The New Federal Farm Bill: Why it matters.

You might remember a while ago that the VT delegation had a hearing on the new Federal Farm Bill that is currently up for reauthorization. I'd like to point you now to this piece in the NYT by Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling 'The Omnivore's Dilemma', that lays out in no uncertain terms how important the farm bill really is. It affects many levels: public health, nutrition programs, many aspects of the farming industry, and the environment.

Some of you might remember back during the so-called 'Republican Revolution', as they began to wage their war on the poor, then Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX and T&A movies) made a comment along the lines that 'America is the only country where our poor people are fat'. Now, insensitive as it was for Gramm to say so, in a sense he did have a point. As you've heard me lament before, there's something really wrong with the system where only the rich can afford to eat healthy. As Pollan writes:

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. ... he 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...he 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.

So how does this tie into the farm bill? Subsidies, baby. Subsidies, proving once again the idea of a 'free' market is nothing but a myth:

[The farm bill] 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 ... 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 reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Pollan then goes on to show how the needs of big agribusiness are often contradictory to the needs of public health. It even determines what foods your kids will eat for lunch at school (ever wonder why there's always Tater Tots? - certainly not because of all the nutrition they don't have). It also affects world poverty, as well, for when we are able to sell crops for less than it costs to grow them, that often can determine the fate of Mexican corn farmers and Nigerian cotton growers, and whether they lose their farms and move to the city, exacerbating the poverty already rampant there.

You'd think something this important would be something to rally around, but due to the technical jargon and back room deals, it usually passes, unnoticed except by the few that stand to benefit the most from it (certainly not you or I).

Pollan is optimistic, however, that change may finally be around the corner, due to the increasing awareness of the environmental community, the development community, and the public health community. But most importantly, he insists that real change is not just going to come from changing our eating habits; we need to get our hands dirty and start taking notice of agricultural policies, and concentrate our activism there:

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.

I've mentioned it before.. for truly radical change to happen, we need to not just 'practice' democracy, we need to start living it.