I just received an interesting email from the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at MSU. It is about a petition to the President Elect Barack Obama, suggesting that the next Secretary of Agriculture should be - you guessed it - Michael Pollan. There is even a facebook group devoted to this cause. While I added myself to the group (only so I could post a comment), I’m not convinced this is a good idea. It’s unsound namely because Pollan is a journalist and not an agriculturalist or agronomist. He has not worked for the government or in public policy before. He is good at researching agricultural issues, and presenting them in an easily-digestible way to the American people. But is he really fit to be the Ag Secretary? I don’t think so. And I don’t think the next president will entertain this idea either.

Here are some more likely candidates, as listed by Plenty Magazine:

–John Ikerd
Raised on a dairy farm in Missouri. Spent his career as an agricultural economist at various top universities. Although his roots are quite mainstream, his philosophies have evolved and he’s written extensively on sustainability. His vision is based on a “common sense” that compels us to care for others and about nature.

–Mark Ritchie
Definitely one of the crunchier candidates — which I consider a positive, though it may harm him politically. Ritchie lived in the Bay Area during the ’70s, later founding a fair trade coffee company as well as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, which works to support the family farm. He also did some time as an academic at the University of Vermont’s Center for Rural Studies. Ritchie has government experience as Minnesota’s Secretary of State, which could help.

–Fred Kirschenmann
A South Dakotan and organic farmer who’s been Director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture — a top nexus for ideas and research on sustainable ag — since 2000. He’s a farmer first and an intellectual second — and he’s very clear about that —though he’s written articulately on sustainable farming. Probably still too left-of-center to have a real shot, but if he got the position he would really push for change.

–Tom Buis
President of the National Farmer’s Union and an Indiana farmer himself. The NFU may be slightly more progressive than the Farm Bureau, but as far as I’m concerned, Buis as ag secretary would pretty much mean a continuation of the status quo. But he has the right friends — Buis served as senior agricultural policy advisor to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who’s got Obama’s ear – and that may help more than a willingness to bring change to ag policy.

–Gus Schumacher
Raised on a farm in Massachusetts; studied agribusiness at Harvard; and worked for a long time at the USDA, in charge of international trade and development programs as well as domestic commodities, insurance, and farm credit operations. He’s served as USDA Under-Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services, Massachusetts Commissioner of Food And Agriculture, and worked at the World Bank. Personally, he’s my favorite candidate because he knows how politics work but has his heart in the right place (see his piece on the Farm Bill here).

–Tom Vilsack
Governor of Iowa, a former lawyer who had the briefest of Democrats’ runs for the presidential nomination. As any Iowa guv must, he has strong ties to Big Ag and vehemently supports ethanol. According to the Guardian, Vilsack “understands that sustainable rural development means more than just commodity farming.” I’m not so sure. Unfortunately, his is the name that’s gotten the most airtime.

I’m leaning away from Vilsack, and I have a feeling Obama will lean away from him as well. We’ll see…

OK. So things have been going well, right? Obama is generally pretty awesome. But get this. Brace yourselves. He apparently (gulp) doesn’t like beets. Blasphemy, right? I mean, he is supposedly such a food-lover and loves eating all sorts of daring and delicious cuisine…but according to the Seattle Times, our next president loves a spicy chili anyday but has always hated beets. This is so sad, as beets are probably one of my favorite ground provisions (root crops). They are great just boiled, diced and thrown into a salad with all the regular fixins, or grated and made into any variety of baked beet creations (think BEETZA with a beet crust, or a beet sauce, or a beet topping? take your pick!) … so in closing, here are some photos of beets to make you drool. Unless you’re the next president, that is.

(all photos from Johnny’s Seed Catalog)

So I knew before I moved to the windy city that I wanted to join a Chicago CSA. Community Supported Agriculture is basically an alternative form of marketing food (usually veggies, but increasingly fruit, flowers, dairy and meat too) that cuts out the supermarket or farmers market. Traditionally the members (buyers) of a CSA would pay for an entire season, at the beginning of the season, so the farm can pay for seeds, labor, supplies, maintenance etc throughout the season knowing that they are financially secure. It’s a lovely mutually beneficial relationship between eater and grower, that reconnects people to their food, people to each other, and everyone to the land. Yay!

So I checked out Local Harvest, a great site that directs people in any city in the USA to the various local food options in their area. I found a whole lot of CSAs in Chicagoland that exist during the summer season, but I need some winter food! Although temperatures will be frigid and it will be snowy, cold season farming is a growing trend in the Midwest. Season extension is one of the main foci of the Student Organic Farm at Michigan State University (the incubator for my interest and passion for sustainable agriculture), and there are a number of farms in this area that use a variety of techniques to provide food all winter long.

But very few farms deliver their winter goodies to CSA members. Then I found Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks. It isn’t a traditional CSA, it’s more like a CSAmalgam — Irv and Shelly basically coordinate a number of farms in the area, organize it into their website, and deliver all over the Chicago area. So I found three friends, and we decided to get a weekly family box of produce. Saturday we got our first shipment of delicious local organic food! Here we are, each of us holding up our favorite item from the week:

They also sent us a little sheet of all the veggies and fruit that we recieved. Each item has a name, a farm it’s from, and some cooking ideas. We split up the big box o food, and I ended up getting Baby Bok Choi and Brussel Sprouts (Full Harvest Farm, Hartford, WI), Honey Crisp Apples (Lehman Orchards, Niles, MI), Red Leaf Lettuce (Genesis Growers, St. Anne, IL), and Crimini Mushrooms (River Valley Ranch, Burlington, WI). Here is my share of the items, for a total of $11:

So from this week forth, I will only be going to the 61st Street Farmers Market and Hyde Park Produce to supplement my CSA share. Hoorah for good food!

