New Mexico food activists are wary of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, President-elect Obama’s choice for agriculture secretary, because of Vilsack’s support for big agribusiness, genetically modified crops and ethanol subsidies. Although the executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers says Vilsack is “a middle-of-the-road pick,“ Mark Winne (pronounced “Winnie”), the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, says Vilsack needs to demonstrate his awareness of “the new agriculture.”

For some perspective on the future of the Department of Agriculture under an Obama administration, I called Winne at his home in Santa Fe. His book is a careful investigation of the links between hunger, food and poverty, including ideas for how to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots. (Full disclosure: My review of the book is blurbed on the paperback edition. I called it ”Fearless, intelligent, and surprisingly funny.”)

The transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

NMI: OK, so Vilsack comes from Iowa, where every square inch of land is covered with either an ear of corn or a pig. What’s wrong with corn and pork?

MW: There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The question will be how well can he relate to everything else. I once had a colleague in Iowa who challenged Vilsack when he said, “I want Iowa to become the food capital of the world.” [My colleague] said, “How about Iowa becoming the food capital of Iowa?” We need to be turning our attention to feeding our own people and doing it in a way that’s good for their health, good for the economic viability of agriculture and good for the environment. The job has what I call a triple bottom line. Previous secretaries have not acknowledged that triple bottom line and that’s where I think he’ll have to pay extra attention.

Why would a secretary of agriculture from a state dominated by industrial agriculture be good or bad for New Mexico, where most farms are small?

If Vilsack’s not capable of transcending Iowa agriculture the whole country is in deep doo-doo. But I think he is capable.

Santa Fe author Mark Winne is a member of the New Mexico Food Gap Task Force.

Some of our bigger challenges in New Mexico are in rural counties where the USDA has a very strong role in providing for economic development. Iowa also has many counties that have lost a lot of population, where there’s not a significant amount of economic activity going on. But one thing Iowa has done well over the last 10 to 15 years is diversify their agriculture. There’s a lot more going on there in terms of rural activity, with innovative food and agriculture projects, and new programs to develop more value on farms. That’s exactly what we need more of in New Mexico, innovation and economic development. There’s a new agriculture out there — it’s now just as much about the consumer as it is about the farmer and rancher — and the secretary of agriculture will have to respond to that.

You recently wrote that industrial agriculture’s phone calls are always the first to be returned by the secretary of agriculture. How would you re-sort the secretary’s stack of little pink ‘While You Were Out’ slips?

The order should be based on the weight of the public interest. If there is someone who has an issue or an interest that will transcend the immediate needs of a single agricultural sector, then that should come first.  People calling from a low-income community in Pittsburgh who don’t have a supermarket within five miles from where they live, or small farmers going out of business because they don’t have markets, those are the calls that I would take first.

For the last few weeks leading up to the nomination, author Michael Pollan was quite vocal about his desire for Obama to rename USDA, the “Department of Food,” or at the very least the “Department of Food and Agriculture.” Were you on board with that?

USDA is the largest welfare program, if you want to call it that, in the federal government. It has the food stamp program and 15 nutrition assistance programs. But there’s rarely any link between these assistance programs and the other side [of the department], which is about food production, and there’s very little relation to health. Food equals health and there’s been very spotty attention from USDA to that connection. That’s where their thinking has to change. The job of USDA is not just providing enough calories for the nation, which is what their focus has been for so long, it’s now about providing healthy calories.

But is local food healthy food?

Yeah, local food is healthy food, but it’s also healthy for local economies. It’s also, generally speaking, healthier for the environment. Local food travels less distance, burns less energy, and puts money back into the local economy. Assuming you’re producing fruits and vegetables, then it is also healthier food. It’s not healthier if we’re putting up a high-fructose corn syrup plant in the middle of New Mexico…

Here’s the thing: Unless by “local” we mean “grown in my garden,” locally grown food in New Mexico isn’t always terribly affordable. So how does it benefit us to have more local arugula for sale at the Santa Fe Farmers Market?

I wasn’t aware of an arugula deficit! I think that what we’re talking about is increasing local production to the point where it will enter the mainstream market, not just a boutique market, which we too often associate with our farmers market. And the Santa Fe Farmers Market is a lot more high-end than, say, the Española Farmers Market.

But right now demand for locally grown food exceeds the supply. [The University of New Mexico] is interested in buying more locally produced food. There are dozens of school districts that are buying locally or want to buy locally. We know the demand is there, but so far it’s the supply that isn’t there.

We want to be able to increase production so that it remains profitable for farmers and becomes more affordable for institutional and individual buyers. For example, Whole Foods is starting to buy from New Mexico farmers and  it wants to see those farmers grow in size. That’s good but it doesn’t do much for the other 90 percent of us who don’t shop at Whole Foods. The overall movement has to be oriented toward the mainstream. I think that’s where USDA has to play a leading role.

I know you want to use more federal money to buy locally grown food for use in school meals, but how can we rationalize that when New Mexico apples are always going to cost more than apples from Washington state?

Actually, the price for apples in season is generally the same or lower than those coming from Washington or some other region. The problem is that New Mexico lacks infrastructure, the coolers and the distribution system, so [taking advantage of locally grown food] is really difficult. The amount of cold storage in this state has declined 20 percent in the last three or four years. Once that equipment degrades beyond the point of no return, new capital investment is required and that money isn’t here. That’s where the public sector has to intervene. State and federal dollars have to be used to revitalize the infrastructure that’s been in decline since World War II.

You have said that USDA should create an Office of Community Food Systems. What exactly would that office do?

It would put under one roof all of the interests and programs that look at specific communities and regions with the goal of making sure that everybody in that area has access to good, healthy, affordable food. Right now you could probably make that happen if you went to every single bureau within USDA, but you’d kill yourself trying to do it. Those resources and that know-how are there, but they’re scattered across the entire playing field of USDA, which is the second largest department in the federal government.

As people’s needs change and we begin to see that we’ve lost control of our food system and USDA has served the agriculture industry more than it has served the people, we’re looking at locally based solutions. How do we better utilize our food assistance dollars? How do we conserve local resources?

But everything at USDA is a silo, if you will. Every department exists in a silo and has a different administrator and these folks don’t talk to each other. Their job is to administer their program and they don’t ever say, “How do we bring all this together so Bernalillo County can feed people?” It’s not a holistic enterprise at all. So we’re looking at how we can begin to pull all this together in a community concept. That idea was picked up [during the Clinton administration]. We need to take that idea and ratchet it up.