by Bill Moyers
If you really care about dealing with climate change; if you really care about dealing with the health care crisis, which is going to mean getting health care costs down; if you really care about feeding the rest of the world, because our agricultural policies are taking food out of the mouths of people in Africa and throughout Asia, our ethanol policies in particular—you can’t escape the question of food.
Food is the shadow issue over all those other issues. You’re only going to get so far with health care costs unless you look at the diet. Let’s look at the school lunch program. This is where we’re feeding a big part of our population. We are essentially feeding them fast food and teaching them how to eat it quickly. We could spend a dollar or more per day per child and work on the nutritional quality of that food. And let’s require that a certain percentage of the school lunch spending in every school district has to be spent within a hundred miles to revive local agriculture, to create more jobs on farms.
You will have a healthier population of kids who will perform better in the afternoon after that lunch. You will have the shot in the arm to local economies by helping local agriculture. And you will teach this generation habits about eating that will last a lifetime.
Right now the school lunch program is a disposal scheme for surplus agricultural commodities. When they have too much meat, when they have too much cheese, they send it to the schools, and they dispose of it through our kids’ digestive systems. Let’s look at it in a different way. This should be about improving the health of our children, so maybe the program belongs in Health and Human Services, maybe it belongs in Education. Get the Department of Agriculture’s hands off it.
As with so much in politics, the initial conditions or rules determine the outcome. If you fill your Agriculture Committee with representatives of commodity farmers and you don’t have urbanites, you don’t represent eaters, okay? If you don’t have people from New York City on these committees, you are going to end up with the kind of farm bills we have, a piece of special-interest legislation. It shouldn’t even be called the Farm Bill. It should be called the Food Bill. It’s about us. It’s not just about them.
It sounds so reasonable, but once again politics and human nature intervene. What are the political obstacles to making that happen?
Well, the commodity groups are one of the most well-organized lobbies on the Hill. And the Farm Bureau, which purports to represent farmers, actually represents agribusiness. So I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But I also feel that there is apolitical movement rising. It’s a very young movement. (If anyone’s talking about me for agriculture secretary, that’s a measure of how young it is! But it’s rising.) There are millions of mothers concerned about food, about the school lunch program, about what’s on sale in the supermarket. There’s enormous concern about food safety. There is the security issue. There are many facets to this movement. It’s still inchoate, and politicians have not recognized the power that is there for the seizing.
I will make a confession. I like to take my grandkids to McDonald’s occasionally, okay? Given the human nature at play here, how do you convince us that we’re contributing to climate change, we’re contributing to a precarious national security, we’re contributing to bad health? What would you say to move us to change?
Well, the first thing I would say is, I’m not a Puritan about food. I’m not a zealot about it. There is something called special-occasion food that we have in our house, and it’s kind of understood that sometimes you enjoy your fast food. You have your Twinkie. People have done this for thousands of years. There’s nothing wrong with doing it. Our problem is we’ve made special-occasion food everyday food and that one in three American children is at a fast-food outlet every single day. And that’s where you get into trouble.
How did you get from the writer’s attic at Harper’s magazine to a man with dirt between your toes?
My path was through the garden. I loved gardening from a very young age, and liked growing food for myself. From there it was kind of an easy step to an epiphany on a feedlot and on a potato field when I was doing a piece of journalism. I was driving down Route 5 in California, which links San Francisco to L.A. And it was a beautiful golden fall day. Suddenly this stench came up. I couldn’t believe the smell. I didn’t know what it was because everything around me looked exactly the same. And I drove a little longer. The landscape, which had been gold, turned black. And it was a feedlot that’s right on the highway, on both sides of the highway.
Suddenly I was in this nightmare landscape where there were mountains of manure the size of pyramids, and mountains of corn the size of pyramids, and black cows as far as you could see. I was like, “Wow, this is where my meat comes from?” I had no idea. And that was when I decided I owe it to myself, I owe it to my readers, and my family, to figure out where my food comes from.
You said in your letter to the president-elect that the first family should “eat locally.” What did that mean?
Well, look, the president’s bully pulpit is a very important thing. And, you know, I think the first family could set an example by whom they appoint White House chef. Is it someone who’s really associated with this local food movement who would not only cook wonderful, healthy food for them, but who, at state dinners, would kind of shine a light on some of the best farmers in this country and elevate the prestige of farming? I also think that we need, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer.
Are you suggesting that the president should rip up the South Lawn?
Not all of it. They’ve got seventeen acres to play with. I don’t know exactly how much, but I’m saying five acres. Put in a garden, an organic garden. Hire a good farmer to grow food there. I think that would send a powerful message. This has happened before. Eleanor Roosevelt put a victory garden at the White House in 1942, over the objections of the Department of Agriculture, who thought it was going to hurt the food industry if people started growing food at home. You know, God forbid.
