Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  “War? What war?”

  War hasn’t affected us here in the way that you would imagine a five-year war would affect a country. Here’s the disconnect: that the president says that we are in the fight for a way of life. This is the greatest battle of our generation, and of the generations to come. Iraq has to be won, or our way of life ends, and our children and our children’s children all suffer. So what I’m going to do is send ten thousand more troops to Baghdad.

  So there’s a disconnect there. You’re telling me this is the fight of our generation, and you’re going to increase troops by 10 percent. And that’s going to do it? I’m sure what he would like to do is send four hundred thousand more troops there, but he can’t, because he doesn’t have them. And the way to get that would be to institute a draft. And the minute you do that, suddenly the country’s not so damn busy anymore. And then they really fight back, then the whole thing falls apart. So they have a really delicate balance to walk between keeping us relatively fearful, but not so fearful that we stop what we’re doing and really examine how it is that they’ve been waging this.

  But you were thinking this before you got McCain.

  Sure, yes, this happened with McCain because he was unfortunate enough to walk into the studio. The frustration of our show is that we’re very much outside any parameters of the media or the government. We don’t have access to these people. We don’t go to dinners. We don’t have cocktail parties. You’ve seen what happens when one of us ends up at the White House

  Correspondents’ Dinner; it doesn’t end well. So he was the unlucky recipient of pent-up frustration.

  You know, the media’s been playing this big. CNN, USA Today ...

  Well, they’ve got twenty-four hours to fill. You know, how many times can Anna Nicole Smith’s baby get a new father?

  But what does it say about the press that the interview you did became news? And, in a way, reflected on the failure of the “professional” journalists to ask those kinds of questions?

  I don’t know if it really reflects on the failure of them to ask. I think, first of all, for some reason, everything that we do or Stephen does—Stephen Colbert—is also then turned into news. The machine is about reporting the news, and then reporting the news about the news, and then having those moments where they sit around and go, “Are we reporting the news correctly? I think we are.” And then they go, and the cycle just sort of continues. I don’t know that there was anything particularly astonishing about the conversation, in that regard.

  Have you lost your innocence?

  What? Well, it was in 1981, it was at a frat party ... oh, I’m sorry ... You know, I think this is gonna sound incredibly pat, but I think you lose your innocence when you have kids, because the world suddenly becomes a much more dangerous place. There are two things that happen. You recognize how fragile individuals are, and you recognize the strength of the general overall group, but you don’t care anymore. You’re just fighting for the one thing. And then you also recognize that everybody is also somebody’s child. It’s tumultuous.

  Your children are how old?

  Two and a half and fourteen months.

  So, has it been within that period of time that you made this transformation from the stand-up comic to a serious social and political critic?

  I don’t consider myself a serious and social political critic.

  But I do. And I’m your audience.

  I guess I don’t spend any time thinking about what I am, or about what we do means. I spend my time doing it. I focus on the task and try and do it as best we can. And we’re constantly evolving it, because it’s my way of trying to make sense of all these ambivalent feelings I have.

  I watched the interview you did with the former Iraqi official, Ali Allawi. And I was struck that you were doing this soon after the massacre at Virginia Tech. It wasn’t your usual Daily Show banter. I said, “Something’s going on with Stewart there.” What was it?

  Well, first of all, you know the process by which we put the show together is always going to be affected by the climate that we live in. And there was a pall cast over the country. But also you’re fighting your own sadness during the day. We feel no obligation to follow the news cycle. In other words, I felt no obligation to cover this story in any way, because we’re not, like I said, we’re not journalists. And at that point, there’s nothing sort of funny or absurd to say about it. But there is a sadness that you can’t escape, just within yourself. And I’m also interviewing a guy who’s just written a book about his experience living in Iraq, faced with the type of violence that we’re talking about on an unimaginable scale. And I think that the combination of that is very hard to shake.

  And I know that my job is to shake it, and to perform. It wouldn’t be a very interesting show if I just came out one day and said, “I’m going to sit here in a ball and rock back and forth. And won’t you join me for a half hour of sadness?”

  But that wasn’t performance when you were wrestling with the sadness you were feeling with him.

  Well, I thought it was relevant to the conversation. I was obviously following the Internet headlines all day. And there was this enormous amount of space and coverage given to Virginia Tech, as there should have been. And I happened to catch sort of a headline lower down, which was “Two Hundred People Killed in Four Bomb Attacks in Iraq.” And I think my focus was on what was happening here versus sort of this peripheral vision thing that caught my eye. I felt guilty.

  Guilty?

  For not having the empathy for their suffering on a daily basis that I feel sometimes that I should.

  Do you ever think that perhaps what I do in reporting documentaries about reality and what you do in poking some fun and putting some humor around the horrors of the world feed into the sense of helplessness of people?

