Is there no end to Michael Pollan’s influence? Now he’s got Rand Waddoup, Wal-Mart’s Senior Sustainability Director, pondering the sorry state of our current food chain. Waddoup posted an entry on Wal-Mart’s corporate blog today entitled “Sustainable Industrialized Food?” :

Having finished Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma just a few nights ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic and in general about food, health, and sustainability. Quoting Michael Pollan from In Defense of Food, “We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods.”

So Waddoup, whose big box boss is the number one food retailer in the U.S., wants to know what Wal-Mart can do to make things better:

I know food, in general, is a very sensitive topic for a lot of people, but what do you think should and can be done in the short term to make the industrialized food chain better? What products should Wal-Mart have that they don’t to meet your desires for a more sustainable food assortment? If you could choose one item you would want removed from stores, what would it be?

Off the top of my head, I’d suggest they take a page from Whole Foods and ban any food product that contains high fructose corn syrup. But that would leave them with an awful lot of empty shelves. In my wildest dreams, of course, they’d stop selling any animal products from factory farms, but, again, that would pretty much shut down their meat department. Still, I’m glad they’re asking. They’re gonna get an earful. Will they listen? Stay tuned; the future of industrialized agriculture in America hangs in the balance!

Learn more about Wal-Mart’s efforts to be more sustainable–and add your two cents’ worth–at checkoutblog.com.