Some things never change.
Yes, I know. But she persisted, and she said, “This is really important for the war effort. I want to encourage people to grow food.” She put in this garden, and by the end of the war, there were twenty million victory gardens in America. People were ripping up their lawns, planting vegetables, raising chickens, and by the end of the war, 40 percent of the fresh produce in America was being produced in home gardens. So it’s not trivial, it could make a tremendous contribution, especially in hard times.
We have some people right here in urban New York who are growing gardens.
You know, a lot of people talk about the elitism of the food movement, and they think about Whole Foods and people shopping at upscale farmers’ markets. But there is another face to this food movement. There is a real crisis in the inner city over access to fresh produce. And we know that the distance from a source of fresh produce is a predictor of health.
Example: West Oakland, California, is an area that has about twenty-six convenience stores, liquor stores that sell processed food, and not a single supermarket. No source of fresh produce. You might get some onions and potatoes in that convenience store, but that is it. Yet it’s full of fast-food outlets. So in effect you have a fresh-food desert. And that is one of the reasons that people in the inner city have such higher rates of diabetes. There is a demand for fresh and healthier food that’s not being served.
Oddly enough, government policy helped get the fast-food outlets into the city—via well-intentioned Small Business Administration loans to encourage minority business ownership. The easiest business to get into is opening a fast-food franchise in the inner city; our government helped that happen. Again, for good reasons. We need similar programs to encourage the supermarkets to come in, so there is a source of fresh produce. Or draw in the farmers’ markets. Why not offer every food stamp recipient a voucher redeemable at a farmers’ market for fresh, wholesome food? At a stroke, that would draw farmers’ markets into the inner cit
y and improve the diet. Not just the number of calories people are getting, but the quality of those calories.
But with urban sprawl, with so many acres of farmland being turned over to development, most of us live a long way from a farmers’ market.
I agree that, since the ’50s, a lot of the local farms have been paved over with houses. We need to protect the land that remains because, when the oil runs out, we’re going to need to be able to feed ourselves from within one hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles. One of the more significant things that happened when we had this oil price spike last summer is the price of moving a box of broccoli from the Salinas Valley in California, where most of it is grown, to the Hunts Point Market here in New York went from $3 to $10.
When that happened, two or three of the big growers in California started buying farmland in New England. See, they get that, in the future, we’re going to need to grow food closer to where people live. And broccoli grows really well anywhere in this country. So we need to look at high-quality farmland close to cities like New York and realize that it’s as precious as, say, a wetland, which we wouldn’t let you develop unless you could really prove the need to develop a wetland. We need to protect farmland, and we’re going to need different solutions in different parts of the country.
We need to recognize that what people in Iowa are really growing there is cattle feed. It looks like corn and beans, but 40 to 50 percent of that grain is going to feed cattle and hogs. So what if we cut out all the transportation, the middleman, and actually put animals back on those farms? Let them grow really high-quality, grass-fed beef. You know, that is some of the best agricultural land in the world, and so we grow meat, back on the land, sustainably. It’s not all or nothing. We need to let a thousand flowers bloom. We need to try many things in many places to figure out what works.
Okay, give me a list of what we can do to make a difference.
If you’ve got space, plant a garden, and if you don’t, look into a community garden where you might rent a little bit of space. Cook. Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients, you start thinking about plants and animals, and not the microwave, and you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, is greatly improved. You will find that you are supporting local agriculture, because you’ll care about the quality of ingredients. And whether you’re cooking or not is one of the best predictors for a healthy diet. People with more money generally have healthier diets, but affluent people who don’t cook are not as healthy in their eating as poor people who still cook. Very, very important. If you don’t have pots and pans, get them.
People say they don’t have time, and that’s an issue. I am saying that we do need to invest more time in food. Food is just too important to relegate to these ten-minute corners of our lives. You know, we watch cooking shows like crazy on television. We’ve turned cooking into a spectator sport. If you would merely invest the time you spend watching cooking shows in actually cooking, you would find you’ve got plenty of time to put a meal on the table.
Are you suggesting that we’re going to have to learn to slaughter our own pigs? I don’t have a fridge large enough for a whole hog.
I actually think buying a freezer, Bill, is a really good investment, because that’s how you can take advantage when there are deals at the farmers’ market. I actually think hunting is a very sustainable form of meat production in a lot of places, where we have way too many whitetail deer. I know that this will offend some people. But by hunting and growing some of your own food, you make yourself a real producer. It sounds kind of sweet and old-lady-like, but gardens are very powerful things.
