MINNEAPOLIS — A long struggle over what kind of milk counts as organic is coming to a head.

The Department of Agriculture has issued draft rules for organic milk that would require that the cows be on pasture at least half the year and get plenty of fresh grass. The proposals are meant to close a loophole that has allowed some huge feedlots to sell their milk as organic, even though their cows rarely grazed on fresh grass.

Advocates for family dairy farms and organic consumers say that’s not what shoppers think they’re buying when they pay a premium for organic milk.

“Pretty much the entire organic community welcomes the long-overdue closing of loopholes for pasture and feed in the organic dairy regulations,” said Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association.

“The controversy has dragged on so long,” agreed George Siemon, a Wisconsin dairy farmer and chief executive officer of Organic Valley, the nation’s largest farmer-owned organic dairy cooperative.
The public comment period on the draft rules runs through Dec. 23.

The issue started to boil over a few years ago when it emerged that a handful of large dairy farms with thousands of cows, mostly in arid western states, were feeding their cows organic grain but keeping them largely confined to feedlots while selling the milk as organic.

The Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute helped lead the charge, mainly against two companies: Aurora Organic Dairy, which produces private-label organic milk for national and local retailers including Wal-Mart, Costco and Safeway; and Horizon Organic, the largest national organic dairy brand. The Minnesota-based Organic Consumers Association called for boycotts and spread the word to its hundreds of thousands of supporters via the Internet. Consumers filed class-action lawsuits.

“We have literally millions of consumers who give a damn and are highly passionate and willing to stand up and protect the integrity of their food supply,” said Mark Kastel, senior farm policy analyst at Cornucopia.

Organic dairy products are a $2.7 billion industry, about 4 percent of all dairy products sold in 2006, according to the Organic Trade Association. Organic dairy is growing faster than the organic sector as a whole, and is an important entry point for consumers who are new to organics, said Holly Givens, a spokeswoman for the association.

Kastel’s watchdog group said the number of big industrial organic dairies has grown from just two in 2000 to 14 or 15 today, and they are producing about 40 percent of the organic milk supply. That’s depressing prices and forcing legitimate family farms out of business, he said.

Organic advocates are happy that the draft rules would require that organic cows be on pasture for at least 120 days out of the year, and that the animals get at least 30 percent of their dry matter intake from grazing during the growing season.

But they’ve got some concerns.

“It’s too prescriptive,” Siemon said. It will be a burden for small and midsize dairy farms like Organic Valley’s to comply with all the detailed requirements, he said. Just one example, he said, is a requirement specifying that drinking water equipment must be cleaned weekly.

Cummins objected to a provision that would let organic dairies bring in conventionally raised heifers and sell their milk as organic. His group says only cows raised organically from birth should be added to organic herds.

Read this in The Chicago Tribune

Consumers Union

(Yonkers, NY) — Amid continuing questions as to the safety of both imported and domestically produced food, a new national food safety and labeling poll conducted by Consumer Reports National Research Center reveals that, by a huge margin, consumers are concerned about food safety, and they want the government to inspect the food supply more frequently and to publicly disclose where food safety problems arise.

“The Consumer Reports poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly expect the government to do much more to protect the public from contaminated food,” said Urvashi Rangan, Ph.D., Senior Scientist and Policy Analyst at Consumers Union.

“Consumers want to know that the food they buy meets the standards they expect—our poll shows that right now, that is not the case. Whether that means that ‘organic’ fish eat 100% organic feed without contamination, or that people know which meat and dairy products come from cloned or genetically engineered animals—consumers want the government to ensure safety, quality and meaning in the food marketplace. The American public wants to know more about their food, where it comes from, how safe it is, and will vote with their dollars to support highly meaningful labels.”

Consumers expect more from the government in monitoring the food supply

While 73 percent polled currently regard the overall food supply as safe, nearly half (48%) said their confidence in the safety of the nation’s food supply has decreased. A bare majority of Americans feel the government is doing all it can to ensure food safety (54%). Eighty-three percent of respondents are concerned with harmful bacteria or chemicals in food and 81 percent are concerned with the safety of imported food.

At present, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspects domestic food production facilities once every 5 to 10 years, and foreign facilities even less frequently. And while U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must inspect meat plants daily, the FDA has no such requirement for other food processing plants. The American public, however, expects the FDA to conduct hands-on reviews of food-processing plants far more often. In fact, two-thirds of respondents said the FDA should inspect domestic and foreign food-processing facilities at least once a month.

More than 8 in 10 consumers strongly agree that when food safety problems arise, the FDA should disclose to the public the location of retailers who sold the potentially harmful food, including fish, produce, and processed foods, as the USDA is currently required to do for meat. Over 80 percent of consumers also want the government to able to require a recall, quickly and accurately trace food from production to sale, and strongly agree that the USDA should disclose to the public information about schools, healthcare facilities, and other public and private institutions that receive recalled meat.

Country of Origin Labeling (COOL)—Americans want to close loopholes for processed food, butcher shops and fish markets

Mandatory country of origin labeling (also known as “COOL”) for meats, fish, produce and peanuts was finally implemented on September 30, 2008 but there are large loopholes that the majority of consumers want closed.

Ninety-four percent of Americans want specialty meat and fish stores to label their products by country of origin. Meat and poultry sold in butcher shops and fish sold in fish markets—some 11% percent of all meat and fish—are currently exempt from country of origin labeling.

Ninety-five percent of consumers polled believe that processed or packaged food should be labeled by their country of origin and that country of origin labeling for products should always be available at point of purchase. Processed (i.e., roasted, salted, smoked) and mixed ingredient foods are currently exempt. CU has developed an online guide to the new rules: http://www.consumersunion.org/pdf/CU-Cool-Tool.pdf.

