by Ralph Nader
After years of opposing or ridiculing renewable energy, the giant oil companies are using a new approach. A recent ExxonMobil advertising campaign puts it this way:
"Oil, gas, coal, biofuels, nuclear, wind, solar....to fuel the future we need them all."
Not an unexpected maneuver from a fossil fuel company that has owned Washington and received subsidies and tax breaks for decades. What is unfortunate is that this is the exact kind of energy pitch coming out of the Obama Administration and most Congressional Democrats. Indeed it is right out of candidate Obama's 2008 campaign rhetoric last year.
Then Senator Obama gave every energy source its due although he spent an inordinate amount of time pushing the mirage of "clean coal" and keeping nuclear energy on the table.
The problem is that all energy sources are not created equal for purposes of efficiency, and the well being of consumers, workers, the environment and posterity. Regardless of their BTU production, different kinds of energy produce different levels of harms and benefits, short and long term.
Take atomic power. Wall Street financiers have been adamant for years that lending billions of dollars to utilities to construct a single nuclear plant requires a 100% U.S. government loan guarantee. A 90% loan guarantee by the taxpayers is rejected by the Wall Streeters. They want a 100% guarantee on the barrelhead.
The well-known physicist, environmentalist Amory Lovins argues against nuclear energy just on economic grounds. He says he doesn't even have to get to the safety issues to recommend rejection. I know no one of prominence of on the other side willing to debate him. If you do, let me know.
But the safety issues surrounding the nuclear option will not go away. Neither the unresolved permanent storage of deadly radioactive waste, nor the national security problems, nor the risk of a class nine meltdown that could contaminate, in the words of the old Atomic Energy Agency (of the U.S. government), an area the size of Pennsylvania, are going away.
Then, of course, there is the missing "source" of energy from the Exxon ad. This is energy efficiency. Reducing waste. A thousand megawatts you don't waste is a thousand megawatts you don't have to produce. The same goes for not having to waste a gallon of gasoline in gas guzzling motor vehicles. Nothing can compete with the payback ratios of energy conservation which includes building and engine construction and use. Yet again and again it is not at the top of the list or on many lists at all.
Then there are the renewables-wind, geothermal, water and all the wonderous varieties of solar. A few days ago, the Sustainable Energy Coalition had its 12th annual Congressional renewable energy and energy efficiency EXPO + Forum at the Cannon House Office Building in the U.S. House of Representatives.
This year's EXPO featured over fifty businesses, trade associations, government agencies and non-profit policy organizations to hear some members of Congress regale them and converse with visitors.
I found the exhibits and their personable exhibitors to be specific, comprehensive and seemingly convinced that renewables are finally, after some failed starts, on an irreversible road to greater market share.
It was not only the advanced hardware and the use of tax credits that fed their optimism. Renewables are branching out in ways that are bringing them nearer to a level playing field with their heavily subsidized and coddled fossil fuel and nuclear "competitors." More venture capital, better tax credits, rebates and various state and local proposals exist to facilitate financing for users.
One spreading incentive comes from my home state of Connecticut which offers a special solar energy leasing plan for homeowners. The Nutmeg State claims it is leading "the way with the nation's first rate payer supporter residential leasing program for solar energy." Catch the details by visiting ctsolarlease.com or phone 888-232-3477.
The point of this column is to demand thoughtful discrimination by our policy makers between different kinds of energy. Some are clearly better than others. From the federal government on down to the state and local level, a discriminatory approach is a must if the conversion to renewables and energy conservation from fossils and nuclear is to accelerate.
The old energy lobbies are very stubborn and have their hooks into too many politicians who mouth the ExxonMobil party line.
There are far more jobs in the new energy economy with far more health, efficiency, and security benefits than there are in staying with hydrocarbons and radioactive atoms.
Ralph Nader [1] is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions [2].
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/16
Saturday, May 16, 2009
The Local UP-Side of the Global DOWN-Turn
by Gregg Kleiner
I grew up on thirteen acres of rural hillside five miles from the one-store, one-school town of Lookingglass, Oregon, where my parents raised me and my four siblings to always try to see the flecks of good in the bad, the stars between clouds in the night sky.
My father pointed out that even maggots writhing inside the carcass of a stillborn lamb were doing important work in the cycle of life, and he said the bats living in a crevice near our chimney were benevolent creatures that erupted in a fluttering cloud at dusk to keep the mosquito population in check.
My mother would sometimes pause in the midst of her non-stop maternal motion of rearing five children to point out the fact that there is always some small helping of good to be found in the bad. She once pulled the family station wagon over on the way to Good Friday confession to marvel out the windshield at the silvery edges on dark storm clouds that were backlit by the sun, and how the silver was like Easter morning and the dark like that day – Good Friday. I still recall that roadside moment when I hear the term “silver lining.” Another time, our mother ushered us all outside into the pasture on an icy March morning so we could witness the power (and faith) that yellow and purple crocuses had to push up out of frost-crusted mud toward the weak light. And when the creek that drained our property overflowed its banks one winter and carried away dead animals, plastic toys, and two brothers who lived upstream and had fallen in one trying to save the other, our mother made sure we all saw the fertile silt the floodwaters left behind in the low spots along the banks.
All these memories help ground me as I watch financial markets disintegrate, global warming accelerate, and workers from cubicle farms to sawmills receive pink slips then queue up at unemployment offices. It is thanks to my mother that I can’t help but try to see the upside of this downturn, as she would no doubt be doing if she were still alive.
I believe there will be many small, good things that come out of the financial realignment and the environmental crises that, in the end—if we as a human race have the courage to make some fundamental changes in time—might well add up enough to usher in a new era: one based more on community, conversation, and compassion than on consumerism, capitalism, and high-flying careers.
Although the downturn will be downright difficult for many of us, perhaps we can focus on the small goodnesses that will bloom out of these hard times, some of which are already budding. Here are a few where I find hope:
* Borrowing Eggs: As oil prices begin climbing back up, we are turning to our neighbors instead of our automobiles when we’re short an egg or cup of flour for a recipe. There’s nothing that builds community quite like the old-fashioned knocking on a neighbor’s door to borrow a cup of sugar or a stick of butter, or a simple egg. And when the bread or pie is baked, we might return the favor in the form of a warm slice, perhaps delivered by a child.
* Peddling Proudly: We are bicycling more, which pushes blood to our cheeks, slows the pace of our lives, and puts us more in touch with the elements of the natural world. Look no farther than China to see how the simple, but super-efficient bicycle moves masses for next-to-nil. And think of all the bicycle mechanics we’ll employ!
* Growing Good Food: Front yards, porches, school grounds, and vacant lots are becoming vegetable gardens where we’re growing food in pots or on plots the way our grandparents did. At community gardens, we’re sharing the weeding as well as the bounty, relieved our children are learning how to grow food before the whole concept is forgotten by a generation reared on buying it sealed beneath plastic wrap at air-conditioned supermarkets. To wash soil from a freshly-pulled carrot and see that brilliant orange, and then taste the sweet crunch, ranks right up there with miracles in my mind. Every child must experience this.
* Clothesline Confidential: The simple clothesline is making a bold comeback, with backyards, balconies, and apartment-building rooftops erupting with the bright, billowing colors of clothes drying in the breeze—consuming only energy supplied by that fireball, the sun. Clothespin factories will soon employ laid-off millworkers.
* Walking Widely: We are utilizing the twin lower appendages of our homo erectus nature to ambulate more often to more places, seeing and hearing and smelling things impossible to sense from the windshield-walled interiors of contraptions powered by the infernal combustion engine.
