Letter to the Next President

In the first part of his long letter, Pollan lays out the argument he made in The Omnivore's Dilemma and developed further in his In Defense of Food. It's a complex argument, but it can be boiled down to this: For a number of critical reasons, we need to shift from an agricultural system that derives its calories from fossil fuels to one that derives its calories from the sun. That's because “when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.”

Such an undertaking would be impossible without the government taking a massive, and necessarily intrusive, role. But, he tells the next president, we "will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change."

He proposes three major initiatives: