More on Micheal Pollan's advice to the next president.  The president-elect did refer to this article in a speech.  I just hope he truly considers it.  After all of the preceeding gloom and doom, I am happy to end my posts to Pandora today with this glimmer of sunshine:

http://www.ecoliteracy.org/publications/michael_pollan_farmer.html

Farmer in Chief
By Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for The New York Times 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Now, keeping in mind that no in-depth scientific environmental safety study was done before the GM sugar beets were planted and harvested, look at this chastisement from Growers for Biotechnology regarding how careful the media must be in checking credentials before writing articles so their work will be scientifically sound?

http://www.growersforbiotechnology.com/

GM Reporting Should Rely On Real Expertise
October 29, 2008

GM Reporting Should Rely On Real Expertise
- Robert Wager, SciDev.net, Oct. 16, 2008

When it comes to evaluating the safety of genetically modified (GM) crops and food the world should rely on experts with good credentials. The media can, of course, add words of caution from critics. But it must be clear which opinions come from detailed knowledge and training, and which may be driven by other agendas.

Evidence-based reports showing the low risks associated with GM crops are scarcely reported. For example, there was little, if any, coverage of the International Council for Science 2004 report. It stated that there is no evidence that current GM crops damage the environment, or that consuming foods containing GM ingredients harms people.

[maybe because of those missing studies and evalutations]

The media must also stop presenting claims that we know nothing about the long-term hazards as being unique to GM foods. A recent European Union report points out that little is known about the long-term health effects ofany food, including GM.

[yeah, okay.  that's a good argument.  we don't know anything about any food humans have been eating for centuries, so let's just eat whatever biotech creates.  very scientific.  and let's give no credence to any scientist who disagrees with our unsupported, proprietary safety claims.]