* Keeping Coops: We’re keeping chickens in backyards where these feathered friends lay eggs with yolks the color of the sun, fertilize their environs, keep pests in check, and eventually become soup for our souls. We are once more waking to the crowing of roosters and the cackling of hens, and our children are learning that meat doesn’t grow on those Styrofoam trays, and eggs aren’t laid inside cartons in two neat rows of twelve at a time.
* Taking Transit: We have more time for reading and conversation as we ride trains, busses, and boats to our more far-flung destinations. We’re mingling at train stations and bus depots, those ageless gathering places that have been overlooked for far too long. Who knows if airports will even be in the picture.
* Community Canning: We’re learning to put food by again, canning fruits and vegetables inside clear quart jars we line up in steamy kitchens where friends, family, and neighbors gather to participate in this ritual of community and survival. When we open those jelly jars of blackberry jam in the watery light of late-January, we’ll ingest the warmth and sweetness and sunshine of summer, our lips a happy shade of purple. And what lovely gifts homemade preserves make for neighbors.
* Live-in In Laws: As housing markets continue to tighten, we’re opening our homes to extended family members, the way everyone once lived. Grandma Grace or an Aunt Emma are providing childcare, Uncle Joe, an unemployed sous chef, is taking care of the cooking and cleaning, Grandpa George is teaching life lessons by telling stories or taking the kids fishing when mom and dad need some time alone to reconnect and tend their love. In our fast-paced society of soccer moms, drop-off daycare centers, and family dinners that have become rare, the live-in extended family is long overdue for a comeback. This arrangement will also reduce healthcare costs, because living in community is powerful medicine that prevents dis-ease.
* Making Music Live: We are gathering more often with our instruments and voices to make music together, in living rooms and parks, instead of only listening to electronic forms downloaded and pumped via earbuds directly into our brains. We’re attending local concerts that cost just a few bucks, instead of traveling miles to mega-concerts that cost loads of cash (thanks in part to those pesky transaction fees). Until recently, homemade music had been a part of every civilization since forever—from caves, longhouses, and mud huts, to the pioneers moving westward. What have we lost along with our live, local music?
* Shopping Mom-and-Pop: Corner groceries are making a comeback, along with the local hardware store and the neighborhood pub, all of them located within walking distance, while those sprawling malls and big box stores in the suburbs silently fade out of fashion, morphing instead into gymnasiums for pick-up basketball games, community colleges, local concert venues or indoor skate parks.
* For-the-fun-of-it Labor: We’re relearning the value of volunteering, because that’s sometimes the only way to accomplish certain things as pink slips proliferate making regular paychecks rare. Working together – for no reward other than sweat, a sense of community, and the fruits of our communal labor – we will survive, and probably be happier.
* Barefoot Baseball: Instead of driving our children all over the region to compete in high-end sports leagues, we’re returning to playing ball in our local neighborhood lots and playgrounds, where young and old gather to cheer the local team members, some of whom might play barefooted, but grinning. Fans are bringing beer brewed in basements, veggies grown in backyards, and home-baked goodies (containing borrowed eggs) and to share on blankets in the shade.
The list could go on and on. And in the end it all adds up to become a way of life that we’ve lost touch with.
You might call me a dreamer, a sentimental soul who’s longing for the old days when my mother pointed out those persistent yellow crocuses nosing out of mud and my father used a dead lamb to teach his children about life.
But during tough times, like those we all now face, I believe it is vital to dream, to see the bright flecks in the darkness, to feel the potential contained in the tiniest of seeds…and then to get to work. Hard work. Now.
Because it is during our darkest hours that the best of the human spirit surfaces. I hold onto a tentative hope that our human community will have the courage, vision, and compassion to radically change our ways—soon: reduce our footprint on this Planet, turn back to community, and do simple, good things for one another.
So let’s get started: Put up a clothesline. Knock on a neighbor’s door and ask for an egg. Ride your bicycle. Bake bread. Stick together. Play catch, in the rain.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/16-1
I grew up on thirteen acres of rural hillside five miles from the one-store, one-school town of Lookingglass, Oregon, where my parents raised me and my four siblings to always try to see the flecks of good in the bad, the stars between clouds in the night sky.
My father pointed out that even maggots writhing inside the carcass of a stillborn lamb were doing important work in the cycle of life, and he said the bats living in a crevice near our chimney were benevolent creatures that erupted in a fluttering cloud at dusk to keep the mosquito population in check.
My mother would sometimes pause in the midst of her non-stop maternal motion of rearing five children to point out the fact that there is always some small helping of good to be found in the bad. She once pulled the family station wagon over on the way to Good Friday confession to marvel out the windshield at the silvery edges on dark storm clouds that were backlit by the sun, and how the silver was like Easter morning and the dark like that day – Good Friday. I still recall that roadside moment when I hear the term “silver lining.” Another time, our mother ushered us all outside into the pasture on an icy March morning so we could witness the power (and faith) that yellow and purple crocuses had to push up out of frost-crusted mud toward the weak light. And when the creek that drained our property overflowed its banks one winter and carried away dead animals, plastic toys, and two brothers who lived upstream and had fallen in one trying to save the other, our mother made sure we all saw the fertile silt the floodwaters left behind in the low spots along the banks.
All these memories help ground me as I watch financial markets disintegrate, global warming accelerate, and workers from cubicle farms to sawmills receive pink slips then queue up at unemployment offices. It is thanks to my mother that I can’t help but try to see the upside of this downturn, as she would no doubt be doing if she were still alive.
I believe there will be many small, good things that come out of the financial realignment and the environmental crises that, in the end—if we as a human race have the courage to make some fundamental changes in time—might well add up enough to usher in a new era: one based more on community, conversation, and compassion than on consumerism, capitalism, and high-flying careers.
Although the downturn will be downright difficult for many of us, perhaps we can focus on the small goodnesses that will bloom out of these hard times, some of which are already budding. Here are a few where I find hope:
* Borrowing Eggs: As oil prices begin climbing back up, we are turning to our neighbors instead of our automobiles when we’re short an egg or cup of flour for a recipe. There’s nothing that builds community quite like the old-fashioned knocking on a neighbor’s door to borrow a cup of sugar or a stick of butter, or a simple egg. And when the bread or pie is baked, we might return the favor in the form of a warm slice, perhaps delivered by a child.
* Peddling Proudly: We are bicycling more, which pushes blood to our cheeks, slows the pace of our lives, and puts us more in touch with the elements of the natural world. Look no farther than China to see how the simple, but super-efficient bicycle moves masses for next-to-nil. And think of all the bicycle mechanics we’ll employ!
* Growing Good Food: Front yards, porches, school grounds, and vacant lots are becoming vegetable gardens where we’re growing food in pots or on plots the way our grandparents did. At community gardens, we’re sharing the weeding as well as the bounty, relieved our children are learning how to grow food before the whole concept is forgotten by a generation reared on buying it sealed beneath plastic wrap at air-conditioned supermarkets. To wash soil from a freshly-pulled carrot and see that brilliant orange, and then taste the sweet crunch, ranks right up there with miracles in my mind. Every child must experience this.
* Clothesline Confidential: The simple clothesline is making a bold comeback, with backyards, balconies, and apartment-building rooftops erupting with the bright, billowing colors of clothes drying in the breeze—consuming only energy supplied by that fireball, the sun. Clothespin factories will soon employ laid-off millworkers.
* Walking Widely: We are utilizing the twin lower appendages of our homo erectus nature to ambulate more often to more places, seeing and hearing and smelling things impossible to sense from the windshield-walled interiors of contraptions powered by the infernal combustion engine.
