the $2.5 million cutoff for such subsidies. If this is true, and this was just a report this morning, but if it's true, it is a prime example of the kind of waste that I intend to end as president.
BILL MOYERS: President-elect Obama has been busy putting his team together. His choice for Secretary of Agriculture could be perhaps the most important clue as to whether Obama really intends to bring change to Washington as he promised. If so, he'll have to take on one of the most powerful lobbies in the country, the people who turned agriculture into agribusiness. As "Time" magazine recently put: farm policy is "a welfare program for the megafarms that use the most fuel, water and pesticides; emit the most greenhouse gases; grow the most fattening crops; hire the most illegals; and depopulate rural America."
For a brief moment during the campaign, reformers thought Barack Obama might include agriculture in the "agenda of change" he would take to Washington. He told TIME magazine that the way we produce our food "is partly contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in health care costs." The farm lobby roared in protest. Obama buckled, took it back, and said he was "simply paraphrasing an article he read."
Ah, yes - but what an article! Here it is: nine pages in the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE on October 12. An open letter to the future "Farmer in Chief" - from one of the country's leading experts on food - Michael Pollan. Significant progress on health care, energy independence, and climate change, Pollan told the candidates, depends on something you haven't talked about at all - food.
That article triggered such a response that an online movement has sprung up calling on President-elect Obama to name Michael Pollan Secretary of Agriculture.
Pollan's popular books include: THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA: A NATURAL HISTORY OF FOUR MEALS, and this most recent work, IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: AN EATER'S MANIFESTO.
What you won't find in his writings is a Shermanesque-like statement saying that if nominated he will not serve. But let's watch my guest Michael Pollan turn pale as I ask him suppose Obama did yield to legions of admirers and name you Secretary of Agriculture instead of yet one more advocate of industrial farming? Where would you start?
MICHAEL POLLAN: I'm ready for the Shermanesque statement.
BILL MOYERS: Make it. We'll make some news on this.
MICHAEL POLLAN: It's not from me. It's - this is - I would be so bad at this job.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
MICHAEL POLLAN: I have an understanding of my strengths and limitations. Well, you have to understand that that department of the government, the $90 billion a year behemoth is captive of agri-business. It is owned by agri-business. They're in the room making policy there. When you have a food safety recall over meat, sitting there with the Secretary of Agriculture and her chief of staff or his chief of staff is the head of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
It's all worked out together. So, I don't know I mean, I think that the department, in a way, is part of the problem. And they're also very dependent on the legislation that the House and Senate Agricultural Committees cobble together. And so I think you'd get swallowed up there very easily. I think that and I don't want this job either. What Obama needs to do, if he indeed wants to make change in this area and that isn't clear yet that he does at least in his first term I think we need a food policy czar in the White House because the challenge is not just what we do with agriculture, it's connecting the dots between agriculture and public health, between agriculture and energy and climate change, agriculture and education.
So you need someone who can take a kind of more you know, global view of the problem and realize that it's an interdisciplinary problem, if you will. And if you do hope to make progress in all these other areas, you have to make sure that if the Surgeon General is, you know, going on about the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, you don't want to be signing farm bills that subsidize high fructose corn syrup at the same time. So you have to kind of align
BILL MOYERS: Because? Because?
MICHAEL POLLAN: High fructose corn syrup contributes mightily, as do all sugars, to type 2 diabetes. And we are subsidizing cheap sweeteners in our farm bill by subsidizing corn. And so you, you see, you have a war going on between the public health goals of the government and the agricultural policies. And only someone in the White House can force that realignment of those goals.
BILL MOYERS: But suppose you are sitting across from the new president and he says, 'Secretary Pollan, what's the core idea here? What are we after?'
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, what we're after is looking at these commodity programs for a start that-
BILL MOYERS: Commodity programs being-
MICHAEL POLLAN: Commodity programs essentially the four crops, five crops we subsidize are corn, wheat, soy, rice, and cotton. We'll leave cotton out because we don't eat too much of it, although we eat some cotton oil. And that our farm policy for many years has been designed to increase production of those crops and keep the prices low.
BILL MOYERS: And we have we have cheaper prices and plenty-
MICHAEL POLLAN: We do.
BILL MOYERS: -of food today.
MICHAEL POLLAN: And, you know, the fact that you can walk into a fast-food outlet and get, you know, a bacon double cheeseburger, french fries, soda for less than the what you would get paid at the minimum wage, in the long sweep of human history, that's an amazing achievement. The problem is, though, we've learned that overabundant, too cheap food can be as much a problem as too little food.
BILL MOYERS: In what way?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Look at the healthcare crisis. We're all eating 300 more calories than we were. We all weigh an average-
BILL MOYERS: A day?
MICHAEL POLLAN: A day. A day. We've gone from 2,000 or 2,300 to 2,600, something like that. We all weigh on average ten pounds more. And lo and behold, we have a serious epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, diet-related cancers. All these chronic diseases which is now what kills us basically pretty reliably in America are adding more than $250 billion a year to healthcare costs. They are the reason that this generation just being born now is expected to have a shorter lifespan than their parents, that one in three Americans born in the year 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control, will have type 2 diabetes, which is a really serious sentence. It takes several years off your life. It gives you an 80 percent chance of heart disease. It means you are going to be spending $14,000 a year in added health costs. So this is about how we're eating.
BILL MOYERS: But can you put this on our food? I mean, are you saying, this is primarily the result of what we eat? That we are sick today because of what we eat?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Not well.
MICHAEL POLLAN: There are other factors obviously. A sedentary lifestyle. You know, cane workers in Cuba can eat 6,000 calories of sugar cane a day and they don't get diabetes because they burn it off. We don't burn it off. So exercise is an issue, although exercise hasn't changed dramatically in this period that our public health has declined so much. No, this, you know, when you have monocultures of corn and soy in the fields, which is what we have because they're our farm policy, you end up with a fast-food diet because growing all that corn and soy, those are those are the building blocks of fast food. We turn the corn into high fructose corn syrup to sweeten the sodas. We also turn the corn into cheap feed lot meat. The soy we turn into also cheap feed lot meat and hydrogenated soy oil, which is what all our fast food is fried in. It has trans fats know as lethal. So we are basically, you know, subsidizing fast food.
BILL MOYERS: You said in that article of October 12th and I laughed out loud when I read it. When we eat from the industrial food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. Now, Michael, I don't ever remember sitting down to a meal of yummy petroleum.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, we are eating oil and we don't see it obviously.
BILL MOYERS: How so?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, how do you grow those giant monocultures of corn and soy? As soon as you plant a monoculture, which is all that is lots of the same thing year after year. You risk depleting the fertility of the soil. So how do you replenish the fertility? Fertilizer. How do you make fertilizer? It's made with natural gas, diesel, oil. So we actually have to spread huge quantities of oil or fossil fuels on our fields to keep the food coming.
When you grow a monoculture, you also get lots of pests. They love monocultures. You build up the population of the pests by giving them a vast buffet of exactly what they're they evolved to eat. So how do you protect them? Well, you use pesticides made from fossil fuels. When you grow corn and soy, which are not exactly foods, they can't eat any of this stuff. It's raw material for processed food. You then have to process it. And so it takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food at the end of that, you know, to make a Twinkie or something like that. It's a very fuel intensive process, with the result that all our food together, if you think of what's in the supermarket, is taking more than ten calories of fossil fuel, one calorie of food.
Look, nobody wants to see food prices go up. Nobody wants to see oil prices go up. But we understand that we are not going to change our energy economy unless we start paying a higher price for oil. We are not going to improve our health around food unless we pay the real cost of food.
Cheap food is actually incredibly expensive. If you look at the all the costs, you are talking about the farm subsidies. That's $25 billion a year to make that food cheap. You look at the pollution effects. The quality of the water all through the farm belt, nitrates in the water, moms who can't use tap water because it, you know, blue baby syndrome from nitrogen in the water. You look at the public health costs. You look at the cost to the atmosphere. Agriculture is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases.
BILL MOYERS: You said in that article that we use more fossil fuel in producing food than we do in any other of our activities including driving to work.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, some of the transportation is in that number because when you look at the food economy's use of fossil fuel, which is about 19 percent, you've got a lot of diesel transportation. But it's more than personal transportation, absolutely. And, you know, we don't see that when we look at our food system.
