Keeping Up with Michael Pollan

In the essay I wrote for the HSS Newsletter about blogging (here) I noted in passing that one virtue of the blog space was that it provided a place to store notes. It is an electronic version of note cards. This post is one example, a placeholder that I'll come back to. Let's hope.

Pollan's Farmer-in-Chief essay in the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago brought together many of the points he's made in the past few years about the role of food and agricultural policy for environmental, political, and health outcomes. His overarching point:

[M]ost 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.

The essay has received boatloads of replies and links on-line. (Here's the current Technorati compilation.)

Pollan was also on Fresh Air with Terry Gross yesterday, more or less reviewing the points in his essay. And his fellow environmental public intellectual Bill McKibben just published a short brief in Harper's about "relocalizing" our economy that's both a follow-up to McKibben's own book, Deep Economy, and entirely in keeping with the points Pollan is making.

The Times set up an extra comments section that has Pollan replying to a few handfuls of the 155 on-line replies.

Here's the entire Food Issue, by the way.

Here's Tom Philpott (who was also profiled, in brief, in the same Food Issue) summarizing over at Grist.

Here's another review.

And here's scienceblog rising star Jonah Lehrer's take on it.