In an American supermarket, you can buy more far more calories per dollar if you opt for processed, “junk” foods instead of fresh unprocessed foods like produce. Fault of greedy junk food manufacturing conglomerates? Not according to an article in the NY Times. The blame, instead, should be laid at the feet of the Farm Bill:
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.
Fun trick: next time you’re shopping for bottled beverages, try to find one that doesn’t contain high-fructose corn syrup.
The Farm Bill’s insidious effects go beyond making us fatter, too, according to the article:
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.
Very good summary, of the subject.
I hate the corn lobby more than I ever thought possible.
Yup…
I’ve been reading up on this topic for the past 5 years or so.. and one of the first things I would help to nuke would be agricultural subsidies…
What’s really fucked up, in my view, is that we DID actually get rid of these subsidies back in the late 1990’s. The Republican congress decided to cut them out–because they had been used as democratic “pork” for so long.. and Clinton went along with it.. but then a bit after 2000.. they came back again…
Disgusting really… we are paying people to abuse the environment, to produce food at artificially low prices, that encourages overeating in many ways for a lot of pepple, and also totally screws up developing nations economics, thus making them more susceptible to dangerous “liberation” ideologies that are nothing more than utopian manipulations..
ind one that doesn’t contain high-fructose corn syrup.
Boylans, baby.
http://www.beveragesdirect.com/products/boylans/
The shizizzle.
You know I knew about food subsidies in a back of my mind kind of way, and You’ll hear me complain from time to time about how certain foods are way overused in American diet and food but I never put those two facts together before.