Fat from the Flawed Farm Bill…Some Get Checks, Most Get Bigger Waistlines
Walk into the average grocery store and you will find that carrots and broccoli are more expensive per calorie than soda or Twinkies. Have you ever stopped to wonder why this is? How is that carrots with just washing, bagging, and no advertisements are more expensive than the Twinkie’s 39 complex, hard to pronounce ingredients and enticing packaging? If poor and hungry, the answer is to that question is less important than the problem of budget efficiency: will you buy the carrot or the Twinkie?
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 [an obesity researcher] 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 (emphasis added).
Take a look at the Twinkie and other processed foods and you will see that the main ingredients are generally derived from corn (added sugars) and soy (added fats). Not coincidentally, these are two of five crops heavily subsidized by the US government under the Farm Bill (the other crops are wheat, rice and cotton). The ingredients in junk food are heavily subsidized, ergo the entire product is artificially cheaper.
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.
Correlation, Not Causation
There is something seriously wrong with our food system when it promotes such diet behaviors. Is it only a coincidence that obesity rates have been on the rise since these farm aid subsidies went into effect? However, one congressman says it’s all about the choices we make. In other words, it’s our own fault if we are fat, not the crops we subsidize:
“I agree that obesity and health are serious issues in America today,” said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. “However, blaming the cause on the crops that we grow in Kansas and/or the U.S. farm program is overlooking the personal responsibility we all have in our daily lives and diets.”
The poor do not have many luxuries. One of the luxuries they do not have is abundant choice when it comes to the food they purchase. The government needs to recognize that its subsidies have skewed the prices of food in favor of calorie-dense, nutrient-light junk food. Consequently, the government should take some responsibility for the diet of the poor, whose “daily lives and diets” are more dictated by price than health choices. The government’s conflicting position on this matter is put simply by Michael Pollan; “The nation’s agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public health objectives.” The bottom-line is the government cannot make Twinkies cheaper than carrots and expect everyone to stay thin and healthy. However, a certain optimism is circulating:
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.
Sadly, the 2007 revision of the Farm Bill did little to alleviate the woes of such community groups. Change needs to come swiftly in order to salvage the 2012 Farm Bill debate. Voting with our fork will only get us so far, it’s time to take the discussion of the Farm Bill beyond dinner. Subsidies aren’t important just to the farmers in Iowa and Nebraska, they affect us all (and the poorest, the most). We have to vote with out ballots and letters and give our say to the politicians. By moving this debate further into the sphere of public dialogue, we can help to turn the Farm Bill into a Food Bill.
And eat some carrots, if you can.
November 25, 2008
Tags: agriculture, farmers, Health, Michael Pollan, nutrition, obesity, policy, subsidies Posted in: Health, Politics
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