Farmer in Chief
By MICHAEL POLLAN
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html>
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Like so much of Pollan's work (see his very uneven book, 'In Defense of Food') this article makes lovely points but suffers from a distracting, big-ass flaw. In this case, it's Pollan's belief (common in neo-naturale-foodie and peak oil doomer circles) that the loss of 'cheap oil' will mean the loss of nitrogen fertilizer and, consequently, an inevitable move into a new age of 'post petrol', 'solar based' farming.
Sounds attractive (and there are farmers already doing it), but hold on; to make nitrogen fertilizer you need three things:
- water
- air
- energy
Of course, during the oil age we've heavily used hydrocarbons to provide the energy part of the mix -- after all, it's a powerful and versatile fuel -- but that's far from essential.
More about this here -
<http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/000302.html>
Also, Pollan describes modern farming as if it's a fallen angel: once, we depended upon the sun to grow our food. Now, we use artificial stimulants, such as pesticides and fertilizer. Because of these props (soon to be removed, Pollan tells us, because the 'age of cheap oil is over') we've industrialized farming, produced high yields and shifted to a life of ding dongs, cheeseburgers and sodas instead of the glistening, locally grown bounty our ancestors enjoyed.
About reversing this trend, Pollan writes:
In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal — not just federal policy and public education but the president's bully pulpit and the example of the first family's own dinner table — to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda.
[...]
First off, I'm annoyed by the cutesy term 'sun food agenda'. Needless to say, all life (except, it seems, super independent organisms such as D. audaxviator) receive essential energy from the sun to complete their life cycle. To suggest that fertilizer-based farming is part of a non-sun-food agenda is over-cooking your metaphor, trying to make modern farming seem more distant from previous methods than is already the case.
And second, I'm developing a new type of food related allergy; it's a strong, negative reaction to baby boomers finding their inner Thoreau. To get a taste of what I'm on about, here's another excerpt from Pollan's essay:
I don't need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one's family and community.
[...]
'Local sunlight'! What a remarkably loaded phrase. Our thoughts will be so 'local' in this brave new world of fresh tomatoes, we'll even come to think of the sunlight we happen to be seeing and feeling as 'local sunlight'.
What I smell in this passage is ideology's cheap cologne. Pollan isn't simply making a case for more intelligent farming techniques (something I wholeheartedly support - hell, everything should be done smarter, with a better design ethic and with our inputs and outputs ever in mind) he's vaguely imagining some new sort of consciousness.
I'd prefer to just re-do the food system in sensible ways, without all the hot air.
Oh and one other thing...
Reading Pollan, you'd think that petrol had such such a massive role in modern farming, that every element of the process was handled by machine. And yet, we have all those migrant workers -- the unhappy targets of anti-immigrant attention -- working American fields and meat processing facilities. Clearly, farming is still very human labor intensive, despite the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Apparently missing this element of modern farming, Pollan writes:
To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food — millions more.
[...]
And then goes into a description of a program to get people to stay in, or move to, farming communities to get the numbers up. Well Mr. Pollan, it seems there already are many millions of people working in the farm sector.
They're just not officially recognized.
.d.