"In America, the big get bigger and the small go out."
–USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue to farmers, October, 2019
"When you think about food being health and food being medicine, that’s really exciting to me."
–Sonny Perdue at a Farm of the Future event, September, 2020
Lincoln – Whoa! That's quite a turnabout, the Secretary of Agriculture in 2019 repeating the old Earl Butz prescription for agriculture ("Get big or get out"), but in 2020 taking some pages right out of the Democratic playbook for the future of farming.
Perhaps the Secretary has been reading Congressman Tim Ryan's book The Real Food Revolution, in which he quotes Hippocrates (p. 53) "Let food be thy medicine."
Ryan and his Congressional colleagues Sherrod Brown, Chellie Pingree, Cory Booker, Rosa DeLauro, Marcia Fudge, Ron Kind, and Marcy Kaptur have been writing and speaking on the role of nutrition in fighting diseases like diabetes and obesity, as well as the need to create more local and regional food markets and processors. These are exactly the themes of the Farm of the Future event Sonny Perdue attended, to his apparent approbation.
Must be an election year. Republicans sense Democrats are onto something big and want to get in on it and claim it as their own. Because there is no Republican platform on rural America (or on anything else), Secretary Perdue is free to appropriate the works of others, including those of Joe Biden. Let's hope it's a permanent conversion, not a temporary political stance.
Whatever the situation, it was gratifying to see the University of Nebraska engaging top level officials in a discussion of how agriculture must move toward healthier food and fewer steps between farm to fork. The University is doing leading-edge research on food as medicine, as I have noted before in this blog.
In the photo below, left to right: Nebraska agriculture director Steve Wellman, UNL Chancellor Ronnie Green, Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, Governor Pete Ricketts, and USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue. Their dour expressions suggest they have just tasted some needed medicine themselves, prescribed by realities that call for a change of emphasis away from production agriculture toward food for health. And whose idea was it to have a big public meeting without social distancing and without masks? It risks a super-spreader event emanating from national and state leaders, as well as sends a "do as I say, not as I do" message to thousands of television viewers.
In the photo below, left to right: Nebraska agriculture director Steve Wellman, UNL Chancellor Ronnie Green, Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, Governor Pete Ricketts, and USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue. Their dour expressions suggest they have just tasted some needed medicine themselves, prescribed by realities that call for a change of emphasis away from production agriculture toward food for health. And whose idea was it to have a big public meeting without social distancing and without masks? It risks a super-spreader event emanating from national and state leaders, as well as sends a "do as I say, not as I do" message to thousands of television viewers.