Americans want meaningful “organic” fish label; Recommendation for federal proposed standard to be decided next week falls significantly short of consumer expectations

Next week, the USDA National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) will meet to decide what the USDA “organic” label should mean for fish. The NOSB will vote on their recommendations for “organic” fish production that currently allows the use of fishmeal from wild fish—which has the potential to carry mercury and PCBs—and open net cages, which flushes pollution, disease, and parasites from fish farms directly into the ocean, adversely impacting wild fish supply, sustainability, and health of the oceans. Currently, fish is allowed to carry an organic claim as long as it isn’t a USDA “organic” label.

An overwhelming majority of Americans—93 percent—polled agree that fish labeled as “organic” should be produced by 100 percent organic feed, like all other organic animals. Ninety percent agreed that “organic” fish farms should be required to recover waste and not pollute the environment and 57 percent are concerned about ocean pollution caused by “organic” fish farms. More than 4 in 10 polled are concerned about the health problems associated with eating wild fish.

Americans want cloned or genetically engineered animals to be labeled; Most would not buy such meat or milk

Nearly 7 in 10 consumers Americans believe that cloning of food animals should be prohibited and nearly 6 in 10 consumers polled are concerned about meat or milk products from cloned or genetically engineered animals. FDA recently proposed allowing these foods to be sold without labels. An overwhelming majority of Americans feel otherwise:

95 percent agree that food products made from genetically engineered animals should be labeled as such.

94 percent agree that meat and dairy products from cloned animals should be labeled as such.

More than 6 in 10 of Americans would not buy meat or milk products from genetically engineered animals or milk/milk products from cloned animals or their offspring.

Americans expect more from “naturally raised” meat standards being proposed by the government

After soliciting public comments for more than three months, USDA is finalizing its standard for meat that could carry a “naturally raised” claim. The government proposes a very limited definition—only that the meat should come from an animal not given antibiotics, artificial hormones, or animal byproducts. According to the survey results, American consumers want the “naturally raised” meat claim to mean much more, including that it came from an animal that:

Had a diet free of chemicals, drugs and animal byproducts (86%)

• Was raised in a natural environment (85%)
• Ate a natural diet (85%)
• Was not cloned or genetically engineered (78%)
• Had access to the outdoors (77%)
• Was treated humanely (76%)
• Was not confined (68%).
• The majority of survey respondents (69%) also did not want salt water to be added to the cut of meat.

The Consumer Reports Poll also finds:

Other Meat & Dairy Labels

Ninety-six percent of Americans agree that meat companies should be allowed to test and label meat products as “tested for mad cow disease.” Nearly half of consumers would pay more for meat products labeled as such. (USDA currently prohibits private testing of slaughtered cattle for mad cow disease.)

Ninety-three percent of consumers agree that meat treated with carbon monoxide should be labeled as such. In addition, more than two-thirds of Americans are concerned about the safety of meat treated with carbon monoxide to preserve red color.

Nine out of 10 Americans agree that meat that contains any irradiated components should be labeled as such. (USDA is considering exempting irradiation of whole carcasses from labeling.)

Ninety-three percent of consumers agree that dairies that produce milk and milk products without artificial growth hormones should be allowed to label their products as being free of these hormones. Fifty-seven percent of Americans are willing to pay more for milk/milk products produced without artificial growth hormones. (Several states have proposed banning “no artificial growth hormone” labels on milk.)

Less than 1 in 5 consumers are willing to pay more for organic milk from cows confined indoors and without access to pasture.

Consumer Reports Poll Methodology
The Consumer Reports National Research Center conducted a telephone survey of a nationally representative probability sample of telephone households. 1,001 interviews were completed among adults aged 18+. Interviewing took place over October 23-26, 2008. The margin of error is +/- 3.2% at a 95% confidence level. A copy of the Poll can be found on www.GreenerChoices.org.

Vienna - Feeding mice with genetically engineered maize developed by the US-based Monsanto corporation led to lower fertility and body weight, according to a study conducted by the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna presented Tuesday.

In the study, mice fed with the NK603 x MON810 sweetcorn variety over a period of 20 weeks showed a smaller litter size and lighter offspring than mice fed with non-engineered maize.

The differences “were statistically significant in the third and fourth litters,” according to an abstract of the study led by Professor Juergen Zentek and commissioned by Austria’s Environment Ministry.

Although in an alternative set-up of the study the differences between the groups of mice were found to be less pronounced and statistically not significant, the environmental organization Global 2000 said this meant that further long-term tests were needed.

Austria has long resisted calls by the European Commission to allow the use of genetically modified food, but it finally had to lift its ban on MON810 maize as animal feed last year.

However, Austrian feed companies have so far agreed to a self- imposed ban on MON810.

The tested corn breed is a cross of MON810 and another variety and is designed to be resistant against herbicides and insects.

An expert panel of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) found in 2005 that the hybrid was “safe for human and animal health.”

Following the release of the study at a conference in Vienna, Global 2000 and Greenpeace criticized EFSA’s approval of the variety and called for a ban of genetically engineered maize.

“It is now vital to keep animal feed in Austria free of genetically engineered maize, and an immediate ban on the use of genetically engineered maize MON810 in Austria is the order of the day,” Global 2000 spokesman Jens Karp said.

By Mark Eisen, The Progressive

Michael Pollan has got people talking. His recent books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, have captured the public imagination, setting off countless coffee shop discussions, dinnertime arguments, and oh-so-many blog posts.

Even more impressively, his exploration of modern-day agriculture and the dysfunctional American diet has prompted his readers to look at their own eating habits with a new sense of understanding and often a desire for change.

Pollan has taken Wendell Berry’s memorable phrase “eating is an agricultural act” one step further. “It’s a political act as well,” Pollan advises.

A lot of people agree. The alternative food movement—organic farming, local food systems, sustainable agriculture, and more—is burgeoning today because, one family at a time, consumers are backing away from the global food network. Instead, they patronize farmers’ markets, buy food shares from CSA (community-supported agriculture) farms, and favor grocers who sell local meat and produce.

Pollan’s books are essential reading in this movement. He details the importance of grazing to a sustainable farm’s operation and the problems of corn as the cornerstone of U.S. agribusiness. But most of all he gracefully chronicles his own journey of discovery in a food world where, amidst $32 billion in advertising, baleful health consequences are carefully obscured.

