Michael Pollan was on The Journal with Bill Moyers the other evening talking about how the U.S.D.A, the government's agriculture department, manages farm subsidies and what that means for our economy, our healthcare needs, and the robustness of of our rural communities, .  Under Moyers' adept questioning, Pollan laid out the key hurdles that the nation faces around food issues.  In his nine-page "Letter to the Farmer-in-Chief" published in the New York Times on the Sunday prior to the election, Pollan had said that food policy will wind up occupying much of the new President's time, not something that has been the case almost anytime in the past.  Talking with Moyers, Pollan was pretty candid about why he wouldn't take the job of Secretary of Agriculture, a position that many are suggesting after he wrote the aforementioned NYT article.

He said he just wouldn't be the right person.  I understood him to mean that he would not have the patience to work with the utter craziness of where our ag policy has gotten us.

"The $90 billion a year behemoth is captive of agri-business. It is owned by agri-business. They're in the room making policy there. When you have a food safety recall over meat, sitting there with the Secretary of Agriculture and her chief of staff or his chief of staff is the head of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association."

Pollan said that the department is a huge part of the problem.  But it is also the interests of those on the House and Senate Agricultural Committees and their constituents.  Although Pollan says that President-elect Obama gets the issues, he doesn't know if Obama will be willing to take it on along with everything else in his first term.  If Obama chooses to take on the issue, or if circumstances push us into an agricultural disaster and we have to take it on (my addition), he should appoint a food policy czar, someone in the White House who would be there to connect the dots "between agriculture and public health, between agriculture and energy and climate change, agriculture and education".  We need someone to take a global view; that person would understand that by subsidizing fructose corn syrup, we contribute to type 2 diabetes.  Our farm subsidy policy means that we undermine the public health goals of the government.  And only someone in the White House can knock heads together to realign those goals. 

Pollan clarified the scope of our farm program in a couple of sentences.  "Commodity programs essentially means the four crops, five crops we subsidize are corn, wheat, soy, rice, and cotton. We'll leave cotton out because we don't eat too much of it, although we eat some cotton oil. And that our farm policy for many years has been designed to increase production of those crops and keep the prices low."

As Bill Moyers neatly sums up, "Are you saying, this is primarily the result of what we eat? That we are sick today because of what we eat?"

Then Pollan gets into other areas - climate change, feeding the rest of the world - the cost of health care - and clarifies how they fit together.  "Food is the shadow issue over all those other issues."

It was a great interview.  You can watch it or read the entire piece.