Corn, overproduction, alcoholism, obesity (a must read!)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Magazine, October 12, 2003

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity
By MICHAEL POLLAN

Sometimes even complicated social problems turn out to be simpler than they
look. Take America's ''obesity epidemic,'' arguably the most serious
public-health problem facing the country. Three of every five Americans are
now overweight, and some researchers predict that today's children will be
the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be
shorter than that of their parents. The culprit, they say, is the health
problems associated with obesity.

You hear several explanations. Big food companies are pushing supersize
portions of unhealthful foods on us and our children. We have devolved into
a torpid nation of couch potatoes. The family dinner has succumbed to the
fast-food outlet. All these explanations are true, as far as they go. But
it pays to go a little further, to look for the cause behind the causes.
Which, very simply, is this: when food is abundant and cheap, people will
eat more of it and get fat. Since 1977, an American's average daily intake
of calories has jumped by more than 10 percent. Those 200 or so extra
calories have to go somewhere. But the interesting question is, Where,
exactly, did all those extra calories come from in the first place? And the
answer takes us back to the source of all calories: the farm.

It turns out that we have been here before, sort of, though the last great
American binge involved not food, but alcohol. It came during the first
decades of the 19th century, when Americans suddenly began drinking more
than they ever had before or have since, going on a collective bender that
confronted the young republic with its first major public-health crisis --
the obesity epidemic of its day. Corn whiskey, suddenly superabundant and
cheap, was the drink of choice, and in the 1820's the typical American man
was putting away half a pint of the stuff every day. That works out to more
than five gallons of spirits a year for every American. The figure today is
less than a gallon.

As W.J. Rorabaugh tells the story in ''The Alcoholic Republic,'' we drank
the hard stuff at breakfast, lunch and dinner, before work and after and
very often during. Employers were expected to supply spirits over the
course of the workday; in fact, the modern coffee break began as a
late-morning whiskey break called ''the elevenses.'' (Just to pronounce it
makes you sound tipsy.) Except for a brief respite Sunday mornings in
church, Americans simply did not gather -- whether for a barn raising or
quilting bee, corn husking or political campaign -- without passing the
jug. Visitors from Europe -- hardly models of sobriety themselves --
marveled at the free flow of American spirits. ''Come on then, if you love
toping,'' the journalist William Cobbett wrote his fellow Englishmen in a
dispatch from America. ''For here you may drink yourself blind at the price
of sixpence.''

The results of all this toping were entirely predictable: a rising tide of
public drunkenness, violence and family abandonment and a spike in
alcohol-related diseases. Several of the founding fathers -- including
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- denounced the
excesses of the ''alcoholic republic,'' inaugurating the American quarrel
over drinking that would culminate a century later in Prohibition.

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Nowadays, for somewhat different reasons, corn (along with most other
agricultural commodities) is again abundant and cheap, and once again the
easiest thing to do with the surplus is to turn it into more compact and
portable value-added commodities: corn sweeteners, cornfed meat and chicken
and highly processed foods of every description. The Alcoholic Republic has
given way to the Republic of Fat, but in both cases, before the clever
marketing, before the change in lifestyle, stands a veritable mountain of
cheap grain. Until we somehow deal with this surfeit of calories coming off
the farm, it is unlikely that even the most well-intentioned food companies
or public-health campaigns will have much success changing the way we eat.

The underlying problem is agricultural overproduction, and that problem
(while it understandably never receives quite as much attention as
underproduction) is almost as old as agriculture itself. Even in the Old
Testament, there's talk about how to deal not only with the lean times but
also with the fat: the Bible advises creation of a grain reserve to smooth
out the swings of the market in food. The nature of farming has always made
it difficult to synchronize supply and demand. For one thing, there are the
vagaries of nature: farmers may decide how many acres they will plant, but
precisely how much food they produce in any year is beyond their control.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/magazine/12WWLN.html


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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