  No. I mean, again, I don’t know, because I don’t know how people feel. And you know, the beauty of TV is, they can see us, but we can’t see them. I think that if we do anything in a positive sense for the world, it’s to provide one little bit of context that’s very specifically focused, and hopefully people can add it to their entire puzzle to give them a larger picture of what it is that they see. But I don’t think it’s a feeling of hopelessness that people feel. If they’re feeling what we’re feeling, it’s that this is how we fight back. And I feel like the only thing that I can do, and I’ve been fired from enough jobs that I’m pretty confident in saying this, the only thing that I can do, even a little bit better than most people, is create that sort of context with humor. And that’s my way of not being helpless and not being hopeless.

  Is Washington a better source for jokes now that the Democrats are in the majority?

  It’s more fun for us, because we’re tired of the same deconstructed game.

  Yeah, I saw that piece you did on the Democrats debating how to lose the war.

  Right, exactly. This has been six years, you know; we’re worn down. And I look forward to a new game to play, something new. I mean, the only joy I’ve had in that time is having Stephen’s show come on the air and sort of give us a different perspective. And, you know, because it’s made of the same kind of genetic material as our show. It feels like it’s also freshened up our perspective and kind of completed our thought.

  You could take me on as a correspondent.

  We would love to take you on as a correspondent. You know, the pay is pretty bad.

  Yeah, well, this is PBS. What would my assignment be? Would you want me to be your senior elderly correspondent?

  I would like you to just sit in my office, and when I walk in, just lower your head and go, “That was ugly.”

  MICHAEL POLLAN

  For a brief moment, reformers thought Barack Obama might include America’s corrupted food chain in the “agenda for change” that he would take to Washington as president. Time magazine had published a scathing indictment of our agricultural system as “a welfare program for the megafarms that use the most fuel, water a
nd pesticides; emit the most greenhouse gases; grow the most fattening crops; hire the most illegals; and depopulate rural America.” Asked for his position, Obama told Time that the way we produce our food is “partly ... contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in health care costs.” The farm lobby roared in protest. Obama buckled and took it back, saying he was “simply paraphrasing” an article he read.

  And what an article! A bombshell landing right in the middle of the presidential campaign less than a month before the election, in the form of a nine-page open letter in The New York Times Magazine from journalist and omnivore Michael Pollan. He warned Obama and Republican candidate John McCain that significant progress on health care, energy independence, and climate change depends on something they “barely mentioned during the campaign: food.” The article triggered such a response that an online movement sprang up calling on President-elect Obama to name Michael Pollan secretary of agriculture.

  A pity it didn’t happen. Pollan would have brought to Washington the activist zeal of Upton Sinclair and the same canny zest for making food both tasty and appealing that Julia Child brought to her kitchen. National magazines had tabbed him among the one hundred most influential people in the world, as well as one of the seven top thought leaders. He has written four bestselling books on food, including, most recently Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. I wanted to know where he would have started if Obama had yielded to Pollan’s legions of admirers and made him secretary of agriculture.

  —Bill Moyers

  How about that: Secretary Pollan?

  I would be so bad at that job.

  Why?

  I have an understanding of my strengths and limitations. You have to understand that the Department of Agriculture, this $100-billion-a-year behemoth, is a captive of agribusiness. They’re in the room making policy there. When you have a food safety recall over meat, sitting there with the secretary of agriculture and his chief of staff is the head of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

  It’s all worked out together. The department is part of the problem. They’re also very dependent on the legislation that the House and Senate Agricultural Committees cobble together. So I think you’d get swallowed up there very easily. If Obama wants to make change in this area, we’ll need a food policy czar in the White House, because the challenge is not just what we do with agriculture, it’s connecting the dots between agriculture and public health, between agriculture and energy and climate change, agriculture and education.

  You need someone who can take a global view of the problem and realize that it’s an interdisciplinary problem. And if you hope to make progress in all these other areas, you have to make sure that if the surgeon general is going on about the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, you don’t want to be signing farm bills that subsidize high-fructose corn syrup at the same time.

  Because?

  High-fructose corn syrup contributes mightily, as do all sugars, to type 2 diabetes. And we are subsidizing cheap sweeteners by subsidizing corn. You have a war going on between the public health goals of the government and the agricultural policies. Only someone in the White House can force the realignment of those goals. For a start, what we’re after is looking at these commodity programs. Essentially the five crops we subsidize are corn, wheat, soy, rice, and cotton. We’ll leave cotton out because we don’t eat too much of it, although we do eat some cottonseed oil. Our farm policy for many years has been to increase production of those crops and keep the prices low.

  And we have cheaper prices and plenty of food today.

  You can walk into a fast-food outlet and get a bacon double cheeseburger, french fries, and soda for less than what you would get paid for an hour of work at the minimum wage. In the long sweep of human history, that’s an amazing achievement. But we’ve learned that overabundant, too-cheap food can be as much a problem as too little food.

