On the Table at the Times

Political blogs are fun. And food is tasty. So what could be better than a political food blog? (Well, many things, clearly, but you get the idea.) The Times has a new blog in its Opinion section by Michael Pollan, who since May 7th has been posting thought-provoking and fascinating pieces about the stuff we eat here in America. In his first post, he provided a survey of what's going on in food journalism and the hot topics, and touched upon the fundamentally unsustainable nature of the current food supply chain:

“Unsustainable” also means a system can’t go on indefinitely paying the costs of doing business as it has been doing. In the case of the industrial food chain, that includes the cost to the treasury ($88 billion in agricultural subsidies over the last five years); to the environment (water and air pollution, especially from our factory animal farms); and to the public health. Cheap food, it turns out, is unbelievably expensive. Many of the costs of cheap food are invisible to us, but they will soon force themselves onto our attention. Take energy, for example. The industrial food system is at bottom a system founded on cheap fossil fuel, which we depend on to grow the crops (the fertilizers and pesticides are made from petroleum), process the food, and then ship it hither and yon. Fully a fifth of the fossil fuel we consume in America goes to feeding ourselves, more than we devote to personal transportation. (Unfortunately the industrial organic food chain guzzles nearly as much fossil fuel as the nonorganic.) If the era of cheap energy is really drawing to a close, as it appears, so will the era of cheap industrial food.

I will readily admit ignorance on the relationship between oil and food until I read this blog. He goes on to discuss the elitism of eating well in America ($1 will buy you 1,200 calories worth of processed food but only 875 calories of fresh produce), the alternative/sustainable food revolution, and the need to end corn subsidies once and for all.
Next time I'm at the book store, I'll be picking up a copy of Pollan's new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.