Michael Pollan: Redefining Technology | Long Now

There is very little in the way of organizing ideas (in the food movement) – big, simple ideas that will knit these people (working on school lunch, labeling, building local food economics, bringing food to food deserts, getting the transfats out of food, and so on) together. … And the virtue of a big, guiding idea is that it can help you judge all the smaller ideas. … We have public policies so that we don’t have to rethink every question that comes up.

So I want to lay out that big idea – a long-term process for reform. … Here’s the core idea: We need to wean the American food system off its heavy, 20th century diet of fossil fuels and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. That’s basically it. … It will require changes at every link in the food chain that connects you to the soil that you eat from – changes in the farm, the marketplace, and the culture. …

The power to produce huge amount of food from such systems has been proven – producing huge amounts of food basically from sunlight, soil and water – at very different scales. … We know that you can do this, and a lot of it depends on redefining our sense of what a clever technology is. What I suggest is that a really smart rotation like the eight-year rotation in Argentina is as clever and powerful a technology as the latest genetically modified seed. And we need to look at it that way. The question is: Why don’t we look at it that way? By and large, because there is nothing to sell, in the case of the rotation. What makes agriculture really work in a sustainable direction is processes more than products.