Homeland Security I Can Believe In
from Michael Pollan’s article “Farmer in Chief” in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:
“For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for “better” jobs in the city. We emptied America’s rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America — not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.”
Read the whole article here! With any luck, our future president is reading it, too, and will implement Mr. Pollan’s very logical and persuasive arguments about the direction our nation’s food policy needs to go.
March 18th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Really cool blog. I found it on yahoo. I am looking forward to read more posts.