* Keeping Coops: We’re keeping chickens in backyards where these feathered friends lay eggs with yolks the color of the sun, fertilize their environs, keep pests in check, and eventually become soup for our souls. We are once more waking to the crowing of roosters and the cackling of hens, and our children are learning that meat doesn’t grow on those Styrofoam trays, and eggs aren’t laid inside cartons in two neat rows of twelve at a time.
* Taking Transit: We have more time for reading and conversation as we ride trains, busses, and boats to our more far-flung destinations. We’re mingling at train stations and bus depots, those ageless gathering places that have been overlooked for far too long. Who knows if airports will even be in the picture.
* Community Canning: We’re learning to put food by again, canning fruits and vegetables inside clear quart jars we line up in steamy kitchens where friends, family, and neighbors gather to participate in this ritual of community and survival. When we open those jelly jars of blackberry jam in the watery light of late-January, we’ll ingest the warmth and sweetness and sunshine of summer, our lips a happy shade of purple. And what lovely gifts homemade preserves make for neighbors.
* Live-in In Laws: As housing markets continue to tighten, we’re opening our homes to extended family members, the way everyone once lived. Grandma Grace or an Aunt Emma are providing childcare, Uncle Joe, an unemployed sous chef, is taking care of the cooking and cleaning, Grandpa George is teaching life lessons by telling stories or taking the kids fishing when mom and dad need some time alone to reconnect and tend their love. In our fast-paced society of soccer moms, drop-off daycare centers, and family dinners that have become rare, the live-in extended family is long overdue for a comeback. This arrangement will also reduce healthcare costs, because living in community is powerful medicine that prevents dis-ease.
* Making Music Live: We are gathering more often with our instruments and voices to make music together, in living rooms and parks, instead of only listening to electronic forms downloaded and pumped via earbuds directly into our brains. We’re attending local concerts that cost just a few bucks, instead of traveling miles to mega-concerts that cost loads of cash (thanks in part to those pesky transaction fees). Until recently, homemade music had been a part of every civilization since forever—from caves, longhouses, and mud huts, to the pioneers moving westward. What have we lost along with our live, local music?
* Shopping Mom-and-Pop: Corner groceries are making a comeback, along with the local hardware store and the neighborhood pub, all of them located within walking distance, while those sprawling malls and big box stores in the suburbs silently fade out of fashion, morphing instead into gymnasiums for pick-up basketball games, community colleges, local concert venues or indoor skate parks.
* For-the-fun-of-it Labor: We’re relearning the value of volunteering, because that’s sometimes the only way to accomplish certain things as pink slips proliferate making regular paychecks rare. Working together – for no reward other than sweat, a sense of community, and the fruits of our communal labor – we will survive, and probably be happier.
* Barefoot Baseball: Instead of driving our children all over the region to compete in high-end sports leagues, we’re returning to playing ball in our local neighborhood lots and playgrounds, where young and old gather to cheer the local team members, some of whom might play barefooted, but grinning. Fans are bringing beer brewed in basements, veggies grown in backyards, and home-baked goodies (containing borrowed eggs) and to share on blankets in the shade.
The list could go on and on. And in the end it all adds up to become a way of life that we’ve lost touch with.
You might call me a dreamer, a sentimental soul who’s longing for the old days when my mother pointed out those persistent yellow crocuses nosing out of mud and my father used a dead lamb to teach his children about life.
But during tough times, like those we all now face, I believe it is vital to dream, to see the bright flecks in the darkness, to feel the potential contained in the tiniest of seeds…and then to get to work. Hard work. Now.
Because it is during our darkest hours that the best of the human spirit surfaces. I hold onto a tentative hope that our human community will have the courage, vision, and compassion to radically change our ways—soon: reduce our footprint on this Planet, turn back to community, and do simple, good things for one another.
So let’s get started: Put up a clothesline. Knock on a neighbor’s door and ask for an egg. Ride your bicycle. Bake bread. Stick together. Play catch, in the rain.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/16-1
Michael Pollan: "Don't Buy Any Food You've Ever Seen Advertised"
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on May 15, 2009, Printed on May 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/
Amy Goodman: Energy, healthcare, agriculture, climate change, global outbreaks like swine flu—what do all these topics have in common? Food. That’s right, none of these issues can really be tackled without addressing some of the fundamental problems of the food system and the American diet.
Well, my next guest is one of the leading writers and thinkers in this country on food. Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism at University of California, Berkeley, author of several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which just came out in paperback. ... Let’s start with the latest news over the last month, swine flu. How is that connected to industrialized agriculture?
Michael Pollan: Well, we don’t know for sure yet. We’re still kind of investigating. But the best knowledge we have is that this outbreak came from a very large industrial pork operation, pork confinement operation, where, you know, tens of thousands of pigs live in filth and close contact. And this was in Mexico.
And, you know, it’s very interesting. Last year, eighteen months ago, the Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get that mutation, which sooner or later is about to happen, it very quickly—you have ... so much genetic material coming together, so concentrated, and then so many pigs can catch it, and ... we’ve created these Petri dishes for new diseases. And here we go.
Goodman: And what has been the industry response?
Pollan: Oh, the industry response and the media response, by and large, is not to pay attention to that part of the story. We haven’t gotten a lot of investigation of, well, exactly how do these things evolve and how did these conditions contribute to it.
The other angle, too, is that, you know, as we bring any pressure to bear on American animal agriculture, the tendency is going to be for it to move to Mexico. And indeed, that appears to be the case here, that these are American corporations who have to escape any kind of environmental regulation, have moved their confinement, animal operations, south of the border.
Goodman: Explain how these animal operations work.
Pollan: Well, a pig confinement operation is a pretty hellish place. They are, you know, tens of thousands of animals, kept jammed together. The animals are so close together that they have to snip their tails off, because the animals are so neurotic—I mean, pigs are very intelligent; they’re smarter than dogs—that they will nip at each other’s tails. They’ve been weaned so early that they have this sucking desire, and so they take it out on the tails of the animal right in front of them. So they snip the tails off, not to stop the procedure, but to make it so painful that animals will avoid having their tails bitten, just to make them raw and painful.
They administer antibiotics to these animals on a regular basis, because they could not survive without them. And the waste goes down directly below the animals into this giant cesspool that’s flushed, two or three times a day, out. I mean, ... they’re incubators for disease.
The sows remain in crates their whole lives, so they can be conveniently inseminated, and they have their babies right there in their crates. You know, to go to one of these places is to stop eating industrial pork, basically. If we could see into this industrial meat production, it would change the way most of us eat.
Goodman: It’s amazing, because the whole coverage, it seems, of swine flu is to be afraid of human beings coming over the border, that they are the main problem.
Pollan: Yeah, that they’re carrying it, yeah, yeah. No, it’s not—we don’t—it is not contracted by eating the pork. That doesn’t, you know, seem to be a problem. And some countries have taken that tact, used this to keep out American pork. But that link hasn’t been made.
Goodman: Can you talk about corporations in other ways, like Monsanto, talking about the sustainability of genetically modified foods?
Pollan: Yeah, Monsanto is very much on the attack right now, pushing its products, particularly in Africa, and making the case that the most sustainable agriculture will be intensive production on the land base we have. The argument is that there’s only so much arable land in the world, we have ten billion people on the way, and that the only way to feed them is to get more productivity over the land we have, to further intensify agriculture, using their genetically modified seeds.
And the word “sustainable” is never far from their lips. And they have this amazing ad campaign. Two things are notable about it. One is that the language of sustainability and the critique of industrial food is being picked up by some of the major players within industrial food, either as an effort to co-opt the rhetoric or simply confuse the consumer and the citizen.
The other thing is that it’s very interesting that Monsanto should be arguing that it has the key to improving productivity. If indeed what we need to do is improve productivity, don’t look at genetically modified crops. They have never succeeded in raising productivity. That’s not what they do. If you look at the—the Union of Concerned Scientists just issued a report looking at the twenty-year history of these crops, and what they have found is that basically the real gains in yield for American crops, for world crops, has been through conventional breeding. Genetic modification has—with one tiny exception, Bt corn used in years of very high infestation of European corn borers—has not increased productivity at all. That’s not what they’re good at. What they’re good at is creating products that allow farmers to expand their monocultures, because it takes less management. So, if indeed we need to go where Monsanto says, there are better technologies than theirs.
Goodman: What about companies boasting that they use real sugar, like that’s a health claim.
Pollan: Well, you know, it’s very interesting. Since this book came out, where I argue don’t buy high-fructose corn syrup and don’t buy products with more than five ingredients, suddenly the industry is—you know, they’re so clever. I have to hand it to them. But now they’re arguing that their products are simpler, and there’s new Haagen-Dazs 5, which is a five-ingredient Haagen-Dazs product. You know, it’s still ice cream. Ice cream is wonderful, but we shouldn’t treat it as health food because it now has only five ingredients. ... Frito-Lay potato chips now is arguing that they’re local. Now, you have to remember, any product is local somewhere. Right? This food doesn’t come from Mars. But to think that Frito-Lay as a local potato chip is really a stretch.
So—and on the high-fructose corn syrup thing, now that you’ve got Snapple and soon-to-be Coca-Cola making a virtue of the fact that they contain real sugar, no high-fructose corn syrup, what that is is an implicit health claim for sugar. And that is an incredible achievement on the part of industry, to convince us that getting off of high-fructose corn syrup has made their products healthier. It has done no such thing. Biologically, there’s no difference between high-fructose corn syrup and sugar.
Goodman: Well, explain why you were going after high-fructose corn syrup.
Pollan: Well, my argument about high-fructose corn syrup and why you should avoid it is it is a marker of a highly processed food. I’m just trying to help people, when they’re going through the supermarket—the main thing you want to avoid is processing, you know, extreme processing. And high-fructose corn syrup—I mean, think about it. Do you know anyone who cooks with high-fructose corn syrup? It’s not a home—it’s not an ingredient you’ll find in a home pantry. It’s a tool of food science.
My problem with it is its ubiquity through the food system. You have high-fructose corn syrup showing up where sugar has never been—in bread, in pickles, in mayonnaise, in relish, in all these products—that they basically have found that if you sweeten anything, we will buy more of it. High-fructose corn syrup is a very convenient, cheap ingredient, because we subsidize the corn from which it’s made.
But to boast about your product not having high-fructose corn syrup as being some kind of virtue is really stretching it. And I think what we see here is another example of the food industry’s ingenuity in taking any critique of industrial food and turning it into the next marketing strategy. It’s a lot like the low-fat campaign, you know, which began as a government critique of food, you know, beginning with George McGovern in the ’70s saying we should eat less red meat because of heart disease. Whatever you think of the science of that, which turns out not to have been that good, it was a well-meaning campaign to improve the American diet. Industry came back and re-engineered the whole food system to have less fat in it and no fat in it. And that campaign sold a lot more food. And, in fact, since that campaign, we’ve been eating about 300 more calories a day, and we’re a lot fatter. So, you can’t—you just can’t underestimate their ability turn any critique into a way to sell food.
So, I’ve had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.
Goodman: Michael Pollan, the Food and Drug Administration is slapping General Mills with a warning over its claim that Cheerios is clinically proven to help lower cholesterol. They say it makes it a drug under federal law.
Pollan: Yeah. Well, good for them. I mean, you know, the FDA has been so lax, and the reason you see this proliferation of bogus health claims all through the supermarket has basically been the FDA has been hands-off for a decade. And to see them tighten a little bit and make these companies prove these health claims—
You know, another piece of advice from In Defense of Food is, don’t eat any food that comes with a health claim. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you’re worried about your health, that is not the healthy food. The healthy food is in the produce section. It’s sitting there very quietly, without budgets to do this research, without budgets for marketing, without packages to print health claims on. So just kind of tune that out.
Goodman: What do you make of the new Agricultural Secretary, Tom Vilsack?
Pollan: Well, it’s interesting. When Vilsack was appointed, I was disappointed initially. And I said something like, this was agribusiness as usual. He has surprised me in various ways, and I have some reason, cautious, for hope. I think he has a mandate from President Obama to begin reforming things.
He has appointed as his number two—the woman running the Department of Agriculture, Kathleen Merrigan, is a proven reformer. She developed the organic program in the department and as a staffer to Senator Leahy back in the ’90s. And she is really committed to sustainable agriculture. This woman will be running the Department of Agriculture. I think that’s wonderful. We’ll see what she can do. She’s up against an incredible amount of opposition.
He made an initial move to go after subsidies that was not very well handled and was rebuffed very easily by the agriculture committees in the House and Senate. He, I think, will do a lot to support local agriculture. He’s very committed to farmers’ markets and developing these local food chains, and I think that’s very encouraging.
But he has a mission to make “nutrition” the watchword of the nutrition programs in the Department of Agriculture: School Lunch, Food Stamps, WIC. Now, that sounds kind of “duh,” but, in fact, those programs have nothing to do with nutrition right now. They’re essentially ways to dispose of agricultural surpluses. So if they actually raise the nutrition standards and make that the focus—
Goodman: What do you mean, they’re the way to—
Pollan: Well, the reason we have a School Lunch Program, you know, it began as an effort really to get rid of this incredible overproduction of American agriculture. I mean, we’re using our children as a disposal for excess, you know, cheap ground beef and cheese and all these corn products, and that the—you know, under the School Lunch Program, we feed our kids chicken nuggets and tater tots in school. We’re using the School Lunch Program to teach them how to become fast-food consumers. So, it’s not about health, and it needs to be about health. So, if he can move that program in that direction, I think that will be wonderful.
Goodman: Michelle Obama’s organic garden, that the pesticide industry had in a memo that they shuddered when they heard her use the word?
Pollan: Yes. You know, I think her garden is actually a significant development. I mean, you can dismiss it as symbolic politics, but in fact symbols are important. And the word “organic” are fighting words in this—is a fighting word in this world. And she did not have to say it was an organic garden; she could have simply said it’s a garden. And that she did was noticed.
And the Crop Life Association, the trade group of the pesticide makers, wrote her a letter, being as cordial as you must be to a First Lady, saying, you know, “You’re really casting aspersions on industrial agriculture, and we really hope you will use our crop protection products.” In other words, “Buy our poisons, whether you need them or not.”
Goodman: We’re talking to Michael Pollan. His latest book, now out in paperback, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Your words of wisdom? Your food for thought? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants?
Pollan: Yeah, it’s very simple. It really is. I mean, you know, as a journalist, you know this, that usually when you drill down into a subject, you find things are more complicated than you thought, and the blacks and whites don’t quite work anymore. When it came to nutrition science, the deeper I went, the simpler it got. And by the time I had spent two years studying what we know about nutrition and health, I realized that, you know, all the—that you could dismiss so much of this sketchy science, and as long as you ate real food, and not too much of it, and emphasized plants more than meat in your diet, you would be fine, and that the over-complication of food by industry, by government, is something really to be avoided.
