About Pollan: he is not qualified to be the Secretary of Agriculture. He is a journalist with great research skills, but that doesn’t translate to being in charge something as large as the USDA. As an advisor, though, he might be valuable in some instances.

Pollan’s real value is that he’s opening up the discussion about agriculture, bringing it front and center on the national stage.

My whole life has essentially centered around questions of agriculture — my father is a retired plant pathologist who worked for land-grant universities, my husband works at a land-grant university in agriculture, and I worked in Haiti on a food-consumption study as part of a USAID farming systems project.