Michael Pollan [1] is back on his favourite
hobbyhorse [2]. Long, but well worth reflecting upon.
Udhay
[1] http://www.michaelpollan.com/
[2] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/18961
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html
The Way We Live Now
You Are What You Grow
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: April 22, 2007
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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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
