Secretary of food?

Packer Managing Editor Fred Wilkinson here.

In a article in today's New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof urges President-elect Obama to make good on his "change" pledge and reinvent the U.S. Department of Agriculture to better reflect the nutritional needs of the country rather than the needs of corporate agriculture. Kristof writes:

"As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed “secretary of food.”

A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat."

Kristof continues on to take the USDA to task for encouraging and subsidising a food production system geared toward producing cheap, empty calories. He quotes former Bush administration Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman as saying USDA should be renamed the "Department of Food and Agriculture."

The U.S. Senate agriculture committee's official title is the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. The "forestry" tacked onto the end seems to widen the scope a bit needlessly.

But in tying together more closely the relationship between consumer and producer in the U.S. food chain, Kristof makes some good points.