Pollan’s topics include a thorough demolition of “nutritionism,” the reigning health ideology that offers dizzying and ever-changing advice on polyunsaturated this and low-fat that, often in the cause of selling highly processed food products.

A good diet is really pretty simple, Pollan declares: Avoid “edible foodlike substances.” Instead, eat real food. “Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”

I caught up with Pollan two days after he returned from a book tour in New Zealand and Australia. At fifty-three, he looked fit but tired from the travel. He lives on a leafy avenue in Berkeley with his wife, painter Judith Belzer, and their fifteen-year-old son. He teaches journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, after a ten-year stint as an editor at Harper’s Magazine. We talked over cups of Darjeeling tea in his kitchen. Here is the edited and condensed interview.

Q: You argue that consumer ignorance is essential for maintaining the industrial agriculture system.

Michael Pollan: If people could see how their food is produced, they would change how they eat. My interest in the topic traces to two moments, in 2000, when I learned how our food is produced.

One was driving down Route 5 in California and passing the Harris ranch, which is a huge feedlot right on the highway. It’s a stunning landscape. I had never seen anything quite like that.

Miles of manure-encrusted land teeming with thousands of animals and a giant mountain of corn and a giant mountain of manure. And a stench you can smell two miles before you get there.

Most feedlots are hidden away on the High Plains. This one happens to be very accessible. Then I visited an industrialized potato farm in Idaho and saw how freely pesticides were used. The farmers had little patches of potatoes by their houses that were organic. They couldn’t eat their field potatoes out of the ground because they had so many systemic pesticides. They had to be stored for six months to off-gas the toxins.

These two things changed the way I ate. I don’t buy industrial potatoes, and I don’t eat feedlot meat.

It’s only our ignorance of how our food is grown that permits this to go on. Most people, if they went to the feedlot or to the slaughterhouse and saw how the animals are raised and killed, would lose their appetite for that food.

The industry knows this. It works so hard not to label where the food comes from, how it’s made, and whether or not there are GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in it, because they know very well from their own research that people don’t want food grown that way.

Q: The national organic rules, which took effect in 2002, are credited with creating the boom in organic food sales. Yet you seem skeptical.

Pollan: Something was gained and something was lost when the federal government defined what “organic” meant. The rules were drawn in a way to make organic friendly to large corporations looking to do organic as cheaply as possible and on as large a scale as possible.

For example, the fight over whether you should really require pasturing for dairy so the cows can eat grass: They drew those rules so broadly that companies like Aurora and Horizon could slip through with very large industrial feedlots.

An “organic feedlot” should be a contradiction in terms, but it’s not under the rules. They really wanted to make it possible to have a mirrored food supply. So you could take everything in the supermarket and make its organic doppelganger. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? It’s a mixed thing.

The Chinese organic is a real question. First, how organic is it? You hear stories that make you wonder. The other issue is what you can do within the organic rules and still be sending contaminated product. Because the soil is so badly contaminated in China, even if they don’t put chemicals on their fields for three years [as U.S. organic rules require for certification], the heavy metals are still there.

So what the consumer thinks they’re buying—organic food—may not be what they’re really getting from China.

Q: The case is made that Wal-Mart’s entry into organic sales won’t hurt organic farmers, but will help the movement by creating more customers for co-ops and natural food stores.

Pollan: I hope that’s true. But Wal-Mart is one of the reasons we grow beef the way we do in this country, which is to say with brutal efficiency and lots of pharmaceuticals. Wal-Mart’s focus on low price tended to mean squeezing their suppliers very, very hard.

Wal-Mart isn’t doing that yet with organic. But long term, that’s what I would worry about: that they would force organic prices down not by being more efficient in distribution but through pressuring suppliers.

Q: The organic folks I talk with say that Wal-Mart sells only the most popular organic items and doesn’t offer the wide selection that serious organic shoppers want.

Pollan: Wal-Mart feeds the bottom third of the population. So they’re not competing with Whole Foods or the corner co-op. It is bringing more people into organic.

The other virtue of Wal-Mart getting into organic is the education factor. There are lots of people in this country who don’t know what organic is, and they will learn about it from Wal-Mart.

When I first started talking about the industrialization of organics, there really was a sense that “big organic” would crush “little organic.” But I don’t think that’s what is happening.

They are very separate worlds. There is overlap, but “little organic” is like these smart independent bookstores. They figured out a way to be in a different business. They do events and hand-sell books and have a whole conversation about books that Barnes & Noble and Amazon can’t do.

In the same way, you see the really entrepreneurial farmers figuring out they don’t have to compete with Whole Foods and certainly not Wal-Mart. They can offer a higher level of quality and more personal attention through the whole CSA relationship and by selling at farmers’ markets now.

Q: Newsweek ran a story arguing that the organic market was leveling off because it’s just too expensive in an era of higher food prices. Do you agree?

Pollan: No, I think it’s still growing quickly. The demand is still there.

What’s slowing the growth is that there is less incentive for farmers to convert to organic because conventional prices are so high. If you’re a wheat or corn grower you’re getting a real good price. Why would you endure the economic hardship of converting to organic farming?

It takes three years. You have to follow organic practices without getting the benefit of the organic label for your effort. It’s a big investment to make the switch.

That’s what’s slowing down organic growth.

Q: In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you detail the rise of U.S. corn production and the use of high fructose corn syrup as the ubiquitous sweetener in so much processed food. But your discussion of cheap corn gave no sense that corn prices would soon go through the roof.

Pollan: As a journalist, I was describing what was. I don’t think I made any predictions. But the story has changed a lot. How it’s going to play out is very hard to predict.

A good deal of The Omnivore’s Dilemma dealt with how we took making food out of the solar basis and put it on a fossil-fuel basis. This is what the industrialization of food is essentially. It’s introducing cheap fossil fuel in what had been a strictly solar process of using photosynthesis to grow food.

When you do that, suddenly your food economy is dependent on your energy. And that’s why prices have gone up. When oil went up, that was the shock. That, and using corn to produce ethanol.

