President Obama made a somewhat forceful statement when he said "With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics....It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and other powerful interests that marshal their interests every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans."

This decision will do a lot to increase corporate health.  What about the public's health?  We're on our own and it's called preventive health--lots of fruit and vegetables (organic when you can), shopping on the perimeter of the market (thank you Michael Pollan) and very, very limited sugar.  Did you know that regular table sugar is refined by using sulphur dioxide?  Yuck!

This time I was chasing a turkey. My mom and I just got home and she told me to check on the turkeys. IBourbo Red communing ran as fast as I could down to the old playhouse where they live. But when I got down I saw the last turkey fly away!

I ran to Mom who said, ‘Go look for the turkeys; I’ll check the woods.’ Again I ran back down the hill to the stream this time. I saw the same turkey soar over my head to the branches on an oak tree (I think its oak) so I ran towards it not noticing that a big puddle of mud was right before my foot.  I put my second foot down and tried to lift my first. Both of my feet slid out from under me making a flack-flack sound coming out from the mud. My jeans and tee shirt landed in the mud but at the last moment, with a splat sound, my hair hit the mud. At that point I screamed. At first I thought I saw a giant hairy spider, but it was my hair covered in mud. I screamed again, ten times to be exact.

Mom came down and asked ,‘are you all right? Did you see the turkeys?’ I sniffled. Mom took me up to the playhouse just to see if we still had any turkeys. Apparently only three turkeys escaped. The rest were hiding in the grass in their pen.

So far I’ve gotten covered in mud twice, for nothing!

Editor's Note: The family started out with 20 turkeys and now sadly has only seven.  A young visitor held a couple of the chicks too tightly, new puppies became a little too playful, turkey wings need to be clipped regularly.  Thanksgiving saeson is going to be a little lean this year.  Life on a farm goes round and round and not something you are usually aware of when you purchase your turkey at the local supermarket.

Living on a farm isn’t easy ‘cause you never have a moment to yourself. But some jobs are fun. My Herding Ducksfavorite job is watering the ducks. Pekin Ducks. The ducks share a small kiddy pool so that they can have some water, since their pen is almost as slippery as the pig pen but it doesn’t smell as bad. How you water the ducks is by turning a hose on medium and spraying it on them. Once you have the ducks’ attention, they will most likely hold their heads up high and show you the muck on their chests so that you can clean it off. Once that’s done, they put their heads down so you can give them water from the hose. They jump in the kiddy pool, which has clean water. It’s their version of being pampered in a spa.

Yesterday, I was trying to get the ducks into their house, but since they are incredibly stupid, they were running all around the rim of the pen. It was so tricky, because I could not separate the ducks from each other. I led them one way, but they just ran to the back of their house, but not into it. I got one or two in at the start, but they went right out. While trying to chase the ducks, I put my foot in one of the gookiest spots and slipped and fell. Luckily I didn’t get my pink mini-dress gooky, only my hand, knee and shoes! And then I just gave up trying to get them in. Later that evening, I finally succeeded. They were a little sleepy and actually wanted to go to bed, instead of thinking of it as a game.

Next time I write, I will hopefully not have fallen into the mud and tracked mud onto the keyboard!

Since I hail from two worlds, formerly working full-time in technology and currently working on food policy issues for New York State, frequently this site is used to test out different kinds of technology that might be applicable to food related issues. After all, the entire site is an experiment as is the idea of sustainable living. Some of these tech tests make it on to the web site and some of it gets shelved. I had been looking for a way of announcing breaking food news for a while and when Twitter appeared on the scene it looked as if it could be employed as a breaking news vehicle.  So for about a year LittleHouseFarm has been publishing abbreviated posts, or tweets, that relate in some way to food, food policy, sustainability or related events in NYC that may not warrant an entire article.

We hope you too, will follow us at twitter.com/littlehousefarm. Oh, and the Dalai Lama is a vegetarian too though he eats meat every other day for health reasons.

Dalai Lama Visits the New York State Senate (before the current melee):

What is A Clearing in the Streets? A very creative exhibit commissioned by the Public Art Fund and designed by Julie Farris and Sarah Wayland-Smith, placed carefully in Collect Pond Park. The park has its own tragic history having once been an actual 60-foot deep freshwater pond that had been abused in the 19th century and therefore, drained.  It sits just south of Canal Street wedged between Chinatown and New York City's courts and nestled up against a skyscraper or two.

The exhibit opens Wednesday, May 27th and runs through October, but I wanted to see it from seedlings upward and onward. The exhibit is a temporary landscape housed inside of a ten-sided plywood structure 15' in diameter where the seedlings will become a flowering meadow by October. The interior of the plywood is lined with sheets of taut material painted to be an endless blue sky. Eight inch gaps in the plywood allow visitors to peak into the scene from different angles.

Imagine walking through busy, noisy downtown NYC, happening upon a plywood structure seemingly plopped down in tiny park, being curious enough to stop and inspect and wow there's a flowering meadow.  Imagine doing that at different times of the day over the course of several months.  That little exhibit could become an entire reasearch project in and of itself.

It's so tempting to keep this treasure to myself, but alas, I'll share:

A Clearing in the Streets from holly on Vimeo.

Michael Pollan is one of the nation’s leading writers and thinkers in this country on the issue of food. He is author of several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. In light of what he calls the processed food industry’s co-option of “sustainability” and its vast spending on marketing, Pollan advises to be wary of any food that’s advertised.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

MICHAEL POLLAN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s good to have you with us. Let’s start with, well, the latest news over the last month, swine flu. How is that connected to industrialized agriculture?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, we don’t know for sure yet. We’re still kind of investigating. But the best knowledge we have is that this outbreak came from a very large industrial pork operation, pork confinement operation, where, you know, tens of thousands of pigs live in filth and close contact. And this was in Mexico.

And, you know, it’s very interesting. Last year, eighteen months ago, the Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get that mutation, which sooner or later is about to happen, it very quickly—you have so many different—so much genetic material coming together, so concentrated, and then so many pigs can catch it, and that this is a—you know, we’ve created these Petri dishes for new diseases. And here we go.

AMY GOODMAN: And what has been the industry response?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Oh, the industry response and the media response, by and large, is not to pay attention to that part of the story. We haven’t gotten a lot of investigation of, well, exactly how do these things evolve and how did these conditions contribute to it.

The other angle, too, is that, you know, as we bring any pressure to bear on American animal agriculture, the tendency is going to be for it to move to Mexico. And indeed, that appears to be the case here, that these are American corporations who have to escape any kind of environmental regulation, have moved their confinement, animal operations, south of the border.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how these animal operations work.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, a pig confinement operation is a pretty hellish place. They are, you know, tens of thousands of animals, kept jammed together. The animals are so close together that they have to snip their tails off, because the animals are so neurotic—I mean, pigs are very intelligent; they’re smarter than dogs—that they will nip at each other’s tails. They’ve been weaned so early that they have this sucking desire, and so they take it out on the tails of the animal right in front of them. So they snip the tails off, not to stop the procedure, but to make it so painful that animals will avoid having their tails bitten, just to make them raw and painful.

They administer antibiotics to these animals on a regular basis, because they could not survive without them. And the waste goes down directly below the animals into this giant cesspool that’s flushed, two or three times a day, out. I mean, they’re just—you know, they’re incubators for disease.

The sows remain in crates their whole lives, so they can be conveniently inseminated, and they have their babies right there in their crates. You know, to go to one of these places is to stop eating industrial pork, basically. I mean, if we could see into this industrial meat production, it would change the way most of us eat.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s amazing, because the whole coverage, it seems, of swine flu is to be afraid of human beings coming over the border, that they are the main problem.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, that they’re carrying it, yeah, yeah. No, it’s not—we don’t—it is not contracted by eating the pork. That doesn’t, you know, seem to be a problem. And some countries have taken that tact, used this to keep out American pork. But that link hasn’t been made.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about corporations in other ways, like Monsanto, talking about the sustainability of genetically modified foods?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, Monsanto is very much on the attack right now, pushing its products, particularly in Africa, and making the case that the most sustainable agriculture will be intensive production on the land base we have. The argument is that there’s only so much arable land in the world, we have ten billion people on the way, and that the only way to feed them is to get more productivity over the land we have, to further intensify agriculture, using their genetically modified seeds.