What a month! It has been almost two weeks since the American people voted in a new president elect, Barack Obama. I am thrilled, to say the least. It is an exciting coincidence that I moved to Chicago, specifically to Hyde Park, just two months before the community’s most prominent resident was voted into the white house. When McCain made his concession speech, my friends called me and we rushed into the streets and (two blocks from my house) to Obama’s street, where at least 50 other Hyde Parkers had gathered to celebrate. One man had brought a big boom box, and we all danced and laughed and…I can’t describe the positive vibe on that block that night. It was infectious. The rest of the week, people walked around as if on clouds, smiling at strangers and not even frowning on the rainy winter days. But this blog is about food and agriculture, so let me share a bit of what I’ve learned about Obama’s stance on these issues.

On Ethicurean, a great foodie website (they define the word as “Someone who seeks out tasty things that are also sustainable, organic, local, and/or ethical - SOLE food, for short”), I read an article a few months ago pointing me to an interview with Barack Obama from the Missoula Independent. I’d highly recommend reading the full interview, which includes Obama’s famous chili recipe, which supposedly is one of the only dishes he can cook!

I was particularly happy to read mention of a great documentary, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, which is all about one of the Illinois farms serving urban farmers markets in Chicago, Angelic Organics. Here are some of the most provocative bites Obama gives on his food and agriculture policies:

Given the busy lives that working parents lead, I know it’s easier to take your children to a fast food restaurant than it is to cook a balanced meal at home using fresh fruits and vegetables. But the eating habits that children develop when they are young will last them for their entire lives. As president, I would use the bully pulpit of the office to encourage parents to devote more time to ensuring that their children are eating healthy meals

On Angelic Organics:

These types of farms can provide an important source of fresh fruits and vegetables to inner city communities that do not have easy access to grocery stores that sell organic foods. Moreover, farms like Angelic Organics that sell directly to consumers cut out all of the middlemen and get full retail price for their food, which increases the financial viability of small family farms. As president, I would implement USDA policies that promote local and regional food systems, including assisting states to develop programs aimed at community-supported farms. I also support a national farm-to-school program and am pleased that the Farm Bill provides more than $1 billion to expand healthy snacks in our schools.

On ethanol production:

I have been a long-time supporter of home-grown biofuels, but I believe that corn ethanol should be a transitional fuel source as we move towards more advanced cellulosic ethanol, which can be made from agricultural waste products, switchgrass, sustainably harvested forest biomass and other renewable feedstock.

On his future choice for Secretary of Agriculture:

I would select a Secretary of Agriculture who shares my commitment to America’s farmers and ranchers, and to developing the rural economy, yet who is not afraid to challenge entrenched special interests in Washington.

My favorite quote from the Missoula Independent interview:

I believe that consumers have a right to know where their food comes from. For that reason, I support the immediate implementation of the Country of Origin labeling law, which will require meat products to indicate their country of origin.

More recently, Time’s Swampland interviewed Obama just a few weeks before his campaign ended. The full transcript is very interesting, especially when Obama mentions the Michael Pollan article I wrote about a few weeks ago. Here is an interesting quote about the economic crisis and how it relates to energy, and in turn, to food:

Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over because there is just too much de-leveraging taking place, too much debt both at the government level, corporate level and consumer level. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s 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, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

According to an article from ScrippsNews, Obama’s capaign website said that he wants to promote regional, local, and organic food systems “by helping organic farmers afford to certify crops, as well as change crop insurance so they’re not penalized.” While I couldn’t find the specific part of the website they referred to (it has probably changed since then), he did say some of those things in the above quotes as well. The article also contrasts Obama’s stance on agriculture with that of Mccain, whose campaign website said he wanted “to foster a “21st Century green revolution,” his campaign Web site said. That calls for research to develop higher yields and more production per acre.” Of course, this would also mean promoting pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer use, and all the other nasty parts of Green Revolution agriculture. Good thing he didn’t win!

Another great site, Family Farmed, as a great PDF factsheet on Obama’s support of local, family farms. I didn’t know he spoke at one of the Farm Aid concerts! He just keeps getting cooler, right?

On Obama’s website, there was a great page that featured a quote about the challenges facing downstate Illinois, as many other places:

I’ve fought these battles for rural Americans - and for ethics reform in our government - in Springfield and in Washington. And I know that what we’re talking about here is not just one policy - it’s about the future for these kids who are going to graduate from Tama High. It’s about whether they can find opportunity here at home. It’s about whether they’ll have a government that fights for them, so they can dream without limit.

In an article from OpEdNews, the author Jim Goodman argues that “Globalization, industrial farming and high tech agriculture have not brought us into a golden age of agriculture, they have given us a food crisis. While Obama has fundamental flaws in his farm policy, he has at least, tried to move beyond the failed policies of Reagan, Clinton and Bush.” At least Obama has food and agriculture on his radar screen, and he is pushing for more sustainable and regional systems of agriculture. He prompts the reader to participate in the public discussion on food policies, and that we must push for change.

A fabulous (as usual) Grist article last month looked at Obama and McCain’s takes on food and agriculture policy. The section on Obama first praises his plan to challenge big agribusiness and the meat industry, and his promise to promote local, organic food. But then the article bashes Obama’s ethanol subsidy plans, and his less-than-novel plan for a $250,000 cap on farmer payments. The article also talks about the Pollan article, and how our next president will be forced “to deal with food issues in ways that break radically with past policies”.

I think our country is moving in the right direction. I’m less apt to move to another country in the coming years. Things are changing, and I have a renewed faith that the future of food and farming is looking brighter every day.