Michael Pollan: The Government Makes You Fat
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 04.22.07
Michael Pollan looks at the way Government policy determines what we eat and why "the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth." He quotes a study by Drewnowski of the University of Washington, who determined that a dollar will buy 1200 calories of cookies or chips but only 250 calories of carrots. If you don't have a lot of money, the most rational thing to do is buy junk food to get the most calories for your buck.
Why is a complex food like a Twinkie, with its 39 ingredients, processing, packaging and marketing so much cheaper than a bunch of carrots? Government subsidies and programs like the Farm Bill. we quote:
"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."
Fascinating reading in the ::New York Times
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I find that incredibly frightening.
This wouldn't be applicable in many urban settings but this sounds like a good reason to grow your own carrots.
I find this incredibly frightening too. I encourage everyone to read the linked article and read it critically rather than through the biased lenses we are so used to wearing. The author seems to have started with a conclusion and works his way back through very weak cause/effect relationships to his premise. Buying locally grown produce will help solve obesity in poor people.....Huh?!
It seems nothing is our own fault these days when something as basic as our choice of what to eat can be blamed on the government boogey man. The government clearly is in a no win situation when programs that deflate the cost of staples such as corn, soy, wheat, and rice, lands you in hot water with the poor. Obesity among the poor is a serious problem which shouldn't be hijacked by the buy-locally-environmental-movement. There are plenty of great reason to buy locally grown food, but this isn't it. The obesity problem deserves real solutions. Check any respectable study on obesity and not one mentions farm subsides as a factor. Education, access to health care, significantly less exercise, and lack of peer pressure to be thin, among others, take the lead. Much lower on the list, fast food is mentioned with junk food lumped in. The issue with fast food isn't cost (you could eat cheaper in the produce aisle than McDonalds) but that fast food and junk food are quicker and easier.
I wish we wouldn't just parrot back any article that supports our conclusions rather than reading critically.
I live in a very small town in the american south and there isn't exactly alot of places to shop for organic or fresh foods in my town. So, more-or-less, we are confined to shopping at wal-mart or other big companies that have a rather small "Fruits and Veggies" section. I went in a few days ago to buy some fruit for my boyfriend and me (I just found this reciepe for some fruit salsa and was eager to try it out). I was trying to find a papaya when I saw the store didn't cary any exotic fruit besides pineapples and coconuts. No mangos, kiwi, papaya or anything else. How are we supposed to eat heathy when there isn't a store that carries these foods? Directly behind that section is the ice cream and frozen desserts sectin which is 2 Xs the size of the veggie section. Our store can cary 8 different brands of ice cream and 7 different brands of apple pie but not 1 papaya? No wonder americans are so fat.
Well, they don't carry papaya, mango,etc. because it isn't grown locally or even in the Unites States. It would cost Walmart alot more in fossil fuel and shipping to get that papaya on the shelf. When we talk about eating "locally" we aren't talking about buying what is at your local grocery store, we are talking about eating foods that are actually grown in your region. It is not "green" or "sustainable" to eat tropical fruits that are not grown "locally".
Not that this has much to do with the article just addressing the comment above.
Some Walmarts DO carry kiwis and other things like that...so they apparantly DO spend that money on shipping and fossil fuels. But, the smaller the town/city...the smaller your choices are often. We have Walmart and ALSO some other places but VERY few organic things. IN FACT...not even the farms will raise anything organic. You have to REALLY look ...check out localharvest (.org I THINK...if not google it)...GREAT resource.
It is very weird that a country that is run by people who claim that they are free market champions support these kind of ridiculous subsidies.
yep, the government makes you fat and sick on purpose, so you will pay outrageous prices for health care and medicine. you still have a choice on the food you eat (buy or grow organic and eat whole foods), but when you get sick, they got you.
Why U.S. Governement doesn't give subsidies for carot and other fresh vegetables? This could help to make heathy food more affordable and stop heathcare increase.
But anyway, if people will buy more fresh and organic food, than big company will sell it! Market is like that.
In Switzerland where I live, the organic market is growing really fast, because people start to look what is in their dish!
I find it incredibly frightening too. How stupid the American public is! So, because the gov't subsidizes certain crops, that means that junk food MUST be produced from these crops.
"the most rational thing to do is buy junk food to get the most calories for your buck. "
This is what the author calls rational? Calories do not equal nutrition.
People, you should have paid attention in JR High school when your teachers were teaching you about supply and demand. It's a very simple concept. Venders will supply what the consumer demands. There aren't 8 different kinds of ice cream at your Wal-Mart because the gov't is subsidizing soybeans.
Having your health insurance payed for by someone elses taxes won't make you any less fat or lazy. Having healthcare period, will not make you any less fat or lazy. However, being less fat and lazy will, on average, reduce your need for healthcare. That, will in turn, reduce your healthcare costs.
Providing a subsudy for growing a certain crop is not a mandate. It is still the choice of the farmer to grow whatever he wants. If he chooses to make more money growing a subsidized crop, that is his decision. That is an exercise of his freedom. Just as it is an exercise of your freedom to purchase healthy.
I realize that most of you don't come from an agricultural background, and that you think big city journalists must surely be the most sophisticated amd informed people in the country, but even if they were able to distinguish a healthy animal or crop from a diseased one, they certainly wouldn't know how to raise one. Organic doesn't necessarily equal healthy. It requires some chemicals and medications to raise crops and animals free of parasites and disease.
Blaming the establishment for youir decisions does not make it the gov'ts fault.
Certainly people have the option to not buy junk food, but that's not the point being made here - the point is that if you remove the subsidies, the cost to produce the junk food goes up and makes healthier food look relatively more attractive to a consumer.
Would people be eating at McDonald's if a Happy Meal actually cost $10 or $15 or $20 dollars? Some would, but a lot more would realize it's a smarter economic transaction to cook your own food. And when you cook your own food, you don't tend to add high-fructose corn syrup or soybean derivatives.
Regarding the lack of options in small town America - why not grow more of your own food? Don't let Wal Mart's profit margins dictate what you can and can't eat, take some control of the situation.