Pollan

Michael Pollan has a superb op-ed in the Times on the relationship between food policy reform and health care reform. They are, basically, one and the same, or at the very least, thoroughly co-dependent:

There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

For the most part, the food business has kept a very, very low profile – a timid protest that the White House garden doesn’t use pesticides, a farmer cum Republican operative writing an article for the American Enterprise Institute, and a failed attempt to prevent the mainstream media from using the term SWINE flu. After reading Pollan’s essay, I can’t help wondering whether Big Food’s been in serious denial or simply working stealthily out of public view. Probably a little of the first and a lot of the second.

That may change as healthcare reform becomes inevitable; a very ugly foodfight seems imminent. Pollan is a very, very smart guy and certainly knows his way around the media. However, the far right will try to turn his entire life upside down, his apparent friendly relationship with Christian fundamentalist Joel Salatin notwithstanding. In the service of protecting the Smithfields and the Monsantos, Pollan will become the next Bill Ayers. Go and make a Googley of “veggie libel laws” and imagine the possibilities they could be put to silence a critic who urges us to “Eat food, not too much. Mostly plants,” and who, half-jokingly, recommends we “Don’t buy any food that’s advertised.”