From 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."
That's a pretty powerful statement, but his problem is not the farm bill itself, but what the farm bill supports. Not enough organic tomatoes, and too many Twinkies.
"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.”
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?"
There's several reasons for this, namely that people like twinkies, and that corn and soybeans are much more effcient to produce than carrots and tomatoes farm bill or no farm bill. I've heard Mr. Pollan on the radio, and he's been to Iowa, he realizes how successfully farmers can grow corn here. But the question remains, Why would people eat these Twinkies? Because the government forces them by making them too cheap.
"For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill...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."
Ok, so what is Mr. Pollan's solution to the Twinkie problem?
"And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in America. A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food issues today"
Good, nothing like good old fashioned grassroots efforts using the market to make changes they desire. Oh but wait.
"voting with our forks can advance reform only so far. It can’t, for example, change the fact that the system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only ones the poor can afford. To change that, people will have to vote with their votes as well — which is to say, they will have to wade into the muddy political waters of agricultural policy.
Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food — to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from far away...It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current farm bill hobbles"
Ah, there's the kicker. Grassroots movements only go so far, so we must force the government to make everyone eat what we say they should eat. They must be forced to eat the things we want them to because we know best. It's nice to make things clean and sustainable, to make the cows and pigs happy and run free, but by doing this we make food unaffordable to all but the elite such as Mr. Pollan. In many parts of the country it is simply impossible to grow local produce year round unlike Berkeley, let alone only during the months when the school children aren't eating at school. The midwest is good at growing corn and soybeans, and should be kept as such. Soybeans are a cheap source of protein and calories for people and animals all across the world, and America is no different.
I'm no big advocate for the farm bill, it's a giant mess of regulatory and market control, but making it even worse by pouring tax dollars into production of organic tomatoes is not the answer. People need to be educated about proper diets and what is healthy to eat, otherwise all the produce in the world will rot on the shelves. Produce needs to be grown in climates where it grows best, making the most effcient use of land and resources. By increasing demand by educating people about the benefits of them Mr. Pollan would be able to achieve his goal, without the all the government intervention.
