Two weeks ago I read Michael Pollan’s long open letter to the next president, which presented why agriculture today is unsustainable (it’s based on cheap oil, which is going away) and his ideas about how it must change.(If you’d rather just read a summary of his proposed ideas, you can go here.) Some are practicable and some will probably never happen, but, as the summary points out, “It’s one thing to rail against what is wrong; another to offer realistic solutions to the problems you decry. I’m grateful to Pollan.”

While reading it, I thought, “How cool would it be if Obama read this? Maybe things would change!”

Well, he has read it:
“I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity…”

Obama: He reads and retains and cares! He is awesome.

(Mr. Isbell and I are voting early tonight. I’ll bet you’ll never guess for whom!)