I read a brilliant NYT article a month ago, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Michael Pollan explained the farm bill, and it turns out that the farm bill defines what Americans eat. We subsidize the hell out of corn, so we eat a lot of corn — corn is in 25% of everything on your grocery store’s shelves — which makes us and our food enormously unhealthy. If we spent that same money subsidizing locally-produced broccoli, chicken, tomatoes and apples, then we’d eat a lot of locally-produced broccoli, chicken, tomatoes and apples. You’ll learn an enormous amount from this lengthy article, so do yourself a favor and give it a read.
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Reading this makes me wonder what we can do about this tangled web of the farm bill besides using our purchasing power.
Saw Michael Moore on Bill Marr’s HBO show-promoting his new documentary “Sicko”. He has lost weight and said doing the film made him realize the main way to stay out of the US Health system is to be healthy. He said he is walking more and has discovered fruits and vegetables. Better food choices can help Americans.
Michael Moore could lose half his body weight and the shadow of his ass would still weigh 40 lbs. Although I guess it’s good he finally realized being morbidly obese wasn’t the healthiest lifestyle in the world. It’s a testament to how rich this country is that one of our biggest problems is that we’re too fat.
Thanks for helping to, um, enlighten the situation.
Would the right wing spend so much time vilifying the likes of Moore and Clinton if they weren’t on some level afraid of them?
I’m afraid he might might fall on me.
Can’t quite figure out why Moore would need to “stay out of the US health system.” He can clearly afford any treatment from the best doctors and hospitals in the world. Maybe he just misses his buddy Castro.
JS, I’m not so sure of that, given the number of working poor in this country who are overweight. They don’t have the luxury of buying healthier food, and they aren’t educated on what is healthier.
@ Tim:
I’m not very sympathetic to that argument. I think unhealthy eating is more readily explained by poor choices and/or poor parenting. It’s simply a lot easier to buy a bag of chips and a fruit pie at 7-11 and call it “dinner” than it is to go to the grocery store and buy and prepare healthier fare. I imagine that the aggregate price difference over the course of a week between those two is not that much.
Certainly there are those who lack transportation and whose immediate neighborhood is not serviced by a traditional supermarket offering a produce and a meat dept, but that alone cannot explain this country’s obesity problem.
Finally, I just don’t buy the education explanation. On some level, almost everyone knows that a bunch of grapes is a healthier snack than a bag of fries. It’s like those wizards who wanna sue McDonald’s because they claim to have been unaware that eating biscuits, Big Macs, and Chicken McNuggets almost every day for years would make them fat and lead to health problems. I just can’t find it in me to feel bad for such folks.
I thought this, too, but I was wrong. I learned I was wrong when I read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, which uses the going price of different types of food to demonstrate that there are a great many people who simply cannot afford to eat healthy foods.
There are serious people working to bring reform to the 2007 Farm Bill and support healthy/fresh/local food issues. I am privileged to work for folks who are part of a coalition of 400 groups called the Farm and Food Policy Project. Check out http://www.healthyfarmbill.org
if you want to send a message to Congress. It’s not too late! Anthony
How much do you think it costs to eat healthy food? It’s not easy but not impossible to do on a modest budget. Our family of five eats very healthy food on $450 a month. And I noticed the other day that made it right at the $3 a day level some congressman was touting as too little to eat on. We buy lots of fresh produce, chicken, fish, and so on. I’m on a personal mission to eradicate high fructose corn syrup from my home. :-)
And if you are ever in Goochland check out the farmers market there every Saturday morning. A couple family farms sell local beef, pork, chicken, eggs and several bring in fresh vegetables and other produce. It’s a 45 minute drive from Scottsville down route 6.
Anybody on a severely restricted food budget quickly discovers that the most important thing is getting the most calories for the dollar. (Often, the second most important thing is an extremely quick preparation time, because such families often spend so much time working that they have little time to prepare a meal.) As you may have noticed, or you may well now notice, the food with the greatest caloric content is also often the cheapest. These foods get most of their calories from fat and sugar, and are loaded with carbohydrates.
Helping nothing, the price of fresh fruits and vegetables has skyrocketed in the past decade, while the price of heavily processed foods have remained stable.
There’s always a tradeoff between time (doing things yourself) and money (paying others to do them for you). Those families who have little choice but to have the breadwinners work 12 or even 16 hours each day often don’t have the luxury of time, and they have to pay for others to prepare their meals, at least in part. If I didn’t need to work at all, I suspect that I could feed my wife and I very nicely for $6/person/day. We’d have some chickens, some goats, we’d triple the size of our garden, and I’d barter regularly with our neighbors for other produce, buying other ingredients as necessary. But, as I said, I wouldn’t be working. :)
JS, I’m with you on the idiots who sue McDonalds for making them fat, when all you have to do is walk into one of their fine establishments and take a look at the average body type of their customers. :-)
However, I think you underestimate the amount of time required to acquire and prep good, healthy food. Sure, you can’t miss with a nice veggie stir-fry, but when you come home from your 12-hour factory job, that might be a bit too much work.
I agree that poor health education/parenting is a problem too — but that situation just exacerbates the existing food price issue.