[Critical information that everyone should be aware of. Rick.]
At 1:28 PM -0400 4/24/2007, Matteo wrote:
>Great article by Michael Pollan. Very cogent discussion
of how US agriculture policy contributes to making junk food cheaper
>than healthy food and destroying the local economies and lives of
>farmers worldwide.
Source >
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html?ei=5087%0A&;
April 22, 2007
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
You Are What You Grow
By MICHAEL POLLAN
A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of
Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to
solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most
reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person's wealth.
For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from
a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the
people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones
most likely to be overweight?
Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to
purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he
could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the
supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft
drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods - dairy,
meat, fish and produce - line the perimeter walls, while the
imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found
that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but
only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down
those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of
soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.
As a rule, processed foods are more "energy dense" than fresh foods:
they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which
makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular
calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the
marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them "junk."
Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are
organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most
rational economic strategy is to eat badly - and get fat.
This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the
inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of
carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike
substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of
manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves
elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty
marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of
these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of
roots?
For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This
resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of
legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about
to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system - indeed,
to a considerable extent, for the world's food system. Among other
things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will
not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as
currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the
root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever
arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans
and wheat - three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill
supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton
are the others.) For the last several decades - indeed, for about as
long as the American waistline has been ballooning - U.S.
agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the
overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.
That's because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by
cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather
than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm
bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars
(derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well
as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the
farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh
produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your
supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between
1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of
soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason
the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is
that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.
A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a
nation faced with what its surgeon general has called "an epidemic"
of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing
the production of high-fructose corn syrup.
But such is the
perversity of the farm bill: the nation's agricultural policies
operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the
subsidies are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine
what sort of food your children will have for lunch in school
tomorrow. The school-lunch program began at a time when the
public-health problem of America's children was undernourishment, so
feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a
win-win strategy. Today the problem is overnutrition, but a school
lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get
dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough calories;
if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater
Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The
farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for
all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged
American farmers to overproduce.
To speak of the farm bill's influence on the American food system
does not begin to describe its full impact - on the environment, on
global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for
American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less
than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price
of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore
whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the
land, to migrate to the cities - or to the United States. The flow of
immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to
the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of
subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two
million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land
since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a
spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring
tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an
unalloyed disaster for Mexico's eaters as well as its farmers.) You
can't fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without
comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural
agriculture in Mexico.
And though we don't ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms,
few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American
landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don't
have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides
what happens on private property in America, but that's not exactly
true. The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the
farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private
land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it
will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with
chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship. The health of the
American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very
look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles,
programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.
Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the
nation's political passions every five years, but that hasn't been
the case. If the quintennial antidrama of the "farm bill debate"
holds true to form this year, a handful of farm-state legislators
will thrash out the mind-numbing details behind closed doors, with
virtually nobody else, either in Congress or in the media, paying
much attention. Why? Because most of us assume that, true to its
name, the farm bill is about "farming," an increasingly quaint
activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we
have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the
farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting
a handful of their Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren't paying
attention, they pay no political price for trading, or even selling,
their farm-bill votes. The fact that the bill is deeply encrusted
with incomprehensible jargon and prehensile programs dating back to
the 1930s makes it almost impossible for the average legislator to
understand the bill should he or she try to, much less the average
citizen. It's doubtful this is an accident.
But there are signs this year will be different. The public-health
community has come to recognize it can't hope to address obesity and
diabetes without addressing the farm bill. The environmental
community recognizes that as long as we have a farm bill that
promotes chemical and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a
pipe dream. The development community has woken up to the fact that
global poverty can't be fought without confronting the ways the farm
bill depresses world crop prices. They got a boost from a 2004 ruling
by the World Trade Organization that U.S. cotton subsidies are
illegal; most observers think that challenges to similar subsidies
for corn, soy, wheat or rice would also prevail.
And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly
concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in
America. A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food
issues today, and while it is still somewhat inchoate, the
manifestations are everywhere: in local efforts to get vending
machines out of the schools and to improve school lunch; in local
campaigns to fight feedlots and to force food companies to better the
lives of animals in agriculture; in the spectacular growth of the
market for organic food and the revival of local food systems. In
great and growing numbers, people are voting with their forks for a
different sort of food system. But as powerful as the food consumer
is - it was that consumer, after all, who built a $15 billion
organic-food industry and more than doubled the number of farmer's
markets in the last few years - voting with our forks can advance
reform only so far. It can't, for example, change the fact that the
system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the
marketplace the only ones the poor can afford. To change that, people
will have to vote with their votes as well - which is to say, they
will have to wade into the muddy political waters of agricultural
policy.
Doing so starts with the recognition that the "farm bill" is a
misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten
with the interests of eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who
think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no
matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize
the real cost of artificially cheap food - to their health, to the
land, to the animals, to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters
want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health
and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food
cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the
most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least
healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh
food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from
far away. Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on
farmers, which is why they would support a bill that guarantees the
people who raise our food not subsidies but fair prices. Why? Because
they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own food
and doesn't hurt the world's farmers by dumping its surplus crops on
their markets.
The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for
farmers won't solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted
agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some
imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to
focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on
growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for
food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the
current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an
eater's farm bill could not be more straightforward: it's one that
changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our
food (and farming) over and above its quantity.
Such changes are radical only by the standards of past farm bills,
which have faithfully reflected the priorities of the agribusiness
interests that wrote them. One of these years, the eaters of America
are going to demand a place at the table, and we will have the
political debate over food policy we need and deserve. This could
prove to be that year: the year when the farm bill became a food
bill, and the eaters at last had their say.
Michael Pollan, a contributing writer, is the Knight professor of
journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent
book is "The Omnivore's Dilemma."
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