Michael Pollan

In a 2006 interview with the Minnesota Independent, Mark Ritchie sounded positively Obamian in his intellectual interests, referencing a range of topics from the 1930’s Chemurgy green-fuel movement, artist Francis Lee Jacques and the business filings duties of the Secretary of State’s office. But, despite the similarity with Obama, it sounds like Minnesota’s Secretary of State wouldn’t accept the position of Secretary of Agriculture were the president-elect to offer it to him.

Eighty-eight big name environmental and food activists — including Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, famed restaurant owner Alice Waters and Minnesotan Winona LaDuke — have written to President-elect Barack Obama urging him to appoint America’s first “sustainability Secretary of Agriculture.” And among their list of six candidates they include Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a former employee of Minnesota’s ag department and co-founder of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.