Banning Books About Agriculture

Michael Pollan and Alice Waters are the celebrated leaders of the locavore movement, that is, buying produce and meats grown and raised close to your home.  The idea is one of sustainability, the closer the food is to market, the less energy is used to produce it.  Also, local produce and meats mean, perhaps, more preservation of biodiversity because producers are not trying to "force" products in climates and regions they do not grow.  It's all great, in theory, or if you happen to live in the Berkeley Hills and are surrounded by some of the most productive farm land (thanks to irrigation, by the way) in the world.

Pollan's latest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma was chosen by the Washington State University faculty to be the "must read" for the incoming freshman class in 2009.  WSU (or as we call it Wazoo) has traditionally been Washington State's agriculture school.  One of the regents, a wheat farmer from Walla Walla, read the book and apparently mentioned his objections to the president of the university and sure enough, the book was pulled.  In Pollan's book he takes aim at large agri-businesses and how overly processed foods have led to an epidemic of obesity in America.

Wazoo apparently kowtowed to an ag-based regent as well as the industry that funds many of it's programs.  In a budget-crunch year, who can blame them?

Except, isn't academia supposed to be about ideas?

On the other hand, Pollan and his colleague, Alice Waters, owner of the expensive Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, can get quite hyperbolic about eating locally.  In fact, last year, Pollan and Waters seemed to revel in escalating food prices, believing in conventional economic theory that as prices escalated for processed food, at the point they equaled what people paid at local "Sunday Markets," people would chose locally grown food.  What they missed is that people were hurting and inflating food prices were, in reality, forcing many people to figure out what to jettison, medicines, food, electricity....In addition, Pollan and Waters very publicly advocated the Obamas for the firing of the first female Head Chef at the White House because she didn't pass their muster on plowing an organic garden or was not a so-called public face of the locavore movement.  It was a little cold-hearted.

Omnivore's Dilemma ought to be read by everyone, especially those students who intend on working in the agriculture industries.  However, the advocates of the buy local movement should also be open to understanding that not everyone will be able to buy locally much less want to.  That it will be extremely difficult to turn the clock back on the choices offered in our grocery stores.  But that little steps, the small ways each of us contribute to a more sustainable society, should be celebrated and each change leads to huge movements.