My garden now is only ten feet by twenty feet, but it produces so much produce I need to give much of it away. I have to spend time figuring out how to get rid of it. By gardening, you will obtain some of the healthiest, freshest food you can possibly get. It is the shortest food chain of all. And it teaches certain habits of mind that I think are really, really important. You know, the philosopher Wendell Berry had a phrase. He said, you know, we’re afflicted by this “cheap-energy mind,” because cheap energy has allowed us to outsource so much in our lives. We do our job, and for everything else, we have a specialist who provides it. They entertain us, they feed us, they clothe us. We don’t do anything for ourselves anymore. It’s one of the reasons that when we look at climate change, we feel so helpless, because we can’t imagine doing any more for ourselves.
Well, as soon as you start gardening, you’ve found a cure for the cheap-energy mind. You’re suddenly realizing, “Hey, I can use my body in support of my body. I have other skills. I can feed myself if I needed to.” And that is a preparation, I think, for the world we may find ourselves in. But it’s very empowering to realize that you’re not at the mercy of the supermarket.
We have 6.7 billion people on this earth, needing to be fed. If we put into effect what you’re talking about, do you think that we have a system that will produce enough food?
As long as the sun still shines, there is the energy to produce food. When people ask, “Can we feed the world sustainably?” the thing we need to remember is that about 40 percent of all the grain we’re growing in the world, which is most of what we grow, we are feeding to animals. So there’s an awful lot of slack there. There is plenty of food, if we organize our agriculture in a proper way.
The “Can we feed the world?” argument has been used for fifty years to drive the industrialization of agriculture. It is agribusiness propaganda by people who are not particularly interested in feeding the world. They’re interested in driving up productivity on American farms. Yes, some want to export food. ADM and Cargill want to ship it out to other places, but basically, they want their raw materials as cheap as possible, and you need overproduction to achieve that. If you’re producing that McDonald’s hamburger or Coca-Cola, you’re dependent on corn and soy, and the cheaper they are, the more profit you’re going to make.
I’m sorry that I can’t persuade you or convince you to take the job. You would be a provocative secretary of agriculture.
Well, that’s probably a good word for it.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Every once in a while, a book so possesses me that I happily give up a couple of consecutive nights of sleep—as well as the evening news broadcasts and latenight talk shows—to finish it.
That’s what happened when I opened the novel Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich. She might have been writing about any of us, trying to negotiate our complex familial and sexual longings, but Gil and Irene, the troubled and fiercely passionate couple whose story is the heart of Shadow Tag, also contain traces of the DNA of the Native American clans we met in Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine.
This is Erdrich’s secret—she makes their story our story, although they may have descended from Ojibwe chieftains and we from Scottish clansmen. Erdrich grew up Catholic on the endless plains of the Dakotas, the daughter of a French Ojibwe mother and a German American father. To this day she will willingly show you the old confessional stall that she keeps in her nifty bookstore—Birchbark Books—in Minneapolis. But she will just as quickly introduce you to some of the phrases she recently learned in classes that she is taking to help preserve the Ojibwe language. Such surprises make this “emissary of the between-world” the quintessential American.
—Bill Moyers
When I opened Shadow Tag and read the first page, it was like stepping onto a high-speed train that didn’t stop until it reached its destination. And even then I didn’t want the trip to be over. It’s a masterpiece of suspense and character. Where did the idea come from?
I wanted to write a suspense novel. I like that kind of narrative. And I wanted to do exactly what you picked out about it. I wanted to have a reader start it and keep reading it and want to know what happens in the end.
Where did the title come from?
Did you play shadow t
ag when you were a child?
Yes, that’s where you try to step on the shadow of the other—
The other person’s shadow.
Yes.
If you grow up in a place where you can play outdoors, under a street lamp, you can play late into the night. And that’s what I did. I had that title in mind for many, many, many years until it occurred to me that if the shadow selves in a relationship were to interact somehow, they would be playing shadow tag. I don’t mean only the darker sides of people, but I also mean the dream sides, the subterranean sides that we don’t know. We don’t always know what our actions are going to be in respect to another person, and somehow, in this setting, in the book, the shadow selves of the family begin to interact.
There is a moment with the husband and wife—Gil and Irene—when we sense the layer of deception that is at the heart of their marriage. We realize she both hates him and she loves him.
They’re very intertwined. Gil is a painter. And Irene is often his subject. He’s an artist ...
And most of his paintings are of her, at different stages and in different poses. You’re revealing the story of a stolen identity—how a man steals his wife’s image and power.
And it’s also a book about diaries and about doubles. I love the German word doppelgänger, by the way. That image kept coming back to me and then into this book.
Irene is keeping two diaries.
She realizes that he is secretly reading her diary, so she begins to write a second diary, one that’s false.
She’s writing lies deliberately for him to read.
She’s manipulating him.
Manipulating him. Which leads me to ask how much of marriage involves holding back a part of ourselves?