And the word “sustainable” is never far from their lips. And they have this amazing ad campaign. Two things are notable about it. One is that the language of sustainability and the critique of industrial food is being picked up by some of the major players within industrial food, either as an effort to co-opt the rhetoric or simply confuse the consumer and the citizen.

The other thing is that it’s very interesting that Monsanto should be arguing that it has the key to improving productivity. If indeed what we need to do is improve productivity, don’t look at genetically modified crops. They have never succeeded in raising productivity. That’s not what they do. If you look at the—the Union of Concerned Scientists just issued a report looking at the twenty-year history of these crops, and what they have found is that basically the real gains in yield for American crops, for world crops, has been through conventional breeding. Genetic modification has—with one tiny exception, Bt corn used in years of very high infestation of European corn borers—has not increased productivity at all. That’s not what they’re good at. What they’re good at is creating products that allow farmers to expand their monocultures, because it takes less management. So, if indeed we need to go where Monsanto says, there are better technologies than theirs.

AMY GOODMAN: What about companies boasting that they use real sugar, like that’s a health claim.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, you know, it’s very interesting. Since this book came out, where I argue don’t buy high-fructose corn syrup and don’t buy products with more than five ingredients, suddenly the industry is—you know, they’re so clever. I just—I have to hand it to them. But now they’re arguing that their products are simpler, and there’s new Haagen-Dazs 5, which is a five-ingredient Haagen-Dazs product. You know, it’s still ice cream. Ice cream is wonderful, but we shouldn’t treat it as health food because it now has only five ingredients. Frito-Lay is—

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve had a big effect.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, but I don’t know if it’s for the better. I mean, I think—

AMY GOODMAN: Frito-Lay?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Frito-Lay potato chips now is arguing that they’re local. Now, you have to remember, any product is local somewhere. Right? This food doesn’t come from Mars. But to think that Frito-Lay as a local potato chip is really a stretch.

So—and on the high-fructose corn syrup thing, now that you’ve got Snapple and soon-to-be Coca-Cola making a virtue of the fact that they contain real sugar, no high-fructose corn syrup, what that is is an implicit health claim for sugar. And that is an incredible achievement on the part of industry, to convince us that getting off of high-fructose corn syrup has made their products healthier. It has done no such thing. Biologically, there’s no difference between high-fructose corn syrup and sugar.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain why you were going after high-fructose corn syrup.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, my argument about high-fructose corn syrup and why you should avoid it is it is a marker of a highly processed food. I’m just trying to help people, when they’re going through the supermarket—the main thing you want to avoid is processing, you know, extreme processing. And high-fructose corn syrup—I mean, think about it. Do you know anyone who cooks with high-fructose corn syrup? It’s not a home—it’s not an ingredient you’ll find in a home pantry. It’s a tool of food science.

My problem with it is its ubiquity through the food system. You have high-fructose corn syrup showing up where sugar has never been—in bread, in pickles, in mayonnaise, in relish, in all these products—that they basically have found that if you sweeten anything, we will buy more of it. High-fructose corn syrup is a very convenient, cheap ingredient, because we subsidize the corn from which it’s made.

But to boast about your product not having high-fructose corn syrup as being some kind of virtue is really stretching it. And I think what we see here is another example of the food industry’s ingenuity in taking any critique of industrial food and turning it into the next marketing strategy. It’s a lot like the low-fat campaign, you know, which began as a government critique of food, you know, beginning with George McGovern in the ’70s saying we should eat less red meat because of heart disease. Whatever you think of the science of that, which turns out not to have been that good, it was a well-meaning campaign to improve the American diet. Industry came back and re-engineered the whole food system to have less fat in it and no fat in it. And that campaign sold a lot more food. And, in fact, since that campaign, we’ve been eating about 300 more calories a day, and we’re a lot fatter. So, you can’t—you just can’t underestimate their ability turn any critique into a way to sell food.

