Michael Pollan: The 2007 Farm Bill 'You are what you grow'
* Michael Pollan: The 2007 Farm Bill 'You are what you grow', By
Michael Pollan, Sustainable Food News, April 19, 2007. HYPERLINK
"http://www.sustainablefoodnews.com/"Straight to the Source
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," which was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The
New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post and Amazon.com.
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 disposal 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. - - - -
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