[Marxism] The economics behind the obesity epidemic

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Magazine, April 22, 2007
The Way We Live Now
You Are What You Grow
By MICHAEL POLLAN

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the 
University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski 
ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. 
He wanted to figure out why it is that the most 
reliable predictor of obesity in America today is 
a person?s wealth. For most of history, after 
all, the poor have typically suffered from a 
shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it 
that today the people with the least amount of 
money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to 
spend, using it to purchase as many calories as 
he possibly could. He discovered that he could 
buy the most calories per dollar in the middle 
aisles of the supermarket, among the towering 
canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the 
typical American supermarket, the fresh foods ? 
dairy, meat, fish and produce ? line the 
perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged 
goods dominate the center.) 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.

As a rule, processed foods are more ?energy 
dense? than fresh foods: they contain less water 
and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which 
makes them both less filling and more fattening. 
These particular calories also happen to be the 
least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is 
why we call the foods that contain them ?junk.? 
Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food 
game in America are organized in such a way that 
if you are eating on a budget, the most rational 
economic strategy is to eat badly ? and get fat.

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.

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.

A public-health researcher from Mars might 
legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what 
its surgeon general has called ?an epidemic? of 
obesity would at the same time be in the business 
of subsidizing the production of high-fructose 
corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the 
farm bill: the nation?s agricultural policies 
operate at cross-purposes with its public-health 
objectives. And the subsidies are only part of 
the problem. The farm bill helps determine what 
sort of food your children will have for lunch in 
school tomorrow. The school-lunch program began 
at a time when the public-health problem of 
America?s children was undernourishment, so 
feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids 
seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem 
is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying 
to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get 
dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to 
serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch 
that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, 
however, the inspector smiles and the 
reimbursements flow. The farm bill essentially 
treats our children as a human Disposall for all 
the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has 
encouraged American farmers to overproduce.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism