Farm Bill Encourages Poor People to Eat Poorly

[Guest guest]

April 22, 2007

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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