At this very moment, there are executives sitting around the table at Coca-Cola, saying the price of high fructose corn syrup is spiking and will probably stay there for a while. “Do we shrink the portion size, or do we raise the price? Do we to go back to the days before supersizing and sell eight-ounce Coca-Colas instead of twenty-ounce Coca-Colas?”

I hope they shrink the portion size. That would be good for public health.

Q: Does the world have a food shortage now, or is it more a problem of distribution and changing diets?

Pollan: The spot shortages around the world are really not so much about supply as the price. There are really high prices, and that’s driven by ethanol, high oil prices, and the growing demand for grain in Asia.

The whole free trade regime around grains is trembling right now. Countries are recognizing that you don’t want to lose control of your ability to feed your population. You don’t want the price of food in your country to be dependent on decisions made in Wall Street or the White House.

Trade globalization has forced cheap American and Brazilian grains into all of these countries. As a consequence, they’ve lost the ability to grow their own grain.

Now they wish those farmers were there.

Q: You seemed to struggle with the concept of vegetarianism and arguments against meat eating.

Pollan: I’m a pretty harsh critic of 99 percent of America’s meat system, but there is that 1 percent I think is important to defend, because first there are good environmental reasons to eat meat in a limited way.

If you believe strongly in building up local food economies, there are places where meat is the best way to get protein off of the land. It’s too hilly, too dry. Having animals is very important for sustainable agriculture. If you’re going to have animals on the farm, they’re going to die eventually, and you’re going to eat them.

But I have enormous respect for vegetarians. They’re further ahead than most of us. They’ve gone through the thought process in making their eating choices. They’ve just come out in a different place than I have.

I think we’re going to focus on meat-eaters the way we have on SUV drivers. There will be a lot of pressure and education to show that a heavy meat diet is a big contributor to climate change, and that there are many good reasons to eat less meat.

Q: How is meat consumption tied to climate change?

Pollan: In several ways. First, it’s fossil-fuel intensive. If you are feeding animals grain on feedlots you are growing that grain with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides. You are moving that grain around the country to feedlots. You’re moving the meat around the country.

It’s a very inefficient way to feed ourselves. It takes ten pounds of grain to get one pound of beef, seven pounds of grain to get one pound of pork, and two pounds of grain to get one pound of chicken.

There is an equity issue, too. If we really have a limited amount of grain to feed the world, and we’re feeding 60 percent of it to animals, and another 10 percent to our cars, that’s going to be hard to defend in the future.

Q: To a striking degree, you argue that individuals in their daily lives can make a difference.

Pollan: I really have a lot of faith—and I know that it’s considered naive by some people on the left—that consumers can change things. I have seen too many cases of what happens when consumers decide to inflect their buying decisions with their moral and political values. It brings about change.

The food industry is remarkably skittish. They’re terrified of food scares and food fads, both of which can cost them billions overnight. So they’re actually more responsive than you would think.

It’s just a matter of consumers voting with their forks for things like grass-fed meat and producers hearing that market signal. But I don’t think you can completely reform the food system by just voting with your fork.

There are policy issues, too. The Farm Bill matters greatly. So I’m not naive in thinking all of our answers lie in changes in personal behavior. The same is true of global warming. Individuals have a lot to do, but we also need public solutions. You can’t have one without the other.

Q: How is climate change a crisis of lifestyle and character?

Pollan: Look, 70 percent of economic activity in this country is consumer—it’s our purchasing decisions. That is the economy. We are implicated in these problems, and we have to recognize that. It’s our lifestyles; it’s how we’ve organized our cities and the countryside. It’s the size of our houses and how we heat our houses. It’s all these things. This is global warming.

We can look at supranational institutions to create a new set of rules for this economy. But I don’t think that will happen in the absence of people discovering that they can change their lives.

I really believe in what Wendell Berry said in the ’70s—that the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. It’s really about how we live.

Q: Are people getting it?

Pollan: On food I have a lot of optimism. I see evidence that people are changing the way they consume. I don’t foresee the industrial food system going away. I see it shrinking.

One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you’re going to put in your body—and what you refuse to put in your body. That’s politics at its most basic.

Marc Eisen writes about food, political, and business topics from Madison, Wisconsin.

Critics of genetically modified crops have warned about “frankenfood” and “superweeds” for years. But today, more than four-fifths of the nation’s corn, cotton and soybean crops are altered to resist pesticides and insects.

Now Frank Morton, a 53-year-old organic seed farmer in Philomath, and other activists are plowing new legal ground in the battle, charging that genetically modified crops will spread and contaminate organic crops.

Morton’s beef is with sugar beet seeds that scientists with agricultural giant Monsanto have tweaked to resist Roundup, the company’s most popular weed killer.

Oregon doesn’t grow many sugar beets, which supply half of the nation’s sugar. But it turns out the Willamette Valley is nearly the sole supplier of U.S. sugar beet seeds.

In the past two years, the humble commodity crop has quietly become the valley’s first to incorporate genetic engineering wholesale.

Morton worries that sugar beet pollen can cross-fertilize table beet and Swiss chard plants, both of which he grows for seed. Each sugar beet flower contains thousands of pollen granules, and researchers have found the windblown pollen miles in the air and miles away from its home field.

“Who’s responsible if it isn’t on a leash?” says Morton, sunburned, earnest and blunt. “I’m a certified organic seed grower, and if (his crops) were to get contaminated with any detectable amount of transgenic sugar beet pollen, my product becomes worthless.”

Earlier this year, activists including Morton filed suit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture to stop Roundup Ready sugar beets. A similar suit that included an eastern Oregon alfalfa grower among its plaintiffs has stopped Roundup Ready alfalfa in its tracks.

Morton began organic farming in the Willamette Valley 20 years ago, growing lettuce varieties for restaurants. He considers it a moral obligation to keep his seeds free of contamination from transgenic crops.

That’s why he was stunned to learn in December 2006 that sugar beet seeds with a protein inserted to resist Roundup were coming to the Willamette Valley.