So, I’ve had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan, the Food and Drug Administration is slapping General Mills with a warning over its claim that Cheerios—

MICHAEL POLLAN: Lowers cholesterol.

AMY GOODMAN: —is clinically proven to help lower cholesterol. They say it makes it a drug under federal law.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. Well, good for them. I mean, you know, the FDA has been so lax, and the reason you see this proliferation of bogus health claims all through the supermarket has basically been the FDA has been hands-off for a decade. And to see them tighten a little bit and make these companies prove these health claims—

You know, another piece of advice from In Defense of Food is, don’t eat any food that comes with a health claim. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you’re worried about your health, that is not the healthy food. The healthy food is in the produce section. It’s sitting there very quietly, without budgets to do this research, without budgets for marketing, without packages to print health claims on. So just kind of tune that out.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of the new Agricultural Secretary, Tom Vilsack?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, it’s interesting. When Vilsack was appointed, I was disappointed initially. And I said something like, this was agribusiness as usual. He has surprised me in various ways, and I have some reason, cautious, for hope. I think he has a mandate from President Obama to begin reforming things.

He has appointed as his number two—the woman running the Department of Agriculture, Kathleen Merrigan, is a proven reformer. She developed the organic program in the department and as a staffer to Senator Leahy back in the ’90s. And she is really committed to sustainable agriculture. This woman will be running the Department of Agriculture. I think that’s wonderful. We’ll see what she can do. She’s up against an incredible amount of opposition.

He made an initial move to go after subsidies that was not very well handled and was rebuffed very easily by the agriculture committees in the House and Senate. He, I think, will do a lot to support local agriculture. He’s very committed to farmers’ markets and developing these local food chains, and I think that’s very encouraging.

But he has a mission to make “nutrition” the watchword of the nutrition programs in the Department of Agriculture: School Lunch, Food Stamps, WIC. Now, that sounds kind of “duh,” but, in fact, those programs have nothing to do with nutrition right now. They’re essentially ways to dispose of agricultural surpluses. So if they actually raise the nutrition standards and make that the focus—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, they’re the way to—

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the reason we have a School Lunch Program, you know, it began as an effort really to get rid of this incredible overproduction of American agriculture. I mean, we’re using our children as a disposal for excess, you know, cheap ground beef and cheese and all these corn products, and that the—you know, under the School Lunch Program, we feed our kids chicken nuggets and tater tots in school. We’re using the School Lunch Program to teach them how to become fast-food consumers. So, it’s not about health, and it needs to be about health. So, if he can move that program in that direction, I think that will be wonderful.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Obama’s organic garden, that the pesticide industry had in a memo that they shuddered when they heard her use the word?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yes. You know, I think her garden is actually a significant development. I mean, you can dismiss it as symbolic politics, but in fact symbols are important. And the word “organic” are fighting words in this—is a fighting word in this world. And she did not have to say it was an organic garden; she could have simply said it’s a garden. And that she did was noticed.

And the Crop Life Association, the trade group of the pesticide makers, wrote her a letter, being as cordial as you must be to a First Lady, saying, you know, “You’re really casting aspersions on industrial agriculture, and we really hope you will use our crop protection products.” In other words, “Buy our poisons, whether you need them or not.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Michael Pollan. His latest book, now out in paperback, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Your words of wisdom? Your food for thought? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it’s very simple. It really is. I mean, you know, as a journalist, you know this, that usually when you drill down into a subject, you find things are more complicated than you thought, and the blacks and whites don’t quite work anymore. When it came to nutrition science, the deeper I went, the simpler it got. And by the time I had spent two years studying what we know about nutrition and health, I realized that, you know, all the—that you could dismiss so much of this sketchy science, and as long as you ate real food, and not too much of it, and emphasized plants more than meat in your diet, you would be fine, and that the over-complication of food by industry, by government, is something really to be avoided.