BILL MOYERS: But how do we do this when, as you said that food connects not only to healthcare, and you told us about that, but to energy independence, to climate change to national security.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: These are the dots. How do they all connect-
MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: -from what you just said?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, when you have a big globalized food system based on a very small number of crops, you're first, you're moving food everywhere. I mean, the supply chains of food are just absurd. You know, we're catching so-called sustainable salmon in Alaska. We ship it to China to get filleted and then we bring it back here. We're shipping-
BILL MOYERS: It's still cheaper than if we-
MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. That's how cheap Chinese labor is. We're not going to be able to do that much longer. We're selling sugar cookies to the country of Denmark, and we're buying sugar cookies from the country of Denmark. And Herman Daily the economist, said, 'Wouldn't it be more efficient to swap recipes?' I mean, these absurdities can't continue. So energy is deeply implicated in the system. Any system that uses a lot of energy is going to produce a lot of greenhouse gas. Plus livestock also produce huge amounts of greenhouse gas. National security, well, there's a there's a tremendous danger when you centralize your food supply.
BILL MOYERS: What's insecure about our food process?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, having a highly centralized food system such as we have where one hamburger plant might be grinding 40 or 50 million burgers in a week, where one pre-bagged salad plant is washing 26 million servings of salad in a week, that's very efficient, but it's also very brittle or very precarious. Because if a microbe is introduced into that one plant, by a terrorist or by accidental contamination, millions of people will get sick. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to your food safety. You want to decentralize. And Tommy Thompson, when he was departing as Secretary of Health and Human Services said, you know, one of the big surprises of his time in Washington was that no one had attacked, no terrorist had attacked the food supply because, and this is a quote, 'it would be so easy to do.'
BILL MOYERS: If I'm the president, I'm saying to Secretary Pollan, look, you've come over to talk to me about food and look what's happening on Wall Street. Look what's happening to people's 401s. Look what's happening to people's security, their real physical security is in great jeopardy. This is what they're worried about. This is what they're scared about. And you're asking me to talk about food.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. Well, I think if you if you really care about dealing with climate change, which you did talk about during the campaign; if you really care about dealing with the healthcare crisis, which is going to mean getting healthcare costs down; if you really care about feeding the rest of the world, because we haven't talked about how our agricultural policies are taking food out of the mouths of people in Africa and throughout Asia, our ethanol policies in particular, you can't escape food.
Food is the shadow issue over all those other issues. And so, you know, you're only going to get so far with healthcare costs unless you look at the diet. Let's look at the school lunch program. This is where we're feeding a big part of our population. We are essentially feeding them fast food and teaching them how to eat it quickly. Well, let's look at school lunch. If we could spend a dollar or more per day per child and work on the nutritional quality of that food. And let's require that a certain percentage of that school lunch fund in every school district has to be spent within 100 miles to revive local agriculture, to create more jobs on farms, to, you know, rural redevelopment. You will achieve a great many goals through doing that. You will have a healthier population of kids who will perform better in the afternoon after that lunch. You will have, you know, the shot in the arm to local economies through helping local agriculture. And you will, you know, teach this generation habits that will last a lifetime about eating.
BILL MOYERS: But how do we do this when, as you said at the beginning of our conversation, the Agricultural Department is in the lock?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the school lunch program probably has to get out of agriculture. Let's move it over to education. Lunch should be, lunch should be educational. Right now the school lunch program is a disposal scheme for surplus agricultural commodities. When they have too much meat, when they have too much cheese, they send it to the schools, and they dispose it through our kids' digestive systems. Let's look at it in a different way. This should be about improving the health of our children. So maybe it belongs in Health and Human Services. Maybe it belongs in Education. Don't, you know, get the Department of Agriculture's hands off of it.
BILL MOYERS: Who's most likely to be my best agent in changing things here if I buy your argument?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, here's - if you wanted to drive change, I think you've got to talk to Nancy Pelosi.