The Department of Agriculture restricts the spread of genetically modified crops when they’re being tested. Oregon has witnessed that: The department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service fined The Scotts Co. $500,000 last November after Roundup Ready creeping bentgrass spread during field trials in Jefferson County.

Limited tracking

But once the service declares a transgenic crop safe, granting it “unregulated status,” it treats the crop as identical to any other plant. No one tracks whether it’s spreading into conventional or organic crops, said John Cordts, a biotechnologist with the inspection service who wrote the environmental assessment for deregulating Roundup Ready sugar beets in 2005.

Cordts noted that U.S. organic standards don’t require organic farmers to test for the presence of genetically modified strains — only to make good-faith efforts to avoid them.

The valley has long used “isolation distances” between crops to prevent cross-pollination, and Morton says testing indicates that his crops haven’t been contaminated yet.

But the contamination of organics and other nongenetically modified crops is a tough issue, Cordts said — one the service isn’t set up to address.

“Our regulatory authority focuses on plant pest risk or the potential for environmental damage,” he said. “We understand the issues associated with organic protection, but with our regulatory authority there’s not a whole lot we can do.”

Alfalfa case

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer was sympathetic to organic and conventional farmers’ arguments in the alfalfa case, whose plaintiffs included Geertson Seed Farms of Adrian. Last year, Breyer ordered the USDA to upgrade its environmental analysis.

Eliminating the ability to grow nontransgenic crops — or to eat them — is an “undesirable consequence,” Breyer wrote.

The USDA needs to analyze “whether there is some risk to engineering all of America’s crops to include the gene that confers resistance to glyphosate,” the active ingredient in Roundup, the judge said.

Monsanto and sugar beet farmers say the concerns are overwrought. The company tried a decade ago to market a Roundup Ready variety, but Hershey’s and other big customers balked, fearing a consumer backlash.

This time U.S. sugar refiners and their customers are on board, said Tom Schwartz, executive vice president of the Beet Sugar Development Foundation. (Monsanto referred questions to Schwartz.)

A change of heart

In part, the change of heart is because the sugar crystal itself contains no remnants of the genetically modified protein or DNA and poses no dietary risk, Schwartz said.

In part it’s because most U.S. consumers have put up little fuss as genetically modified crops have expanded. Critics blame that on weaker disclosure laws than in Europe and Japan, where concern about GMO crops is greater.

“Many of our customers’ products contain corn, soy or cotton oil,” Schwartz said. “They’ve already got a transgenic product in them.”

Roundup use soars on Roundup Ready crops, growers concede. But use of more environmentally damaging herbicides drops. And frequent crop rotation, including rotation to non-Roundup Ready crops, can help prevent weeds from developing resistance to Roundup.

Growers raised small amounts of Roundup Ready sugar beets in 2006 and 2007. But the big switchover came this year, when about 60 percent of sugar beet growers chose transgenic seed, said Luther Markwart, vice president of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association.

No organic sugar beets are grown in the United States, and the two-year cycle of the plant, with the sugar beet root harvested before the plant flowers, makes contamination unlikely, supporters of GM crops say.

But preventing contamination is tougher when growing seeds. Some advocates say small amounts of contamination — less than 1 percent — are likely and organic standards should allow for that.

Schwartz said his group is “totally confident that GM and non-GM varieties can coexist in the Willamette Valley.” He declined to give specifics because of the lawsuit.

Opponents acknowledge short-term advantages of the modified crop. But they say experience with corn crops indicates that weeds will become more resistant as farmers rely more on Roundup, requiring heavier doses of herbicides to control the “superweeds.”

Roundup less harmful

In its application to deregulate Roundup Ready sugar beets, Monsanto said four glyphosate-resistant weeds had been identified. The company said it worked with local scientists to control them.

Roundup is less harmful to wildlife and fish than many other herbicides. But critics say farmers are using far more herbicides than in the past, and the long-term effects are unclear.

In 1999, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted Monsanto’s request to increase allowable glyphosate residues 50-fold on sugar beet roots, to 10 parts per million. The agency said that was still well below unsafe levels.

Willamette Valley sugar beet seed growers contacted by The Oregonian declined to talk on the record. Bart Edwards, president of Specialty Seed Growers of Western Oregon, said the group has members on both sides of the issue: Regulators are “going to need the wisdom of Solomon to solve this problem.”

Once upon a time, sales of organic and natural products were growing in double digits most years. Enthusiastic grocers and venture capitalists prowled the halls of trade shows looking for the next big thing. Grass-fed beef? Organic baby food? Gluten-free energy bars?

But now, shaky consumer spending is dampening the mood. It turns out that when times are tough, consumers may be less interested in what type of feed a cow ate before it got chopped up for dinner, or whether carrots were grown without chemical fertilizers — particularly if those products cost twice as much as the conventional stuff.

Whole Foods Market, a showcase for the natural and organic industries, is struggling through the toughest stretch in its history. And the organic industry is starting to show signs that a decade-long sales boom may be coming to an end.

The sales volume of organic products, which had been growing at 20 percent a year in recent years, slowed to a much lower growth rate in the last few months, according to the Nielsen Company, a market research firm. For the four-week period that ended Oct. 4, the volume of organic products sold rose just 4 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.

“Organics continue to grow and outpace many categories,” the Nielsen Company concluded in an October report. “However, recent weeks are showing slower growths, possibly a start of an organics growth plateau.”

If the slowdown continues, it could have broad implications beyond the organic industry, whose success spawned a growing number of products with values-based marketing claims, from fair trade coffee to hormone-free beef to humanely raised chickens. Nearly all of them command a premium price.

While a group of core customers considers organic or locally produced products a top priority, the growth of recent years was driven by a far larger group of less committed customers. The weak economy is prompting many of them to choose which marketing claim, if any, is really important to them.

Among organic products, those marketed to children will probably continue to thrive because they appeal to parents’ concerns about health, said Laurie Demeritt, the president and chief operating officer of the Hartman Group, a market research firm for the health and wellness industry. But products that do not have as much perceived benefit, like processed foods for adults, may struggle.

