I was just reading an article in The New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.
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Barack Obama, speaking to Time’s Joe Klein (for some reason it’s been taken down from Time’s site). He’s referring to this article. Via The Vine.
Bradford Plumer writes:
Major kudos for explaining how all of these issues—food, energy, health care—are interlinked. Politicians don’t do that nearly enough. Now, as an analysis, this isn’t bad: cheap oil is part of what’s turned industrial farming into the destructive mutant we all know and love. But note what’s missing: Our agricultural system’s also built on artificial subsidies for overproduction that, at this point, do far more harm than good. The very subsidies that Obama… still supports. So, uh, maybe it’s time to stop snuggling up to King Corn.
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