And so, the challenge is, though, how do you identify food? Because now the market is full of these edible food-like substances, the ones that carry the health claims, the—
Goodman: What do you mean, “edible food-like substances”?
Pollan: Well, these are products of food science. These are the stuff in the middle of the supermarket, the stuff that doesn’t go bad for a year, deathless food, immortal food. You have to think, well, what does it mean to say a food has got a shelf life of six months or a year? It means it has been engineered to resist bacteria, pests of all kinds, fungi, mold. And what does that mean? Well, it has no nutritional value for those things. The insects, the bacteria, they’re not interested in the Twinkie, because there’s nothing of nutritional value in it.
Goodman: Can you talk about how the food system affects healthcare and the whole issue of healthcare reform?
Pollan: Well, I think that we are soon to recognize that we are not going to be able to reform healthcare, which depends on getting the cost of healthcare down, without addressing the American diet, the catastrophe of the American diet.
The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, estimates that of the $2 trillion we’re spending on healthcare in this country, $1.5 trillion is for the treatment of preventable chronic disease. Now, that’s not all food, because you have smoking in there, too, and alcoholism. But the bulk of it is food. Food is implicated in heart disease, which we spend, you know, billions and billions on. It’s implicated in type 2 diabetes. It’s implicated in about 40 percent of cancers. It’s implicated in stroke, all sorts of cardiovascular problems.
And, you know, in a sense, the healthcare crisis is a euphemism for the food crisis, I mean, that they are identical. And I do think that President Obama recognizes this. And I think that you will see programs to address this, because that is how you could—you know, a better School Lunch Program would be a down payment on the healthcare reform, because you would reduce long-term the costs of the system. Treating a case of type 2 diabetes costs the City of New York, every new case, $500,000. It is bankrupting the system. And it’s preventable.
Goodman: How is it treated?
Pollan: Well, type 2 diabetes is, once you contract it, it’s $13,000 a year in additional medical costs. It takes something like ten years off of your life span. It means an 80 percent chance of heart disease in your life, a possibility of amputation and blindness, you know, being tethered to machines and drugs your whole life. It’s a very serious sentence, and it’s entirely preventable with a change in lifestyle.
The interesting thing is, why don’t we have really powerful public interest ad campaigns to inform people about this? I mean, the way the government could save the most money the most easily would be having a public advertising campaign about the dangers of soda. There are a great many children that, simply by getting off soda, avert this whole course.
Goodman: What do you think of taxing soft drinks, that they’re talking about now?
Pollan: You know, I’m not sure, frankly. I haven’t really thought that through. It’s probably not a bad idea. I think that the cheapness of high-fructose corn syrup and sugars in our economy is part of the problem and that when we started subsidizing—I guess I would attack it on the other side. We should not be making these corn-based products so cheap with our tax dollars. I think we have to change the subsidies. The reason that soda is so cheap is that we subsidize corn in huge amounts, and I think we have to change the incentives down on the farm. I think that’s really where I would put my emphasis.
Goodman: What about large corporations buying up the farmland of poorer countries?
Pollan: Well, this is going on. There is a growing recognition that the great unrenewable resource is arable soil in this world and that countries like China realize that they will not be able to feed their population on their soil base, because of their numbers, but also because they poison so much of their soil. Their soil is polluted, and they have a serious problem with that. So they are buying up huge swaths of land in Africa.
This is a political disaster, you know, waiting to happen. I mean, Africans are going to stand by while their best farmland is being used to feed Chinese? I mean, I don’t see this as a sustainable solution for anybody. But this is what’s happening.
And we should take note and realize that our farmland is so precious, and we should be very careful about developing it, and we should certainly be careful about letting it run off into the Mississippi River because we’re failing to put in cover crops and things like that.
Goodman: [Y]ou wrote a long letter to President Obama, to the “Farmer-in-Chief,” as you put it. What’s the most salient point in it?
Pollan: The most salient point is simply, you are not going to be able to tackle either the healthcare crisis or climate change unless you look at our food system. In the case of climate change, food is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gases, the way we’re growing food, the way we’re processing it and the way we’re eating. And the healthcare crisis, as I’ve talked about. So we need to address it. It’s really the shadow issue over these other two issues.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
© 2009 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/
Posted on May 15, 2009, Printed on May 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/
Amy Goodman: Energy, healthcare, agriculture, climate change, global outbreaks like swine flu—what do all these topics have in common? Food. That’s right, none of these issues can really be tackled without addressing some of the fundamental problems of the food system and the American diet.
Well, my next guest is one of the leading writers and thinkers in this country on food. Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism at University of California, Berkeley, author of several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which just came out in paperback. ... Let’s start with the latest news over the last month, swine flu. How is that connected to industrialized agriculture?
Michael Pollan: Well, we don’t know for sure yet. We’re still kind of investigating. But the best knowledge we have is that this outbreak came from a very large industrial pork operation, pork confinement operation, where, you know, tens of thousands of pigs live in filth and close contact. And this was in Mexico.
And, you know, it’s very interesting. Last year, eighteen months ago, the Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get that mutation, which sooner or later is about to happen, it very quickly—you have ... so much genetic material coming together, so concentrated, and then so many pigs can catch it, and ... we’ve created these Petri dishes for new diseases. And here we go.
Goodman: And what has been the industry response?
Pollan: Oh, the industry response and the media response, by and large, is not to pay attention to that part of the story. We haven’t gotten a lot of investigation of, well, exactly how do these things evolve and how did these conditions contribute to it.
The other angle, too, is that, you know, as we bring any pressure to bear on American animal agriculture, the tendency is going to be for it to move to Mexico. And indeed, that appears to be the case here, that these are American corporations who have to escape any kind of environmental regulation, have moved their confinement, animal operations, south of the border.
Goodman: Explain how these animal operations work.
Pollan: Well, a pig confinement operation is a pretty hellish place. They are, you know, tens of thousands of animals, kept jammed together. The animals are so close together that they have to snip their tails off, because the animals are so neurotic—I mean, pigs are very intelligent; they’re smarter than dogs—that they will nip at each other’s tails. They’ve been weaned so early that they have this sucking desire, and so they take it out on the tails of the animal right in front of them. So they snip the tails off, not to stop the procedure, but to make it so painful that animals will avoid having their tails bitten, just to make them raw and painful.
They administer antibiotics to these animals on a regular basis, because they could not survive without them. And the waste goes down directly below the animals into this giant cesspool that’s flushed, two or three times a day, out. I mean, ... they’re incubators for disease.
The sows remain in crates their whole lives, so they can be conveniently inseminated, and they have their babies right there in their crates. You know, to go to one of these places is to stop eating industrial pork, basically. If we could see into this industrial meat production, it would change the way most of us eat.
Goodman: It’s amazing, because the whole coverage, it seems, of swine flu is to be afraid of human beings coming over the border, that they are the main problem.
Pollan: Yeah, that they’re carrying it, yeah, yeah. No, it’s not—we don’t—it is not contracted by eating the pork. That doesn’t, you know, seem to be a problem. And some countries have taken that tact, used this to keep out American pork. But that link hasn’t been made.
Goodman: Can you talk about corporations in other ways, like Monsanto, talking about the sustainability of genetically modified foods?
Pollan: Yeah, Monsanto is very much on the attack right now, pushing its products, particularly in Africa, and making the case that the most sustainable agriculture will be intensive production on the land base we have. The argument is that there’s only so much arable land in the world, we have ten billion people on the way, and that the only way to feed them is to get more productivity over the land we have, to further intensify agriculture, using their genetically modified seeds.