And so, the challenge is, though, how do you identify food? Because now the market is full of these edible food-like substances, the ones that carry the health claims, the—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “edible food-like substances”?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, these are products of food science. These are the stuff in the middle of the supermarket, the stuff that doesn’t go bad for a year, deathless food, immortal food. You have to think, well, what does it mean to say a food has got a shelf life of six months or a year? It means it has been engineered to resist bacteria, pests of all kinds, fungi, mold. And what does that mean? Well, it has no nutritional value for those things. The insects, the bacteria, they’re not interested in the Twinkie, because there’s nothing of nutritional value in it.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how the food system affects healthcare and the whole issue of healthcare reform?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, I think that we are soon to recognize that we are not going to be able to reform healthcare, which depends on getting the cost of healthcare down, without addressing the American diet, the catastrophe of the American diet.

The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, estimates that of the $2 trillion we’re spending on healthcare in this country, $1.5 trillion is for the treatment of preventable chronic disease. Now, that’s not all food, because you have smoking in there, too, and alcoholism. But the bulk of it is food. Food is implicated in heart disease, which we spend, you know, billions and billions on. It’s implicated in type 2 diabetes. It’s implicated in about 40 percent of cancers. It’s implicated in stroke, all sorts of cardiovascular problems.

And, you know, in a sense, the healthcare crisis is a euphemism for the food crisis, I mean, that they are identical. And I do think that President Obama recognizes this. And I think that you will see programs to address this, because that is how you could—you know, a better School Lunch Program would be a down payment on the healthcare reform, because you would reduce long-term the costs of the system. Treating a case of type 2 diabetes costs the City of New York, every new case, $500,000. It is bankrupting the system. And it’s preventable.

AMY GOODMAN: How is it treated?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, type 2 diabetes is, once you contract it, it’s $13,000 a year in additional medical costs. It takes something like ten years off of your life span. It means an 80 percent chance of heart disease in your life, a possibility of amputation and blindness, you know, being tethered to machines and drugs your whole life. It’s a very serious sentence, and it’s entirely preventable with a change in lifestyle.

The interesting thing is, why don’t we have really powerful public interest ad campaigns to inform people about this? I mean, the way the government could save the most money the most easily would be having a public advertising campaign about the dangers of soda. There are a great many children that, simply by getting off soda, avert this whole course.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of taxing soft drinks, that they’re talking about now?

MICHAEL POLLAN: You know, I’m not sure, frankly. I haven’t really thought that through. It’s probably not a bad idea. I think that the cheapness of high-fructose corn syrup and sugars in our economy is part of the problem and that when we started subsidizing—I guess I would attack it on the other side. We should not be making these corn-based products so cheap with our tax dollars. I think we have to change the subsidies. The reason that soda is so cheap is that we subsidize corn in huge amounts, and I think we have to change the incentives down on the farm. I think that’s really where I would put my emphasis.

AMY GOODMAN: What about large corporations buying up the farmland of poorer countries?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, this is going on. There is a growing recognition that the great unrenewable resource is arable soil in this world and that countries like China realize that they will not be able to feed their population on their soil base, because of their numbers, but also because they poison so much of their soil. Their soil is polluted, and they have a serious problem with that. So they are buying up huge swaths of land in Africa.

This is a political disaster, you know, waiting to happen. I mean, Africans, you know, are going to stand by while their best farmland is being used to feed Chinese? I mean, I don’t see this as a sustainable solution for anybody. But this is what’s happening.

And we should take note and realize that our farmland is so precious, and we should be very careful about developing it, and we should certainly be careful about letting it run off into the Mississippi River because we’re failing to put in cover crops and things like that.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have twenty seconds left, but you wrote a long letter to President Obama, to the “Farmer-in-Chief,” as you put it. What’s the most salient point in it?

MICHAEL POLLAN: The most salient point is simply, you are not going to be able to tackle either the healthcare crisis or climate change unless you look at our food system. In the case of climate change, food is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gases, the way we’re growing food, the way we’re processing it and the way we’re eating. And the healthcare crisis, as I’ve talked about. So we need to address it. It’s really the shadow issue over these other two issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan, I want to thank you for being with us. His latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, it’s just come out in paperback. Also his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire.