You Are What You Eat

More's the Pity

Haunted by high food prices? It wasn’t always this way. While we like to blame grocery prices on the Democrats, or the Republicans,  it’s not one president or another who’s to blame. It’s us, the eaters, and our overwhelming desire to have it all. We have traded health for convenience, and with it we’ve traded the planet for plastic. Set aside the environmental aspects of what we’ve done to ourselves for a while, and consider the health aspects alone.

Just during my lifetime, we have completely abandoned the idea that certain foods come in and out of season. Instead, we find ways to make everything available all year around through a combination of genetically modified seeds that can grow in unaccustomed climates, the forging of global supply chains, and the proliferation of single use plastic. Take grapes. In summer, the grapes in our supermarkets can come from North America. But the winter grapes come from, for example, Mexico or Chile. That is also true of fruits like blueberries.

All this is not without a price. It doesn’t get cheaper to haul food from half way across the planet to the US. Putting food on the table has become an industry bigger, if not better, than ever before. The industry that produces it is now called agri-business, even when the beginning of the chain is the farmer. The farmer herself needs a college degree.

And now it’s all catching up with  us. Big Food, which drives our eating habits, is not only becoming too expensive for ordinary consumers to afford, it’s also making us sick.

As we employ technological fix after technological fix to one of our three basic necessities (food, clothing, and shelter), we fight the battles of obesity, diabetes, and dementia on the other end. The consumers of the Standard American Diet( SAD) —that’s Americans —are dying younger and younger. We feed our people products that are banned in lesser, poorer nations.

Fixing America’s broken food system is a complex, multi-faceted challenge that requires addressing issues related to food production, distribution, health, sustainability, and equity. To effectively reform the food system, actions need to be taken at multiple levels—from policy changes at the national level to shifts in local practices and individual behaviors.

1. At the federal level:

• Restructure agricultural subsidies to incentivize the production of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains rather than corn, soy, and livestock feed.Current subsidies don’t favor growing the foods we think the population ought to be eating. Why subsidize livestock feed? Why corn? Much of our corn goes to ethanol production, which goes into gasoline as an additive. As we shift off the internal combustion engine, we might need less ethanol. When was this subsidy last examined? Large farmers like Archer-Daniels-Midland grow corn for ethanol, but also for high fructose corn syrup, which we’ve come to consider unhealthy. In Arizona, the citrus groves have all been razed for homes, which means our produce comes from further away and is no longer fresh when it gets to us.

• Anti-Trust Legislation Enforcement: Enforce antitrust laws to break up monopolistic agribusiness corporations. Look up ADM, which was founded during the Gilded Age and still grows much of the same stuff it did then, often on land exhausted by single-crop farming.   Anti-trust would encourage competition, support smaller farmers, and diversify food production.

• What’s in the Farm Bill? Everything, from food security (SNAP) to disaster relief to crop insurance to nutrition is in the Farm Bill. It’s moving toward strengthening organic standards as consumer demand shifts. You’d be surprised (I was) to learn that things in the food supply are not as bad as they appear. There’s still not enough support for small to mid-size farms, however, and that’s where our mission-driven farmers operate.

• Nutritional Standards and Labeling: Strengthen nutritional standards for school meals and food assistance programs. As you know if you have children or have ever spent time in a hospital, the worst food standards are in schools, hospitals, and jails.

• Implement clearer labeling that educates consumers on the health and environmental impacts of their food choices.

And, as I am always suggesting, we need more education on what it means to eat fast food or processed food, or non-nutritional food all the time.

I’ve now gone down this rabbit hole of our food supply, and will probably continue discussing it for another week or so. You don’t have to listen to me. But if you do, you will find out that I’m doing my homework.