  Look at the health care crisis. We’re all eating 300 more calories a day than we were twenty-five years ago. We’ve gone from 2,000 or 2,300 to 2,600, something like that. We all weigh on average ten pounds more. And lo and behold, we have a serious epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, diet-related cancers. All these chronic diseases that kill us pretty reliably in America are adding more than $250 billion a year to health care costs. They are the reason that the generation being born now is expected to have a shorter life span than their parents, that one in three Americans born in the year 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control, will have type 2 diabetes. That is a serious sentence. It takes several years off your life. It means an 80 percent chance of heart disease. It means you are going to be spending $14,000 a year in added health costs. So this is all about how we’re eating.

  And you’re saying this is primarily the result of what we eat?

  Yes. There are other factors, obviously. A sedentary lifestyle. Cane workers in Cuba can eat 6,000 calories of sugarcane a day, yet they don’t get diabetes because they burn it off. We don’t burn it off. So exercise is an issue, although exercise hasn’t changed dramatically in this same period that our public health has declined so much. When you have monocultures of corn and soy in the fields, which is what we have because of our farm policy, you end up with a fast-food diet, because those crops are the building blocks of fast food. We turn the corn into high-fructose corn syrup to sweeten the sodas. We also turn the corn into cheap feedlot meat. The soy we also turn into cheap feedlot meat and hydrogenated soy oil, which is what our fast food is fried in. It has trans fats, known to be lethal. We are basically subsidizing fast food.

  I laughed when I read in your New York Times Magazine article, “When we eat from the industrial food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.” Now, Michael, I don’t ever remember sitting do wn to a meal of yummy petroleum.

  Well, we are eating oil and we obviously don’t see it.

  How so?

  How do you grow those giant monocultures of corn and soy? As soon as you plant a monoculture, which basically is lots of the same thing year after year, you risk depleting the fertility of the soil. How do you replenish the fertility? Fertilizer. How do you make fertilizer? It’s made with natural gas, diesel oil. So we actually have to spread huge quantities of oil or fossil fuels on our fields to keep the food coming.

  When you grow a monoculture, you also get lots of pests. They love monocultures. You build up the population of the pests by giving them a vast buffet of exactly what they’ve evolved to eat. So how do you get rid of them? You use pesticides made from fossil fuels. When you grow corn and soy, you then have to process it. And so it takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food—to make a Twinkie or something like that. It’s a very fuel-intensive process.

  Look, nobody wants to see food prices go up. Nobody wants to see oil prices go up. But we understand that we are not going to change our energy economy unless we start paying a higher price for oil. We are not going to improve our health around food unless we pay the real cost of food.

  Cheap food is actually incredibly expensive. Farm subsidies—that’s $25 billion a year spent to make food cheap. You look at the pollution effects—nitrates in the water, moms who can’t use tap water because their kids get blue baby syndrome from nitrogen in the water. You look at the public health costs. You look at the cost to the atmosphere—the food system is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gases.

  You claim that we use more fossil fuel in producing food than we do in any other activity, including driving to work.

  It’s more than personal transportation, absolutely. And you know, we don’t see that when we look at our food system.

  You told us that food connects not only to health care but also to energy independence, to climate change, to national security—how do all the dots connect?

  Well, when you have a big globalized food system based on a very small number of crops, first, you’re moving food
everywhere. I mean, the supply chains of food are just absurd. We’re catching so-called sustainable salmon in Alaska. We ship it to China to get filleted and then we bring it back here. That’s how cheap Chinese labor is. We’re not going to be able to do that much longer. We’re selling sugar cookies to the country of Denmark, and we’re buying sugar cookies from the country of Denmark. And Herman Daly, the economist, said, “Wouldn’t it be more efficient to swap recipes?” I mean, these absurdities can’t continue. So energy is deeply implicated in the system. Any system that uses a lot of energy is going to produce a lot of greenhouse gas. Plus livestock also produce huge amounts of greenhouse gas.

  National security? Well, there’s a tremendous danger when you centralize your food supply. Having a highly centralized food system such as we have, where one hamburger plant might be grinding forty or fifty million burgers in a week, where one pre-bagged salad plant is washing twenty-six million servings of salad in a week, that’s very efficient, but it’s also very precarious, because if a microbe is introduced into that one plant, by a terrorist or by accidental contamination, millions of people will get sick. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to your food safety. You want to decentralize. Tommy Thompson, when he was departing as secretary of health and human services, said one of the big surprises of his time in Washington was that no terrorist had attacked the food supply because, and this is a quote, “it would be so easy to do.”

  The politicians might say, “Look what’s happening on Wall Street, look what’s happening to people’s 401(k)s. Look what’s happening to people’s security— their real physical security is in great jeopardy. This is what they’re scared about. And you’re asking me to talk about food.”