This is way outside my usual commentary, but hey, it's the weekend and it's a pet interest of mine. The NYTimes Magazine last week had a great (and relatively short) article on the upcoming farm bill and its sprawling, fascinating effects on our lives in everything from health to economics to trade. The farm bill, which comes up every five or so years and is once again impending, has perhaps the most effect of any law you've never heard of. It's colossal, complicated, and totally regressive -- the goals of this bill, which has all kinds of influence, have virtually nothing to do with effective agriculture policies and everything to do with politics, lobbying, and narrow interests.
The piece explains,
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 . . . For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation . . . sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system.The way it sets those rules is by providing huge subsidies for corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and cotton.
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 . . . 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.I didn't know anything about these things until this past fall, when I just randomly read a book about nutrition. I was fascinated by how much junk I was eating, and how wrong I was in my general approach to food consumption. It lead me to read about the politics of food, and then more nutrition, and then more politics. The whole thing is a debacle, and it makes us fat, leads to dangerous foods (which we've seen with alarming frequency lately), and screws the agricultural economies of developing countries. Whether any of these problems will be rectified with the new version of the bill I have no idea, but I certainly hope so.