And the word “sustainable” is never far from their lips. And they have this amazing ad campaign. Two things are notable about it. One is that the language of sustainability and the critique of industrial food is being picked up by some of the major players within industrial food, either as an effort to co-opt the rhetoric or simply confuse the consumer and the citizen.
The other thing is that it’s very interesting that Monsanto should be arguing that it has the key to improving productivity. If indeed what we need to do is improve productivity, don’t look at genetically modified crops. They have never succeeded in raising productivity. That’s not what they do. If you look at the—the Union of Concerned Scientists just issued a report looking at the twenty-year history of these crops, and what they have found is that basically the real gains in yield for American crops, for world crops, has been through conventional breeding. Genetic modification has—with one tiny exception, Bt corn used in years of very high infestation of European corn borers—has not increased productivity at all. That’s not what they’re good at. What they’re good at is creating products that allow farmers to expand their monocultures, because it takes less management. So, if indeed we need to go where Monsanto says, there are better technologies than theirs.
Goodman: What about companies boasting that they use real sugar, like that’s a health claim.
Pollan: Well, you know, it’s very interesting. Since this book came out, where I argue don’t buy high-fructose corn syrup and don’t buy products with more than five ingredients, suddenly the industry is—you know, they’re so clever. I have to hand it to them. But now they’re arguing that their products are simpler, and there’s new Haagen-Dazs 5, which is a five-ingredient Haagen-Dazs product. You know, it’s still ice cream. Ice cream is wonderful, but we shouldn’t treat it as health food because it now has only five ingredients. ... Frito-Lay potato chips now is arguing that they’re local. Now, you have to remember, any product is local somewhere. Right? This food doesn’t come from Mars. But to think that Frito-Lay as a local potato chip is really a stretch.
So—and on the high-fructose corn syrup thing, now that you’ve got Snapple and soon-to-be Coca-Cola making a virtue of the fact that they contain real sugar, no high-fructose corn syrup, what that is is an implicit health claim for sugar. And that is an incredible achievement on the part of industry, to convince us that getting off of high-fructose corn syrup has made their products healthier. It has done no such thing. Biologically, there’s no difference between high-fructose corn syrup and sugar.
Goodman: Well, explain why you were going after high-fructose corn syrup.
Pollan: Well, my argument about high-fructose corn syrup and why you should avoid it is it is a marker of a highly processed food. I’m just trying to help people, when they’re going through the supermarket—the main thing you want to avoid is processing, you know, extreme processing. And high-fructose corn syrup—I mean, think about it. Do you know anyone who cooks with high-fructose corn syrup? It’s not a home—it’s not an ingredient you’ll find in a home pantry. It’s a tool of food science.
My problem with it is its ubiquity through the food system. You have high-fructose corn syrup showing up where sugar has never been—in bread, in pickles, in mayonnaise, in relish, in all these products—that they basically have found that if you sweeten anything, we will buy more of it. High-fructose corn syrup is a very convenient, cheap ingredient, because we subsidize the corn from which it’s made.
But to boast about your product not having high-fructose corn syrup as being some kind of virtue is really stretching it. And I think what we see here is another example of the food industry’s ingenuity in taking any critique of industrial food and turning it into the next marketing strategy. It’s a lot like the low-fat campaign, you know, which began as a government critique of food, you know, beginning with George McGovern in the ’70s saying we should eat less red meat because of heart disease. Whatever you think of the science of that, which turns out not to have been that good, it was a well-meaning campaign to improve the American diet. Industry came back and re-engineered the whole food system to have less fat in it and no fat in it. And that campaign sold a lot more food. And, in fact, since that campaign, we’ve been eating about 300 more calories a day, and we’re a lot fatter. So, you can’t—you just can’t underestimate their ability turn any critique into a way to sell food.
So, I’ve had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.
Goodman: Michael Pollan, the Food and Drug Administration is slapping General Mills with a warning over its claim that Cheerios is clinically proven to help lower cholesterol. They say it makes it a drug under federal law.
Pollan: Yeah. Well, good for them. I mean, you know, the FDA has been so lax, and the reason you see this proliferation of bogus health claims all through the supermarket has basically been the FDA has been hands-off for a decade. And to see them tighten a little bit and make these companies prove these health claims—
You know, another piece of advice from In Defense of Food is, don’t eat any food that comes with a health claim. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you’re worried about your health, that is not the healthy food. The healthy food is in the produce section. It’s sitting there very quietly, without budgets to do this research, without budgets for marketing, without packages to print health claims on. So just kind of tune that out.
Goodman: What do you make of the new Agricultural Secretary, Tom Vilsack?
Pollan: Well, it’s interesting. When Vilsack was appointed, I was disappointed initially. And I said something like, this was agribusiness as usual. He has surprised me in various ways, and I have some reason, cautious, for hope. I think he has a mandate from President Obama to begin reforming things.
He has appointed as his number two—the woman running the Department of Agriculture, Kathleen Merrigan, is a proven reformer. She developed the organic program in the department and as a staffer to Senator Leahy back in the ’90s. And she is really committed to sustainable agriculture. This woman will be running the Department of Agriculture. I think that’s wonderful. We’ll see what she can do. She’s up against an incredible amount of opposition.
He made an initial move to go after subsidies that was not very well handled and was rebuffed very easily by the agriculture committees in the House and Senate. He, I think, will do a lot to support local agriculture. He’s very committed to farmers’ markets and developing these local food chains, and I think that’s very encouraging.
But he has a mission to make “nutrition” the watchword of the nutrition programs in the Department of Agriculture: School Lunch, Food Stamps, WIC. Now, that sounds kind of “duh,” but, in fact, those programs have nothing to do with nutrition right now. They’re essentially ways to dispose of agricultural surpluses. So if they actually raise the nutrition standards and make that the focus—
Goodman: What do you mean, they’re the way to—
Pollan: Well, the reason we have a School Lunch Program, you know, it began as an effort really to get rid of this incredible overproduction of American agriculture. I mean, we’re using our children as a disposal for excess, you know, cheap ground beef and cheese and all these corn products, and that the—you know, under the School Lunch Program, we feed our kids chicken nuggets and tater tots in school. We’re using the School Lunch Program to teach them how to become fast-food consumers. So, it’s not about health, and it needs to be about health. So, if he can move that program in that direction, I think that will be wonderful.
Goodman: Michelle Obama’s organic garden, that the pesticide industry had in a memo that they shuddered when they heard her use the word?
Pollan: Yes. You know, I think her garden is actually a significant development. I mean, you can dismiss it as symbolic politics, but in fact symbols are important. And the word “organic” are fighting words in this—is a fighting word in this world. And she did not have to say it was an organic garden; she could have simply said it’s a garden. And that she did was noticed.
And the Crop Life Association, the trade group of the pesticide makers, wrote her a letter, being as cordial as you must be to a First Lady, saying, you know, “You’re really casting aspersions on industrial agriculture, and we really hope you will use our crop protection products.” In other words, “Buy our poisons, whether you need them or not.”
Goodman: We’re talking to Michael Pollan. His latest book, now out in paperback, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Your words of wisdom? Your food for thought? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants?
Pollan: Yeah, it’s very simple. It really is. I mean, you know, as a journalist, you know this, that usually when you drill down into a subject, you find things are more complicated than you thought, and the blacks and whites don’t quite work anymore. When it came to nutrition science, the deeper I went, the simpler it got. And by the time I had spent two years studying what we know about nutrition and health, I realized that, you know, all the—that you could dismiss so much of this sketchy science, and as long as you ate real food, and not too much of it, and emphasized plants more than meat in your diet, you would be fine, and that the over-complication of food by industry, by government, is something really to be avoided.
