Music icon Willie Nelson offers Obama advice on food

November 9, 11:01 AMBoston Nutrition ExaminerPeg Aloi

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Agriculture activist Nelson (photo from Mother Earth News)

The Food and Health section of Treehugger.com featured an intriguing article this week about country music legend Willie Nelson. Nelson was a Kucinich supporter and is a strong proponent of the biodiesel movement (which urges recycling waste products like cooking oil to fuel cars). His letter to the new President Elect urges the implementation of a number of initiatives designed to help local economies, preserve the environment and reform the way food is grown in the U.S.

You may know that Nelson founded Farm Aid in 1985, a national benefit effort modelled on the European Live Aid benefit concerts for world hunger, to help family farms in the United States. Concerts featured sell-out attendance and artists like Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt and Dave Matthews not only performed, but some served on the board of Farm Aid.

Small Farms Mavericks of Food and Energy Policy

Nelson's letter outlines a number of ideas by now familiar to many Americans who have embraced the Good Food Movement, as Nelson calls it. This Movement has grown without the help or interference of the federal government, but now, Nelson insists, is the time for government to take the reins of leadership in these issues affecting every aspect of our lives.

Nelson says that family farms are on the cutting edge of environmental preservation with their use of solar, wind and other alternative energy sources. They also promote fuel conservation and bolster local economies by persuading consumers to buy food grown and sold in their own communities, as opposed to produce trucked or flown from great distances, requiring huge expenditures in fuel and arriving in a less fresh state than local produce.

Fresher food, easing up on our use of fossil fuels, helping local economies: this is clearly a win-win proposition and we should all hope the new administration will embrace these ideas and enact legislation to make them official.