You Are What You Grow
Photo by Brian Ulrich/The New York Times
Adam Drewnowski, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington, was stymied by the correlation between a person’s wealth (or, more important, the lack thereof) and the likelihood of becoming overweight. To find some answers, he gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend at a typical American supermarket.
In today’s New York Times Magazine, the inimitable Michael Pollan relates how Drewnowski discovered that you got the most calories for your money among “the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink.”
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.
If you’re eating on a budget, Drewnowski concluded, your most-rational economic strategy is to eat nutritionally bankrupt empty calories and pack on the pounds.
Pollan asks: How did we end up in a economic situation where a pair of Twinkies—with no fewer than 39 ingredients, not to mention packaging and marketing costs—is markedly cheaper than a bunch of carrots? “For the answer,” he says, “you need look no farther than the farm bill.”
The farm bill, which is reexamined approximately every five years—it’s come around again in 2007—determines which U.S. crops will be subsidized by the government, and which will not.
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.
The result, Pollan says, is 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). When it comes to supporting fresh produce, however, the farm bill leaves those farmers bereft.
As a result of encouraging overproduction, we also end up flooding overseas markets with a glut of cheap crops that undercut world prices, threatening the livelihoods of millions of small farmers around the world, especially in developing countries. And, according to Pollan, the post-NAFTA flow of the Mexican immigrants that gives Bill O’Reilly so much agita, is “inextricably linked” to the flow of U.S. corn south of the border.
Read the rest of this very important issue here. You can also urge your members of Congress to reform the farm bill via Oxfam America’s online system.
Related articles:
1. Unhappy Meals
2. The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
3. Wake up, America!
4. Michael Pollan vs. Whole Foods
5. The School Lunch Test
Helen said,
April 22, 2007 at 7:16 pm
this is really, really interesting - how do you find out stuff like this?
I don’t believe in ‘laying blame’ and I don’t know how you can get people to break out of learned helplessness and start making better choices (especially given the weight of the blanket of media and advertising that tries to keep them there). But it is astounding to me that government policy is so clearly promoting the problem. Perhaps it started off with trying to find cheap ways to keep people from starving, and has become self-perpetuating.
mAndrea said,
April 23, 2007 at 11:21 am
Interesting point that you made about the cost of some produce compared to grains.
Never understood why grains and airlines get subsidies, and other businesses do not. First rule of business is that you charge enough to make a profit after expenses. If only a few people can afford to go on trips, then so be it. Better for the environment.
Dustywheat said,
April 23, 2007 at 11:38 am
I see this from a different angle. After going to one of my meetings, where we talked about processes vs “whole” (or less processed) foods, one thing the leader said stuck with me.
“Processed food is has already been broken down. Most cereal is basically pre-digested for you.”
So your body gets things it doesn’t need and doesn’t even need to do the work for it. I know snap peas are more expensive than little packages of cookies, but I know how I feel after the little packages of cookies vs the wonderous sugar snap pea.
People have gotten away from thinking of strawberries as a treat vs twinkies. Very sad…
aleta said,
April 27, 2007 at 11:36 pm
To address some of the Farm Bill questions, mAndrea asked why grains get subsidies, and the answer addresses Helen’s theory as well. I don’t know about airlines, but the reason grains get subsidies is because (a) they’re used primarily for animal feed, and (b) it has to do with the way the original Farm Bill worked. Born out of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era, the idea was to address the issue of farmers being forced to flood the market with their crop during harvest time which pushed prices down. The govt. made a program that offered to store farmers’ grain so they could sell it at a later time when the market wasn’t flooded and they could get a better price for it. Grains are storable for long periods of time without going bad. And once the govt subsidizes something, it’s hard to take away the subsidies. That’s why produce and nuts don’t get the same type of subsidies. So yes, it was originally a way to make sure lots of people were fed cheaply as well as stabilizing farmers’ incomes, and has gone awry from there. Food & Water Watch has a good Farm Bill 101 sheet: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/us-farmbill
Sidnie said,
April 28, 2007 at 5:03 pm
It is appalling that it is far cheaper to eat so unhealthfully, but our healthcare costs are through the roof as well. I guess what I am trying to say is that yes we will initially pay for eating well, but it far outways what it does long term to the health care system, not to mention or bodies.
The Worsted Witch » said,
July 12, 2007 at 11:27 am
[...] The Environmental Working Group has almost reached its goal of obtaining 30,000 signatures on a petition to tell Congress to increase support for organic farms in the farm bill—they just need 3,000 more people to sign it by midnight ET Sunday. Check out the petition here. [...]
One/Change » Blog Archive » Environmental Working Group’s Grow Organics Petition said,
July 12, 2007 at 2:18 pm
[...] 1Jasmine, Worsted Witch; 2EWG [...]