And so, the challenge is, though, how do you identify food? Because now the market is full of these edible food-like substances, the ones that carry the health claims, the—
Goodman: What do you mean, “edible food-like substances”?
Pollan: Well, these are products of food science. These are the stuff in the middle of the supermarket, the stuff that doesn’t go bad for a year, deathless food, immortal food. You have to think, well, what does it mean to say a food has got a shelf life of six months or a year? It means it has been engineered to resist bacteria, pests of all kinds, fungi, mold. And what does that mean? Well, it has no nutritional value for those things. The insects, the bacteria, they’re not interested in the Twinkie, because there’s nothing of nutritional value in it.
Goodman: Can you talk about how the food system affects healthcare and the whole issue of healthcare reform?
Pollan: Well, I think that we are soon to recognize that we are not going to be able to reform healthcare, which depends on getting the cost of healthcare down, without addressing the American diet, the catastrophe of the American diet.
The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, estimates that of the $2 trillion we’re spending on healthcare in this country, $1.5 trillion is for the treatment of preventable chronic disease. Now, that’s not all food, because you have smoking in there, too, and alcoholism. But the bulk of it is food. Food is implicated in heart disease, which we spend, you know, billions and billions on. It’s implicated in type 2 diabetes. It’s implicated in about 40 percent of cancers. It’s implicated in stroke, all sorts of cardiovascular problems.
And, you know, in a sense, the healthcare crisis is a euphemism for the food crisis, I mean, that they are identical. And I do think that President Obama recognizes this. And I think that you will see programs to address this, because that is how you could—you know, a better School Lunch Program would be a down payment on the healthcare reform, because you would reduce long-term the costs of the system. Treating a case of type 2 diabetes costs the City of New York, every new case, $500,000. It is bankrupting the system. And it’s preventable.
Goodman: How is it treated?
Pollan: Well, type 2 diabetes is, once you contract it, it’s $13,000 a year in additional medical costs. It takes something like ten years off of your life span. It means an 80 percent chance of heart disease in your life, a possibility of amputation and blindness, you know, being tethered to machines and drugs your whole life. It’s a very serious sentence, and it’s entirely preventable with a change in lifestyle.
The interesting thing is, why don’t we have really powerful public interest ad campaigns to inform people about this? I mean, the way the government could save the most money the most easily would be having a public advertising campaign about the dangers of soda. There are a great many children that, simply by getting off soda, avert this whole course.
Goodman: What do you think of taxing soft drinks, that they’re talking about now?
Pollan: You know, I’m not sure, frankly. I haven’t really thought that through. It’s probably not a bad idea. I think that the cheapness of high-fructose corn syrup and sugars in our economy is part of the problem and that when we started subsidizing—I guess I would attack it on the other side. We should not be making these corn-based products so cheap with our tax dollars. I think we have to change the subsidies. The reason that soda is so cheap is that we subsidize corn in huge amounts, and I think we have to change the incentives down on the farm. I think that’s really where I would put my emphasis.
Goodman: What about large corporations buying up the farmland of poorer countries?
Pollan: Well, this is going on. There is a growing recognition that the great unrenewable resource is arable soil in this world and that countries like China realize that they will not be able to feed their population on their soil base, because of their numbers, but also because they poison so much of their soil. Their soil is polluted, and they have a serious problem with that. So they are buying up huge swaths of land in Africa.
This is a political disaster, you know, waiting to happen. I mean, Africans are going to stand by while their best farmland is being used to feed Chinese? I mean, I don’t see this as a sustainable solution for anybody. But this is what’s happening.
And we should take note and realize that our farmland is so precious, and we should be very careful about developing it, and we should certainly be careful about letting it run off into the Mississippi River because we’re failing to put in cover crops and things like that.
Goodman: [Y]ou wrote a long letter to President Obama, to the “Farmer-in-Chief,” as you put it. What’s the most salient point in it?
Pollan: The most salient point is simply, you are not going to be able to tackle either the healthcare crisis or climate change unless you look at our food system. In the case of climate change, food is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gases, the way we’re growing food, the way we’re processing it and the way we’re eating. And the healthcare crisis, as I’ve talked about. So we need to address it. It’s really the shadow issue over these other two issues.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
© 2009 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/
Howard Zinn: Changing Obama's Military Mindset
By Howard Zinn, The Progressive
Posted on May 15, 2009, Printed on May 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140035/
We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too—he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician.
If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you—the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it.
From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.
Lieberman—who, as you know, was and is a war lover—was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.
It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.
Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.
I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought—and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents—Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative—followed this thread.
The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.
We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he’s been in office only a short time.
Some people might say, “Well, what do you expect?”
And the answer is that we expect a lot.
People say, “What, are you a dreamer?”
And the answer is, yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.
We better hold on to that dream—because if we don’t, we’ll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don’t want.
Be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we’ve had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn’t give people free health care; let the market decide.
Which is what the market has been doing—and that’s why we have forty-eight million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are two million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can’t pay their rent. Leave things to the market, and there are thirty-five million people who go hungry.
You can’t leave it to the market. If you’re facing an economic crisis like we’re facing now, you can’t do what was done in the past. You can’t pour money into the upper levels of the country—and into the banks and corporations—and hope that it somehow trickles down.
What was one of the first things that happened when the Bush Administration saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that caused this crisis.
This was when the Presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me to see Obama standing there, endorsing this huge bailout to the corporations.
What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren’t poverty stricken. The CEOs aren’t poverty stricken. But there are people who are out of work. There are people who can’t pay their mortgages. Let’s take $700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let’s take $1 trillion, let’s take $2 trillion.
Let’s take this money and give it directly to the people who need it. Give it to the people who have to pay their mortgages. Nobody should be evicted. Nobody should be left with their belongings out on the street.
Obama wants to spend perhaps a trillion more on the banks. Like Bush, he’s not giving it directly to homeowners. Unlike the Republicans, Obama also wants to spend $800 billion for his economic stimulus plan. Which is good—the idea of a stimulus is good. But if you look closely at the plan, too much of it goes through the market, through corporations.
It gives tax breaks to businesses, hoping that they’ll hire people. No—if people need jobs, you don’t give money to the corporations, hoping that maybe jobs will be created. You give people work immediately.
A lot of people don’t know the history of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal didn’t go far enough, but it had some very good ideas. And the reason the New Deal came to these good ideas was because there was huge agitation in this country, and Roosevelt had to react. So what did he do? He took billions of dollars and said the government was going to hire people. You’re out of work? The government has a job for you.
As a result of this, lots of very wonderful work was done all over the country. Several million young people were put into the Civilian Conservation Corps. They went around the country, building bridges and roads and playgrounds, and doing remarkable things.
The government created a federal arts program. It wasn’t going to wait for the markets to decide that. The government set up a program and hired thousands of unemployed artists: playwrights, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers. What was the result? The result was the production of 200,000 pieces of art. Today, around the country, there are thousands of murals painted by people in the WPA program. Plays were put on all over the country at very cheap prices, so that people who had never seen a play in their lives were able to afford to go.
And that’s just a glimmer of what could be done. The government has to represent the people’s needs. The government can’t give the job of representing the people’s needs to corporations and the banks, because they don’t care about the people’s needs. They only care about profit.
In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise—and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.
Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, “It’s not just that we have to get out of Iraq.” He said “get out of Iraq,” and we mustn’t forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq—not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.
But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: “It’s not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq.”
What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?
It’s the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers—that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.
It’s the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we’ve been at bringing democracy all over the world.
Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.
