10 Federal #Food Policy Issues Obama and Romney Should Discusshttp://reason.com/archives/2012/10/20/ten-important-federal-food-policy-issues … via @reason
In a recent Huffington Post column endorsing President Obama, she writes that she’s behind Obama in part because his opponents often “challenge current regulations and try to block new regulations that help to protect... the food we eat. Just recently, House Republicans went to great lengths to block the implementation of a new food safety law, while also trying to cut the budgets of agencies that oversee food safety.”
Streisand isn’t the only one weighing in on the presidential candidates and their food policies in the weeks leading up to the election.
Grist’s Tom Laskawy, for example, dislikes "what we know about [Mitt] Romney’s food and agriculture policy" while lamenting what he says is a current president who has in several ways done little more than pay lip service to the priorities of advocates like Laskawy during his four years in office. One Obama shortcoming Laskawy points to is that the president “loves... the regulatory power of the state too little.”
Michael Pollan, the journalist, author, and academic, recently spent 2,000 words in The New York Times Magazinepositing the existence of a national “food movement”—something he both suggests may be “millions” strong and admits may be little more than wishful thinking on his part.
Pollan claims that California’s ballot initiative on GMOs, Prop 37, will test whether his “so-called movement” (Pollan’s own words) is a force or a farce. And, writes Pollan, President Obama is “[o]ne person in Washington who would surely take note of the California vote”—at once both welcoming and suggesting the pre-ordination of the incumbent president’s re-election.
Me? I could not care less who will be the next president. Keep Food Legal, the nonprofit I lead, also takes no position in this (or any) election.