Another well written & entertaining book that address the food question food is:
" The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan in which he traces the origin of the foods used in 4
meals; fast food, big organic, grass fed, & hunter gatherer.
Ron
--On Monday, September 22, 2008 3:32 PM -0400 Jed Rothwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Remi Cornwall wrote:
So more regulation, right? A paternalistic state must step in here? I dunno.
No, that will not be necessary. The problem can be fixed with several steps,
mainly by reducing
regulations and reducing government spending. Fewer but better regulations are
called for.
Changes such as the following are called for:
1. Remove price supports for unhealthy food. This means less regulation, not
more. It will cost
the government and taxpayers less, especially if we stop paying wealthy farmers.
2. Modest price supports for healthy food might be in order, to offset decades
of encouraging bad
food habits. At present, there are huge price supports for corn, meat and milk
and no supports
for vegetables and fruit.
3. Locally grown food.
4. Better health education in public schools.
5. Improved sidewalks and transportation, to allow more people to walk. The
obesity rate in urban
areas such as New York, Boston and Tokyo where people walk a lot is much lower
than in suburban
areas.
For details, see the book T. Farley, D. Cohen, "Prescription for a Healthy
Nation," Beacon Press,
2005.
It seems unlikely to me that oil production will decline enough to affect
obesity in the U.S. in
the next 20 to 40 years. That will happen only if ethanol production from corn
continues, and I
doubt that will happen. Ethanol production decreases the supply of food and
oil, and increases
global warming, because ethanol is an energy sink: it takes more fossil fuel
energy to produce
ethanol than the ethanol itself generates. As I noted here before, when you
fill up a 25 gallon
SUV tank with ethanol, you consume as much food as an adult eats in one year.
If there can be
such a thing as an obscene statistic, this would be it.
- Jed
