Many of president-elect Barak Obama’s choices for his cabinent are a bit baffling, and I fear that he may be relying too much on his own moral authority and charisma to control everything, but I’ve been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Until now.

His choice of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack as secretary of agriculture is heart-breaking. Being the pragmatist he is, I had anticipated that Obama would turn to someone who generally supports big agriculture, but for him to choose someone who is so close to Monsanto that he flies on a Monsanto jet (and who of course also supports genetically modified food), who demonstrates so little nuance in his thinking about biofuels (which have had disastrous effects on food prices), and who has systematically moved control of agriculture from the local to the state level in Iowa (and who has supported similar moves from the state to federal levels), is just awful.

Corporate agriculture is the cause of the world’s food problems, not the solution to them. And as Michael Pollan points out, Vilsack shows no concern for eaters, in either rich nations (where corporate agriculture has ruined people’s health) or in poor nations (where corporate agriculture is killing subsistence farmers, through starvation, poisoning or desperation so deep it ends in suicide).

This isn’t change. This isn’t progress. It’s retrograde acquiescence to food-business as usual, to the dollar rather than to the people.