Political Causes of Obesity

My daughter sent this to me, very interesting.

The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity

October 12, 2003
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.

But the outcome of our national drinking binge is not
nearly as relevant to our present predicament as its
underlying cause. Which, put simply, was this: American
farmers were producing way too much corn, especially in the
newly settled areas west of the Appalachians, where fertile
soil yielded one bumper crop after another. Much as it has
today, the astounding productivity of American farmers
proved to be their own worst enemy, as well as a threat to
the public health. For when yields rise, the market is
flooded with grain, and its price collapses. As a result,
there is a surfeit of cheap calories that clever marketers
sooner or later will figure out a way to induce us to
consume.

In those days, the easiest thing to do with all that grain
was to distill it. The Appalachian range made it difficult
and expensive to transport surplus corn from the lightly
settled Ohio River Valley to the more populous markets of
the East, so farmers turned their corn into whiskey -- a
more compact and portable ''value-added commodity.'' In
time, the price of whiskey plummeted, to the point that
people could afford to drink it by the pint, which is
precisely what they did.

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
natu farmers may decide how many acres they will plant,
but precisely how much food they produce in any year is
beyond their control.

The rules of classical economics just don't seem to operate
very well on the farm. When prices fall, for example, it
would make sense for farmers to cut back on production,
shrinking the supply of food to drive up its price. But in
reality, farmers do precisely the opposite, planting and
harvesting more food to keep their total income from
falling, a practice that of course depresses prices even
further. What's rational for the individual farmer is
disastrous for farmers as a group. Add to this logic the
constant stream of improvements in agricultural technology
(mechanization, hybrid seed, agrochemicals and now
genetically modified crops -- innovations all eagerly
seized on by farmers hoping to stay one step ahead of
falling prices by boosting yield), and you have a sure-fire
recipe for overproduction -- another word for way too much
food.

All this would be bad enough if the government weren't
doing its best to make matters even worse, by recklessly
encouraging farmers to produce even more unneeded food.
Absurdly, while one hand of the federal government is
campaigning against the epidemic of obesity, the other hand
is actually subsidizing it, by writing farmers a check for
every bushel of corn they can grow. We have been hearing a
lot lately about how our agricultural policy is undermining
our foreign-policy goals, forcing third-world farmers to
compete against a flood tide of cheap American grain. Well,
those same policies are also undermining our public-health
goals by loosing a tide of cheap calories at home.

While it is true that our farm policies are making a bad
situation worse, adding mightily to the great mountain of
grain, this hasn't always been the case with government
support of farmers, and needn't be the case even now. For
not all support programs are created equal, a fact that has
been conveniently overlooked in the new free-market
campaign to eliminate them.

In fact, farm programs in America were originally created
as a way to shrink the great mountain of grain, and for
many years they helped to do just that. The Roosevelt
administration established the nation's first program of
farm support during the Depression, though not, as many
people seem to think, to feed a hungry nation. Then, as
now, the problem was too much food, not too little; New
Deal farm policy was designed to help farmers reeling from
a farm depression caused by what usually causes a farm
depression: collapsing prices due to overproduction. In
Churdan, Iowa, recently, a corn farmer named George Naylor
told me about the winter day in 1933 his father brought a
load of corn to the grain elevator, where ''the price had
been 10 cents a bushel the day before,'' and was told that
suddenly, ''the elevator wasn't buying at any price.'' The
price of corn had fallen to zero.

New Deal farm policy, quite unlike our own, set out to
solve the problem of overproduction. It established a
system of price supports, backed by a grain reserve, that
worked to keep surplus grain off the market, thereby
breaking the vicious cycle in which farmers have to produce
more every year to stay even.

It is worth recalling how this system worked, since it
suggests one possible path out of the current subsidy
morass. Basically, the federal government set and supported
a target price (based on the actual cost of production) for
storable commodities like corn. When the market price
dropped below the target, a farmer was given an option:
rather than sell his harvest at the low price, he could
take out what was called a ''nonrecourse loan,'' using his
corn as collateral, for the full value of his crop. The
farmer then stored his corn until the market improved, at
which point he sold it and used the proceeds to repay the
loan. If the market failed to improve that year, the farmer
could discharge his debt simply by handing his corn over to
the government, which would add it to something called,
rather quaintly, the ''ever-normal granary.'' This was a
grain reserve managed by the U.S.D.A., which would sell
from it whenever prices spiked (during a bad harvest, say),
thereby smoothing out the vicissitudes of the market and
keeping the cost of food more or less steady -- or ''ever
normal.''

This wasn't a perfect system by any means, but it did keep
cheap grain from flooding the market and by doing so
supported the prices farmers received. And it did this at a
remarkably small cost to the government, since most of the
loans were repaid. Even when they weren't, and the
government was left holding the bag (i.e., all those
bushels of collateral grain), the U.S.D.A. was eventually
able to unload it, and often did so at a profit. The
program actually made money in good years. Compare that
with the current subsidy regime, which costs American
taxpayers about $19 billion a year and does virtually
nothing to control production.

So why did we ever abandon this comparatively sane sort of
farm policy? Politics, in a word. The shift from an
agricultural-support system designed to discourage
overproduction to one that encourages it dates to the early
1970's -- to the last time food prices in America climbed
high enough to generate significant political heat. That
happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the
Soviet Union broke, a disclosure that coincided with a
spell of bad weather in the farm belt. Commodity prices
soared, and before long so did supermarket prices for meat,
milk, bread and other staple foods tied to the cost of
grain. Angry consumers took to the streets to protest food
prices and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the
high cost of hamburger, that American birthright.
Recognizing the political peril, Nixon ordered his
secretary of agriculture, Earl (Rusty) Butz, to do whatever
was necessary to drive down the price of food.

Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields
''fence row to fence row'' and set about dismantling 40
years of farm policy designed to prevent overproduction. He
shuttered the ever-normal granary, dropped the target price
for grain and inaugurated a new subsidy system, which
eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with direct payments
to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but in
effect it was revolutionary. For instead of lending farmers
money so they could keep their grain off the market, the
government offered to simply cut them a check, freeing them
to dump their harvests on the market no matter what the
price.

The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to:
the price of food hasn't been a political problem for the
government since the Nixon era. Commodity prices have
steadily declined, and in the perverse logic of
agricultural economics, production has increased, as
farmers struggle to stay solvent. As you can imagine, the
shift from supporting agricultural prices to subsidizing
much lower prices has been a boon to agribusiness companies
because it slashes the cost of their raw materials. That's
why Big Food, working with the farm-state Congressional
delegations it lavishly supports, consistently lobbies to
maintain a farm policy geared to high production and cheap
grain. (It doesn't hurt that those lightly populated farm
states exert a disproportionate influence in Washington,
since it takes far fewer votes to elect a senator in Kansas
than in California. That means agribusiness can presumably
''buy'' a senator from one of these underpopulated states
for a fraction of what a big-state senator costs.)

But as we're beginning to recognize, our cheap-food farm
policy comes at a high price: first there's the $19 billion
a year the government pays to keep the whole system afloat;
then there's the economic misery that the dumping of cheap
American grain inflicts on farmers in the developing world;
and finally there's the obesity epidemic at home -- which
most researchers date to the mid-70's, just when we
switched to a farm policy consecrated to the overproduction
of grain. Since that time, farmers in the United States
have managed to produce 500 additional calories per person
every day; each of us is, heroically, managing to pack away
about 200 of those extra calories per day. Presumably the
other 300 -- most of them in the form of surplus corn --
get dumped on overseas markets or turned into ethanol.

Cheap corn, the dubious legacy of Earl Butz, is truly the
building block of the ''fast-food nation.'' Cheap corn,
transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed
Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda
ubiquitous in the 70's to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of
today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what
allowed McDonald's to supersize its burgers and still sell
many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us
a whole raft of new highly processed foods, including the
world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its
ingredients, you discover is really a most ingenious
transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it
contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it
together.


You would have thought that lower commodity prices would
represent a boon to consumers, but it doesn't work out that
way, not unless you believe a 32-ounce Big Gulp is a great
deal. When the raw materials for food become so abundant
and cheap, the clever strategy for a food company is not
necessarily to lower prices -- to do that would only lower
its revenues. It makes much more sense to compete for the
consumer's dollar by increasing portion sizes -- and as
Greg Critser points out in his recent book ''Fat Land,''
the bigger the portion, the more food people will eat. So
McDonald's tempts us by taking a 600-calorie meal and
jacking it up to 1,550 calories. Compared with that of the
marketing, packaging and labor, the cost of the added
ingredients is trivial.

Such cheap raw materials also argue for devising more and
more highly processed food, because the real money will
never be in selling cheap corn (or soybeans or rice) but in
''adding value'' to that commodity. Which is one reason
that in the years since the nation moved to a cheap-food
farm policy, the number and variety of new snack foods in
the supermarket have ballooned. The game is in figuring out
how to transform a penny's worth of corn and additives into
a $3 bag of ginkgo biloba-fortified
brain-function-enhancing puffs, or a dime's worth of milk
and sweeteners into Swerve, a sugary new ''milk based''
soft drink to be sold in schools. It's no coincidence that
Big Food has suddenly ''discovered'' how to turn milk into
junk food: the government recently made deep cuts in the
dairy-farm program, and as a result milk is nearly as cheap
a raw material as water.

As public concern over obesity mounts, the focus of
political pressure has settled on the food industry and its
marketing strategies -- supersizing portions, selling junk
food to children, lacing products with transfats and
sugars. Certainly Big Food bears some measure of
responsibility for our national eating disorder -- a
reality that a growing number of food companies have
publicly accepted. In recent months, Kraft, McDonald's and
Coca-Cola have vowed to change marketing strategies and
even recipes in an effort to help combat obesity and, no
doubt, ward off the coming tide of litigation.

There is an understandable reluctance to let Big Food off
the hook. Yet by devising ever more ingenious ways to
induce us to consume the surplus calories our farmers are
producing, the food industry is only playing by a set of
rules written by our government. (And maintained, it is
true, with the industry's political muscle.) The political
challenge now is to rewrite those rules, to develop a new
set of agricultural policies that don't subsidize
overproduction -- and overeating. For unless we somehow
deal with the mountain of cheap grain that makes the Happy
Meal and the Double Stuf Oreo such ''bargains,'' the
calories are guaranteed to keep coming.


Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine,
teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California at Berkeley.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/ma...076533&ei=1&en
=b4b21dbf1a6431ba


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

On 2003-10-14, FOB wrote:

No problem. We need something to kill off the ever burgeoning
population. Aids didn't do it. Maybe eating ourselves to death will.

nb

I don't think there should be a "coming tide of litigation" against
"Big Food." I think the lawsuits would be unjustified and just lazy
money grubbing people trying to make a buck. "Big Food" did not force
any of their product down anyone's throat, there was an individual
choice made and with that comes personal accountability.

notbob wrote in message news:HOLib.559136$cF.237139@rwcrnsc53...
On 2003-10-14, FOB wrote:

No problem. We need something to kill off the ever burgeoning
population. Aids didn't do it. Maybe eating ourselves to death will.

nb