Thinking through Pollan’s Farmer in Chief: The Title
Given the rest of his article, I assume that Pollan intends his presumptive title for the President of the United States–farmer in chief–to contrast with the traditional role of Commander in Chief. And in offering the alternative, I assume he intends to set the productive, peaceful, domestic world of farming and food against the destructive, bellicose, international theater of war. Certainly later in the article Pollan focuses exclusively on the use of food for domestic consumption. If he mentions its role in international politics at all, it is in the context of the need for American self sufficiency in food.
Yet historically the contrast between commander in chief and farmer in chief has never been sharp, nor farming a purely domestic matter. In saying this I am not pointing a finger at the US. The Biblical references to swords into plowshares and plowshares into swords alerts us to the fact that war and farming have never been polar opposites and grim as it may be food policy and foreign policy had always gone hand in hand.
But to return to the US, in the nineteenth century, the exploitation of America’s vast and productive farmlands went hand in hand with the America’s foreign policy, used to produce foreign currency and to promote America’s interests. The sale of tobacco and cotton to Britain brought money into the young Republic. American cotton was essential to the Lancashire cotton mills so central to the English industrial revolution. Later in the century, wheat was added to the list of exports to Britain. The money that poured into the US was essential to the economic growth of the nation.
In the twentieth century, World War I, II and the Cold War all had their agricultural aspects. Hoover’s hunger map following the First World War was a dramatic demonstration of the realization that food aid could also be a policy too. Lend Lease in the Second World War sent shipments of wheat to beleaguered Britain and kept the Allied war effort going. Following the War when it looked as if there would be world wide starvation, Congress passed Public Law 480, a law that was perceived as brilliantly dealing with the problem of surplus US production, world hunger, and international policy at one go. The grain went to support friendly nations and to win the friendship of wavering ones while ensuring it did not just rot in granaries. This act remained embodied in successive Farm Bills until 1996. The failure of the Soviet Union to produce enough grain to feed its population meant that in 1963 it was forced to buy 150 million bushels of wheat at world market price of $250 million dollars from the US, a decisive point in the Cold War. (Just this year, Iran purchased wheat.)
America continues to be able to produce huge quantities of agricultural products, including food. That it will abandon using that fact in the service of international politics seems, shall we say, improbable. Farmer in chief and commander in chief are one and the same, not alternatives.
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