The economy has “crystallized the tradeoffs that consumers are willing to make,” she said. “Fair trade is nice, but fair trade may fall off the shopping list where organic milk may not.”

Thomas J. Blischok, president of consulting and innovation for Information Resources, a market-research firm, said shoppers were not moving entirely away from categories like organic products in the grocery store. But they are becoming more selective, buying four or five products instead of seven or eight, he said.

Mr. Blischok conducted a survey of 1,000 consumers in the first half of the year and found that nearly two-thirds said they were cutting back on nonessential groceries and nearly half said they were buying fewer organic products because they were too expensive. Such consumer attitudes have compounded problems for Whole Foods Market, the Austin, Tex., chain that served as a launching pad for many organic and natural brands. The company’s stock has dropped by more than 70 percent since the first of the year, and analysts expect more grim news when fourth-quarter earnings are announced next week.

Recently in Boston, on the sprawling convention floor of the Natural Products Expo East, some vendors said they had been hurt by the economic malaise and others said they had not yet felt the impact.

Several of them noted that Whole Foods Market faces a broad array of problems, including increased competition from traditional grocers, and should not be viewed as a proxy for the whole industry. But many also worried that if the economy continues to flounder, consumers — particularly those who only occasionally shop for their products — may decide they can no longer afford to let their conscience dictate their shopping list.

Theresa Marquez, the chief marketing executive for Organic Valley, which sells primarily dairy products, said she was not worried about core customers because they were so committed to buying organic.

“I’m not sure the periphery — those that purchase perhaps only four or so times a month — will break the industry,” she said in an e-mail conversation after the convention. “But I am concerned that those periphery customers are important to the growth of the industry and without them, organic growth is sure to go flat.”

Organic Valley’s sales have slowed in the last four months, in part because of price increases, company officials said.

Robert Atallah, the owner of Cedarlane Foods, which makes organic and natural frozen meals, said his business had slowed in the last 18 months, a problem he attributed to increased competition and the economy. He said that he believed a newly developed line of products could help sales but cannot convince buyers for grocery chains to commit.

“The morale of buyers is so low, they don’t want to buy anything,” he said. “It’s a sick feeling all the way around. People don’t know if their job is going to be there.”

But others said they had not yet noticed a slowdown and were optimistic that sales would remain steady — or possibly improve — as consumers ate fewer meals in restaurants and devoted more time to cooking. Some store-brand manufacturers said they were thriving as consumers looked for cheaper alternatives to branded products.

“People aren’t going on vacation, they aren’t going to buy a car, so maybe they’ll buy a luxury item that is affordable,” said Dary Goodrich, chocolate products manager for Equal Exchange, a worker-owned fair trade organization offering tea, coffee and chocolate from small-scale farmers. “Right now, we aren’t seeing a slowdown, but it’s a concern.”

In interviews with consumers around the country, some said they were spending as much or more at the grocery store, including on organic products, in part because they have curbed restaurant meals. Karen Jenson, 35, said she was buying as much organic food but shopping at four different stores to find deals.

“The apples right now are really cheap here because they are in season,” she said, standing outside the Linden Hills Co-op in Minneapolis.

But some others said they were cutting back on organic food to save money.

Joni Heard, a 29-year-old mother of two who lives in central Florida, said that in the past she would buy organic milk, cheese and produce but had cut back because it was too expensive.

“I’m a stay-at-home mom and my husband — you never know if he’s going to be laid off,” she said in an interview, explaining that her husband works in construction. “I can’t justify spending $2 or $3 more for a single item.”

***********************************************************

And a note from Cornucopia’s Senior Farm Policy Analyst, Mark Kastel:

Before and after my speech at Western Organic Dairy Producers Alliance, last week, I met with buyers and management, and conducted staff training/update, at five different co-ops in Seattle and Portland. I also met with top management with two organic dairy processors.


None of them had experienced sales declines. Some were actually still experiencing quite aggressive growth while others were experiencing a noticeable flattening of sales. But everyone was universally concerned, as we all should be. These are difficult times. Particularly challenging for organic dairy producers who have already seen their margins pinched.

I can remember back in my days working for International Harvester; one of our competitors, the Caterpillar Tractor Company, used to use the headline in their institutional advertising, “There are no simple answers, only intelligent alternatives.”

Since you are what you eat, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is proposing stricter grazing standards for cows certified to produce organic dairy products, closing loopholes that allowed some operators to cut corners.

Regulators found that some producers, though certified organic, were cutting corners on the standards because the current rule doesn’t define what “access to pasture” means. Some dairies didn’t give grazing time to cows that had just given birth or wouldn’t let cows out to pasture in the rain.

The Oct. 24 proposal specifies that organic livestock, those raised free of hormones, antibiotics or pesticide-treated grain, must be allowed to graze in a pasture at least 120 days a year. Thirty percent of the cows’ feed must be from such grazing, rather than being fed organically produced food in a feedlot or an indoor facility.

The change, eight years in the making, is significant because consumers pay up to twice as much for organic milk, whose sales are growing but are only about 6 percent of the $17 billion spent annually on milk.

“It’s a big win for organic integrity,” said Samuel Fromartz, author of Organic Inc., a book that examines the organic food industry. “A lot of smaller farmers thought the pasture definition was a big loophole that you could walk 5,000 Holsteins through.”

There are about 1,800 dairies with some 87,000 organic dairy cows in the United States, more than 93 percent of them small operations in the Northeast or Midwest, according to the 26-page proposal. Though only 7 percent of the farms are in the West, they account for a third of the production.

“Some producers, with the approval of their certifying agents have used other provisions within the regulations to avoid or minimize the role of pasture,” the Agriculture Marketing Service said.

Some organic supporters, led by the Cornucopia Institute, an organic advocacy organization, said that industrial-size dairies that supply some of the country’s largest retailers with private-label brand organic milk were skirting the standards. That let the companies lower production costs and gain an unfair advantage over smaller producers.

“It’s inexcusable they are not enforcing this program, which has hurt the ethical players in this business,” said Mark Kastel, senior farm policy analyst at Cornucopia, referring to agriculture officials.

Since 2005, the agency overseeing the organic program has received 11 complaints requesting enforcement actions against big producers. The dairies have been accused of over-milking their cows, restocking herds with cows that aren’t certified organic and skimping on fresh pasture.

Cornucopia, a Wisconsin-based institute, filed a complaint in 2005 against Aurora Organic Dairy of Boulder, Colo., which has five farms in Colorado and Texas where 16,000 cows produce organic milk for private-label supermarket and retail brands. With sales of about $100 million annually, Aurora said it accounts for up to 10 percent of the U.S. organic milk market.

The department found 14 willful violations by Aurora and proposed revoking its organic certification. The company agreed instead last year to make changes to its operations under a consent agreement.

“These were allegations, not violations of organic standards,” said Sonja Tuitele, spokeswoman for Aurora. “The activists are opposed to scale and the campaign they have waged is not necessarily based on fact.”

The dairy also is fighting a class-action lawsuit filed last fall. The complaint alleges that consumers were defrauded, even though the milk carried an organic seal of approval issued by USDA.

Aurora said it now publishes data on how many acres of pasture it owns and how long cows graze on that pasture. It also has added organic pasture to its farms, Tuitele said.

The agency is taking comments on the proposal until Dec. 23. A preliminary proposal on stricter grazing requirements in 2006 attracted about 250 comments from consumers, trade groups, retailers and producers.

Though the proposal addresses the “access-to-pasture” problem, some organic farmers say they worry that new issues may slow progress on the rule. For the first time, the agency says it is considering adding bees and aquatic species as organic “livestock.” And it includes provisions about beef cattle and whether non-organic heifers can continue to be used as replacements in a herd.

“There is some fear that big industry packed the rule to slow it down,” said Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association in Finland, Minn. “It was not done correctly. It makes you really suspicious since it has taken them years and years to close these loopholes.”

Barbara Robinson, who oversees the National Organic Program at USDA, said the proposal is expansive because the agency wanted to lay out as many options as possible for the organic industry.

“We have no hidden agenda,” she said, adding that she hopes a final rule will be published in the spring. “It’s their rule, their industry and their marketing claim.”

Public Comments due Monday, November 3rd

Take a look at the bar of organic chocolate in your desk drawer or the carton of organic ice cream in your freezer, and you’ll likely see a little-known but very common food ingredient: lecithin.

Unless the ingredients list specifically states “organic soy lecithin,” the lecithin was processed from hexane-extracted soybeans that were undoubtedly sprayed with pesticides in the fields, and possibly genetically engineered—in organic food???

Currently, food manufacturers can legally add conventional soy lecithin to organic foods.

To be labeled “ORGANIC,” and to carry the USDA organic seal, food has to be made up of 95% organic ingredients. The only non-organic ingredients are ones that are unavailable organically and cannot make up more than 5% of the product.

When the organic standards were developed in 1995, organic soy lecithin was not commercially available. To encourage the growth of the budding organic industry, the organic standards included a list of conventional substances/ingredients that were not available organically, and could be added to organic foods. Organic soy lecithin was not available, so lecithin made it on the list. But times have changed.

Over the years, one pioneering organic company has not only developed a truly organic soy lecithin, but has invested in the ability to supply the organic version to every food manufacturer that needs it. Organic soy lecithin is not extracted with the use of hexane, a neurotoxic and polluting solvent prohibited in organic production. And the organic version always comes from organically grown, non-GMO soybeans (genetically engineered ingredients are also banned in organics).

Now that organic lecithin is commercially available, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), the expert citizen panel that Congress set up to decide these issues, needs to determine whether to recommend removing lecithin from this list of conventional substances that are allowed in organic foods. This is the first time in organic regulatory history that the NOSB will vote on a petition to remove a food ingredient from the National List.

The Cornucopia Institute urges members of the organic community to tell the NOSB members that you support the removal of lecithin from 205.605 and 205.606. If lecithin remains on the list, food manufacturers have no incentive to opt for the truly organic lecithin, and many will continue to put hexane-extracted, conventional lecithin in your organic foods—it’s cheaper.

There is more at stake than simply the type of lecithin you can expect to find in your organic foods in the future. The regulations need to adapt, by removing lecithin from the list of allowed conventional substances. If the regulations do not change when companies innovate and develop new organic ingredients, why should anyone bother investing in the expensive research and development that gives rise to the availability of new organic ingredients?

We need to send a strong message to the NOSB members and the USDA that we stakeholders in the organic industry expect the regulations to change with the times. And change should be in the interest of organic consumers and innovative organic companies.

Submit your comment to the National Organic Standards Board members.

Comments may be submitted via the internet at www.regulations.gov until November 3, 2008.

• To submit a comment, go to www.regulations.gov. In the middle of the screen, you will see “Search Documents.” Type in “AMS-08-0083” and click “Go.”

• Next, you will see “Narrow Search” on the left side of the screen. Click on “Notices” under “Document Type.”

• You may now click on “Send a Comment or Submission” underneath the search result.

Sample message:

Dear NOSB Members,

As a consumer/farmer/processor/retailer (choose one or more), I want the highest percentage possible of organic ingredients in my organic foods.

When a substance becomes available in organic form, I support a change in the standards which requires manufacturers to use only the organic version. Specifically, I understand that organic soy lecithin has become available, which is why I urge the Board to recommend to the USDA that they remove non-organic soy lecithin from the National List (7 CFR 205.605 and 7 CFR 205.606) of approved non-organic materials.

As an organic stakeholder, I wish to avoid genetically engineered and hexane-extracted ingredients whenever possible. Conventional soy lecithin is always hexane-extracted, and could be produced from genetically engineered soybeans. Since organic soy lecithin is never hexane-extracted and sourced from organically grown, non-GMO soybeans, I strongly urge the Board to vote for removing conventional soy lecithin from the National List.

Second, companies that invest time and money in the development of an organic version of a commonly used food ingredient should be rewarded for their efforts in the marketplace. If the rules do not change and continue to allow food manufacturers to purchase the non-organic version, why should anyone ever make the investment in the research and development of organic food ingredients in the future?

Voting to remove lecithin from the National List will ensure that processed organic foods contain organic soy lecithin. Just as importantly, it will send a strong message to organic companies that their efforts at developing organic versions of common food ingredients will not be in vain.

Reports that Chinese producers regularly add melamine to animal feed are sparking new fears that more Canadian products could be contaminated with the industrial chemical.

The revelation, prompted by the discovery of melamine-tainted eggs in Hong Kong this past weekend, is the latest in a growing scandal in China that has so far included dairy, chocolate and pet food.

Only a modest amount of Canada’s meat products - just under $200,000 worth, according to Statistics Canada - came from China in 2007. But last year, Canada imported nearly $15-million worth of protein substances and other ingredients primarily used to make animal feed from China.

The worry over potential melamine contamination prompted the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to create new rules earlier this month requiring importers to prove feed ingredients are melamine-free.

However, many in Canada’s meat and animal-feed industry say they have been taking extra measures to guard against melamine since last year’s pet-food scandal.

“There are no concerns for Canadians at this time,” said Julie Latremouille, manager of regulatory affairs at the Animal Nutrition Association of Canada, which represents feed producers.

But not everyone agrees. The very fact that melamine has been found in animal feed and a host of other products coming from China should be setting off alarm bells in consumers’ minds, according to Mark Kastel, co-director of The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based advocacy group.

“There’s no guarantee that just because we haven’t seen [melamine in many food products] that we won’t,” he said.

Concerns over melamine contamination has been heating up over the past few months since reports that several Chinese infants died and thousands had to be hospitalized after drinking formula that contained the chemical. It is alleged that dairy suppliers were adding melamine to some products to make them appear more protein-rich in quality-control tests.

In Canada, several recalls of chocolate and other dairy products have been initiated in recent weeks over fears they may be contaminated with melamine. Canadians shouldn’t stop worrying about whether the chemical is lurking in other food products, Mr. Kastel said. “We’re waiting for the next shoe to drop. I think that’s a reasonable assumption,” he said. “If we don’t feel comfortable feeding our pets Chinese-sourced material, why would we feel comfortable with our children eating this crap?”

Melamine is an acute problem in China, where babies have been exposed to high concentrations of the chemical in infant formula. In North America, consumers who are exposed to small amounts of the substance over long periods of time may ultimately face increased risks of developing certain diseases, he said.

“We know that [with] contamination with heavy metals or toxic chemicals, deleterious effects are not limited to instant acute symptoms or death,” Mr. Kastel said.

Health Canada says that while “very low levels of melamine could be found in food due to its industrial uses … the levels of melamine from these sources would not represent a human health risk.”

But Mr. Kastel dismissed that assurance, citing the fact that no major studies have been done to determine whether melamine has an accumulative effect on human health.

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda.

But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign.

Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air.

But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.

Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases.

Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers.

Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little — a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.

Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.”

This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness.

There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.”

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves.

To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

How We Got Here

Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it’s important to understand how that system came to be — and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished.
What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare — black — from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year — a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution.

As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized.

In drafting these proposals, I’ve adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security.

I. Resolarizing the American Farm

What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals — if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land.

Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.

Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing “specialty crops” — farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.)

Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale “alternative” farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can’t survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don’t survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary.

There is no reason — save current policy and custom — that American farmers couldn’t grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today’s sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.)

Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green — that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion.

If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don’t farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility.

In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields — a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions.

A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in “conservation” or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration.

The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to “perennialize” commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses — without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon.

But that is probably a 50-year project. For today’s agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm — as in Wendell Berry’s elegant “solution.” Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season’s grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste — all without our help or fossil fuel.

If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these — the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it — has just been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do.

The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.

It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will — as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.)

And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.

It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you’re proposing feed the world?

There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don’t know, because we haven’t tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn’t produce comparable yields.

Today’s organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve 80 to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world — with a population expected to peak at 10 billion — survive on these yields?

First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today’s organic levels could increase the world’s food supply by 50 percent.

The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn’t everything — and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we’re growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations.

The final point to consider is that 40 percent of the world’s grain output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world’s corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone — however we choose to grow it.

In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels — performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals — is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely “driving and spraying,” which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living.

To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food — millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don’t. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production — as farmers and probably also as gardeners.

The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn’t expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today.

For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for “better” jobs in the city. We emptied America’s rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America — not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day’s drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do “food-system impact statements” before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do “open space”) in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center.

The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy — one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet.

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.

Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers’ markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:

Four-Season Farmers’ Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.

Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities.

Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won’t ever have food-safety problems — it will — only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.

Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the U.S.D.A. does little to support the ones that remain. From the department’s perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen.

The U.S.D.A. should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.

Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda — as well as the food security of billions of people around the world — will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation.

Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases — whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons — go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food.

We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

Create a Federal Definition of “Food.” It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a “junk food.”

We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them “junk food” — and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you’ll recall President Reagan’s ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only “food” is exempt from local sales tax.

A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers’ markets — all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers’-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers’ markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies.

III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal — not just federal policy and public education but the president’s bully pulpit and the example of the first family’s own dinner table — to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda.

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” — in Alice Waters’s phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.

But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition.

Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial.

There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible — the other sense in which “sunlight” should be the watchword of our agenda. The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating.

The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.

Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House. If what’s needed is a change of culture in America’s thinking about food, then how America’s first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil.

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you’re in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence — at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans’ TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week — a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America.

The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.

You’re probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement.

Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry — the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat — meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher “family value,” after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal?

Our agenda puts the interests of America’s farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more “populist” or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative “economies” depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America’s agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century’s most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment — that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”