Michael Pollan explains the Farm Bill
You Are What You Grow
April 22, 2007 | Source: 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.
<< Back
|
