Rigged Economics Add to Healthy-Food Prices
Filed under: General Health, Nutrition
This is an article by syndicated columnist David Sirota that I thought was absolutely fantastic and worth sharing with you guys.
The easiest way to explain Gallup’s discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being “Whole Paycheck.” Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times.
It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for the wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point’s carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile – if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blow-hard – that’s because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.
As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism – the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.
In this chapter of that larger tragicomedy, lawmakers whose campaigns are underwritten by agribusinesses have used billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize those agribusinesses’ specific commodities (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc) that are the key ingredients of unhealthy food. Not surprisingly, the subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs such as fruits and vegetables. The end result is that recession-battered consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to “choose” the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support.
Corn – which is processed into the junk-food staple corn syrup and which feeds the livestock that produce meat – exemplifies the scheme.
“Over the past decade, the federal government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop…artificially low,” reports Time magazine. “That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 – a bargain.”
Yes it is a bargain, but one created by deliberate government policy that serves the corn industry titans, not by any genetic advantage that makes corn derivatives automatically more affordable for the budget-strapped commoner.
The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry, notes Time, is “that a dollar (can) buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit.”
So while it may be amusing to use American’s worsening recession-era diet as another excuse to promote cultural stereotypes, the nutrition crisis costing us billions in unnecessary health care costs is more about public policy and powerful special interests than it is about epicurean snobs and affluent tastes. Indeed, this is a problem not of agricultural biology that supposedly makes nutrition naturally unaffordable – it is a problem of rigged economics and corrupt polymaking.
Solving the crisis, then, requires everything from recalibrating our subsidies to halting the low-income school lunch program’s support for the pizza and french fry lobby (yes, they have a powerful lobby). It requires, in other words, a new level of maturity, a better appreciation for the nuanced politics of food and a commitment to changing those politics for the future.
Impossible? Hardly. A country that can engineer the seemingly unattainable economics of a $5 McDonald’s feast certainly has the capacity to produce a healthy meal for the same price. Its just a matter of will – or won’t.
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Posted on August 1st, 2011 by Brian St. Pierre
6 Comments
August 1st, 2011 at 9:28 am
This strikes quite a chord, as I was just having this very discussion in Chicago over the weekend.
Not that I want to start beating another drum about social welfare issues, but I would really like to see some analysis done on a concept I’ve never really read about. If our nation’s welfare-dependants can only afford that which is subsidized, than why don’t we employ a new tactic in subsidy? At the State level, why not require aid recipients to purchase 80% (a made up number) of their dietary needs from local farmers markets. We would essentially be subsidizing these local farmers and people would be encouraged (forced as they are now) to make a healthier choice.
Lobbying would work against this of course on behalf of the corn and its support industries, but we might be able to start this experiment in a smaller, less politicized State.
Admittedly I have not let this idea sit in the oven long, but is really like to hear some feedback.
August 2nd, 2011 at 12:53 pm
Nice post Brian. Since I cut all the crap out of my diet, I’ve been struck by how the desire for sustainable agriculture and local, pasture-raised meat really cuts across party lines. At our paleo get-togethers here in DC we have the whole range of folks from conservative Republican (me) to lefty tree-huggers. We all get along great, as long we keep the discussion to food!
August 8th, 2011 at 9:38 am
I always appreciate your posts Brian.
Here is another view point on the subject:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1hDDSY/www.good.is/post/the-inconvenient-truth-about-cheap-food-and-obesity-it-s-not-farm-subsidies/
“The cause is higher personal income plus productivity growth in our food and farm industries. On the farm, new precision technologies such as GPS systems, satellite-controlled variable rate chemical applications, efficient drip irrigation, and improved crop genetics are continuously reducing production costs, and lowering consumer prices. Nor is it just the crops grown by subsidized farmers that have become cheap. One USDA study in 2008 found that over the previous 25 years the price of un-subsidized fruits and vegetables—controlling for season and quality—had fallen at almost exactly the same rate as the price of chocolate chip cookies, cola, ice cream, and potato chips. So that other popular claim—Americans are obese because unsubsidized healthy foods have become more expensive—is also bogus.”
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