BILL MOYERS: Speaker of the House?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Speaker of the House. I think you have to look at the Constitution of the House Agriculture Committee. I think that is where much that is wrong with this Farm Bill comes out of Collin Peterson's Agriculture Committee. I think you have to-
BILL MOYERS: He's the chairman?
MICHAEL POLLAN: He's the chairman. He's from Minnesota. He's being considered for Secretary of Agriculture, I'm told which is, you know, alarming. He's-
BILL MOYERS: Because?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Because he was not willing to touch commodities subsidies at all, not willing to put a serious cap on them, and, in fact, extended them. Like a lot in politics, the initial conditions or rules determine the outcome. If you fill your Agriculture Committee with representatives of commodity farmers and you don't have urbanites, you don't represent eaters, okay? You don't have people from New York City on these committees, you are going to end up with the kind of farm bills we have, a piece of special interest legislation. It shouldn't even be called the Farm Bill. It should be called the Food Bill. It's about us. It's not just about them.
BILL MOYERS: That sounds so, you know, it sounds so reasonable. But once again politics and human nature intervene. What are the political obstacles to making that happen?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the commodity groups, as Harry Reid has said, are the, you know, one of the two most well-organized lobbies on the Hill. And the Farm Bureau which is, you know, purports to represent farmers, actually represents agri-business one of the most important lobbies. So I'm not saying it's going to be easy. But, I also feel I know that there is a political movement rising. It's very young, this movement. I mean, if anyone's talking about me for Agriculture Secretary, that is a measure for how young it is. But it's rising. There are you know, millions of mothers concerned about food, about the school lunch program, about the - what's on sale in the supermarket. There's enormous concern about food safety. Our food safety system is breaking down. There is the security issue. There is there are many facets to this movement. It's still inchoate. And politicians have not recognized the power that is there. And that's going to happen first.
BILL MOYERS: I will make a confession that will show you how hard this is because there is so much human nature at play here. I mean, I like to take my grandkids to McDonald's because it enables me to cheat a little, right. So how do you convince us that we're contributing to climate change, we're contributing to a precarious national security, we're contributing to bad health? What do you say to us that moves us?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the first thing I would say is, I'm not a, you know, I'm not a Puritan about food. And I'm not a zealot about it. And there is something called special occasion food that we have in our house. And it's kind of understood that sometimes you go, you enjoy your fast food. You have your Twinkie, whatever it is. People have done this for thousands of years. There's nothing wrong with doing it. Our problem is we've made special occasion food everyday food and that one in three American children are at a fast-food outlet every single day. And that's where you get into trouble. I, look, I grew up eating fast food and drinking soda and I don't have type 2 diabetes and, you know, knock on wood, I don't have heart disease. But so I think it really is our, you know, how do we handle our food lives every day.
BILL MOYERS: How did you get to from being editor of "Harper's" magazine to a man with dirt between his toes?
MICHAEL POLLAN: My path, I was executive editor of "Harper's." I wasn't the editor. Lewis Lapham was the editor. My path was through the garden. I was a gardener. And I loved gardening from a very young age. And I grew - I like growing food for myself. And that's where I learned about, you know, these kind of things. And from there it was a kind of easy step to kind of - I had an epiphany on a feed lot and on a potato field when I was doing a piece of journalism.
And I was driving up Route 5 in California, which links San Francisco to L.A. And you're driving - I was driving south. And it was a beautiful golden fall day in California. And suddenly this stench came up. And I couldn't believe the smell. And I didn't know what it was because everything around me looked exactly the same. And I drove a little longer. And the landscape, which had been gold, turned black. And it was a feed lot that's right on the highway, on both sides of the highway.
And suddenly I was in this nightmare landscape where there was mountains of manure the size of pyramids, and mountains of corn the size of pyramids, and cows, black cows as far as you could see. And I was, like, wow, this is where my meat comes from? I had no idea. And that was when I decided, you know, I need to, I owe it to myself, I owe it to my readers, my family, to figure out where does my food come from.
BILL MOYERS: Michael Pollan, let's take a break and then we'll be back to continue this conversation.
We'll be back with Michael Pollan in a bit, and we'll talk about what we can do about the food we eat. But first, this is when we remind you that you are the "public" in Public Broadcasting. This is your station, and it needs your support, call now.