Obama is a very smart guy, and surely he must know some of the history. You don’t have to know a lot to know the history of Afghanistan has been decades and decades and decades and decades of Western powers trying to impose their will on Afghanistan by force: the English, the Russians, and now the Americans. What has been the result? The result has been a ruined country.
This is the mindset that sends 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that says, as Obama has, that we’ve got to have a bigger military. My heart sank when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half or some fraction? No.
We have military bases in more than a hundred countries. We have fourteen military bases on Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But the people don’t really want us there. There have been huge demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base. There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.
One of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to send Predator missiles to bomb Pakistan. People died. The claim is, “Oh, we’re very precise with our weapons. We have the latest equipment. We can target anywhere and hit just what we want.”
This is the mindset of technological infatuation. Yes, they can actually decide that they’re going to bomb this one house. But there’s one problem: They don’t know who’s in the house. They can hit one car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who’s in the car? No.
And later—after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies have been taken out of the house—they tell you, “Well, there were three suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there’s seven other people killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists.”
But notice that the word is “suspected.” The truth is they don’t know who the terrorists are.
So, yes, we have to get out of the mindset that got us into Iraq, but we’ve got to identify that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him, to renounce that mindset. We’re the ones who have to tell him, “No, you’re on the wrong course with this militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won’t accomplish anything that way, and we’ll remain a hated country in the world.”
Obama has talked about a vision for this country. You have to have a vision, and now I want to tell Obama what his vision should be.
The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won’t even say loved—it’ll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we’ve withdrawn our military bases from all these countries.
We don’t need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and—this is part of the emancipation—you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn’t have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can’t pay their rent, build child care centers.
Let’s use the money to help other people around the world, not to send bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need helicopters to save people’s lives, and the helicopters are over in the Middle East, bombing and strafing people.
What’s required is a total turnaround. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That’s what we need.
This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn’t be easily satisfied and say, “Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect.”
But you don’t respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.
Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he’s surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.
We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, “Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons.” No, we have to speak our minds.
This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, “Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view.” Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, “We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us.”
And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.” Thanks to Alex Read and Matt Korn for transcribing Zinn’s talk on February 2 at the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., from which this is adapted.
© 2009 The Progressive All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140035/
Posted on May 15, 2009, Printed on May 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140035/
We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too—he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician.
If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you—the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it.
From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.
Lieberman—who, as you know, was and is a war lover—was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.
It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.
Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.
I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought—and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents—Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative—followed this thread.
The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.
We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he’s been in office only a short time.
Some people might say, “Well, what do you expect?”
And the answer is that we expect a lot.
People say, “What, are you a dreamer?”
And the answer is, yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.
We better hold on to that dream—because if we don’t, we’ll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don’t want.
Be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we’ve had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn’t give people free health care; let the market decide.
Which is what the market has been doing—and that’s why we have forty-eight million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are two million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can’t pay their rent. Leave things to the market, and there are thirty-five million people who go hungry.
You can’t leave it to the market. If you’re facing an economic crisis like we’re facing now, you can’t do what was done in the past. You can’t pour money into the upper levels of the country—and into the banks and corporations—and hope that it somehow trickles down.
What was one of the first things that happened when the Bush Administration saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that caused this crisis.
This was when the Presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me to see Obama standing there, endorsing this huge bailout to the corporations.
What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren’t poverty stricken. The CEOs aren’t poverty stricken. But there are people who are out of work. There are people who can’t pay their mortgages. Let’s take $700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let’s take $1 trillion, let’s take $2 trillion.
Let’s take this money and give it directly to the people who need it. Give it to the people who have to pay their mortgages. Nobody should be evicted. Nobody should be left with their belongings out on the street.
Obama wants to spend perhaps a trillion more on the banks. Like Bush, he’s not giving it directly to homeowners. Unlike the Republicans, Obama also wants to spend $800 billion for his economic stimulus plan. Which is good—the idea of a stimulus is good. But if you look closely at the plan, too much of it goes through the market, through corporations.
It gives tax breaks to businesses, hoping that they’ll hire people. No—if people need jobs, you don’t give money to the corporations, hoping that maybe jobs will be created. You give people work immediately.
A lot of people don’t know the history of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal didn’t go far enough, but it had some very good ideas. And the reason the New Deal came to these good ideas was because there was huge agitation in this country, and Roosevelt had to react. So what did he do? He took billions of dollars and said the government was going to hire people. You’re out of work? The government has a job for you.
As a result of this, lots of very wonderful work was done all over the country. Several million young people were put into the Civilian Conservation Corps. They went around the country, building bridges and roads and playgrounds, and doing remarkable things.
The government created a federal arts program. It wasn’t going to wait for the markets to decide that. The government set up a program and hired thousands of unemployed artists: playwrights, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers. What was the result? The result was the production of 200,000 pieces of art. Today, around the country, there are thousands of murals painted by people in the WPA program. Plays were put on all over the country at very cheap prices, so that people who had never seen a play in their lives were able to afford to go.
And that’s just a glimmer of what could be done. The government has to represent the people’s needs. The government can’t give the job of representing the people’s needs to corporations and the banks, because they don’t care about the people’s needs. They only care about profit.
In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise—and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.
Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, “It’s not just that we have to get out of Iraq.” He said “get out of Iraq,” and we mustn’t forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq—not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.
But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: “It’s not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq.”
What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?
It’s the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers—that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.
It’s the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we’ve been at bringing democracy all over the world.
Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.
Obama is a very smart guy, and surely he must know some of the history. You don’t have to know a lot to know the history of Afghanistan has been decades and decades and decades and decades of Western powers trying to impose their will on Afghanistan by force: the English, the Russians, and now the Americans. What has been the result? The result has been a ruined country.
This is the mindset that sends 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that says, as Obama has, that we’ve got to have a bigger military. My heart sank when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half or some fraction? No.
We have military bases in more than a hundred countries. We have fourteen military bases on Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But the people don’t really want us there. There have been huge demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base. There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.
One of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to send Predator missiles to bomb Pakistan. People died. The claim is, “Oh, we’re very precise with our weapons. We have the latest equipment. We can target anywhere and hit just what we want.”
This is the mindset of technological infatuation. Yes, they can actually decide that they’re going to bomb this one house. But there’s one problem: They don’t know who’s in the house. They can hit one car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who’s in the car? No.
And later—after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies have been taken out of the house—they tell you, “Well, there were three suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there’s seven other people killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists.”
But notice that the word is “suspected.” The truth is they don’t know who the terrorists are.
So, yes, we have to get out of the mindset that got us into Iraq, but we’ve got to identify that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him, to renounce that mindset. We’re the ones who have to tell him, “No, you’re on the wrong course with this militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won’t accomplish anything that way, and we’ll remain a hated country in the world.”
Obama has talked about a vision for this country. You have to have a vision, and now I want to tell Obama what his vision should be.
The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won’t even say loved—it’ll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we’ve withdrawn our military bases from all these countries.
We don’t need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and—this is part of the emancipation—you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn’t have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can’t pay their rent, build child care centers.
Let’s use the money to help other people around the world, not to send bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need helicopters to save people’s lives, and the helicopters are over in the Middle East, bombing and strafing people.
What’s required is a total turnaround. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That’s what we need.
This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn’t be easily satisfied and say, “Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect.”
But you don’t respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.
Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he’s surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.
We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, “Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons.” No, we have to speak our minds.
This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, “Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view.” Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, “We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us.”
And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.” Thanks to Alex Read and Matt Korn for transcribing Zinn’s talk on February 2 at the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., from which this is adapted.
© 2009 The Progressive All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140035/
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