On the day after Michelle Obama planted an organic garden at the White House, I was at the Georgia Organics Conference at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA. The weekend of workshops — I went to one on worms and another on successes in meat processing — was topped off with 1,100 people gathered under a tent for a Farmers Feast.
The main attraction was Michael Pollan. He was there throughout the conference and presented the keynote address that night. His full 60 minute speech is now available online. If you care about food it is well worth watching in its entirety.
Pollan began by celebrating “our foot in the door and seat at the table” of an Obama administration. He went on to propose an organizing principal for the food movement. He calls it the Sun Food Agenda:
Here’s the core idea, very simply… We need to wean the American food system off of its heavy twentieth century diet of fossil fuels and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine… and water, of course.
To the extent that what we’re working on — as an eater, as a farmer, as a food distributor, as a marketer — is advancing that, is squeezing fossil fuel from the food system, from the diet, and replacing it with sunshine I think we’re moving in the right direction.
How can you disagree with that?
At my table for the feast was Meredith Ford Goldman, the food critic for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. This is some of what she had to say:
Could we, eventually, reduce health care costs with healthy, sustainable foods? Pollan’s answer, of course, is yes. He reminded us that 20 percent of our fossil fuels support our food system — a system that could be weaned and “put back on a diet of … sunshine and water.”
How to do it? By changing from a monoculture in the field to polycultures — going from big, subsidized factory farming to small farms that are rewarded for diversifying crops. It’s not exactly a new idea — before World War II it was how we farmed.
Our current system, which offers no crop rotation and supports feedlots of animals so closely confined that they are overloaded with antibiotics, is broken, and we’ve got to fix it. We have to shorten our food chain, and that may start with something as simple as a wife and mother telling her husband that they’re starting a garden on the front lawn.
The photo above is of an image map of the key concepts and themes of Pollan’s speech (click to enlarge to a fuller view) done live by graphic facilitator Julie Stuart.
RELATED: USA Today takes a look at the new documentary, Food, Inc., which is set to open June 12 in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The documentary takes a critical look at the American food system.
OF RELATED INTEREST: PLANNING AND PLANTING YOUR FIRST VEGETABLE GARDEN