New administration: Secretary of food

.
President-elect Barack Obama took a big step when he gave former Sen. Tom Daschle, his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, a broader mandate to coordinate health reform. For whatever reasons, the incoming administration has shied away from such a sweeping, intelligent approach to food policy. Given the president-elect's choice for a new agriculture secretary, perhaps that is just as well. At first glance, former Iowa Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack looks like a very traditional, even backward-looking selection. On farming issues, he supported agribusiness over Iowa counties' ideas about controlling huge pig feedlots and genetically modified plants. And he was a big fan of crop-based ethanol. We suspect Vilsack's oversight of the national forest issues that fall in the Department of Agriculture will be a learn-on-the-job undertaking fraught with opportunities to misunderstand Western issues. We liked the call of columnist Nicholas Kristof for a secretary of food. We need a reformer charged with transcending the 19th- and 20th-century idea of a Cabinet officer serving the needs of farmers. With that perspective, it would be possible to unite producers, consumers and government in delivering diets that are healthy for the people, the land and the economy. We see room for the administration to create smarter food and environmental policies for agriculture over time....