An interesting article by Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine entitled You are What You Grow.
The article responds to the hypothesis that 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.
. . .
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?
The answer is farm subsidies. Corn (sugars), soy (fats), meat, and milk are heavily subsidized while fresh produce receive almost nothing in the way of subsidies. “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.” The logic of these subsidies finds its way into our school lunch programs where chicken nuggets and tater tots are reimbursable but healthier fare is not.
Interesting article. The author definitely has an agenda, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong.
Opening the door to a discussion about U.S. (or European) farm policy is akin to opening the door to a discussion of madness. We subsidize corn, and encourage the use of corn syrup as a sweetener, but restrict through quotas the importation of sugar made from sugar cane to protect the Hawaii sugar cane industry (for that matter we tax the importation of ethanol made from sugar cane and subsidize the use of ethanol made from corn). Sugar (from corn) in the United States is subsidized, but the price of sugar is well above the world price. Ethanol from Brazil would be competitive with gasoline as a fuel, but we tax its importation and waive taxes on domestic corn based ethanol in an effort to make it competitive with gasoline.
While some will likely read this item and conclude that the healthier items should receive subsidy to better compete with the less healthy. Better to remove the subsidy from the less healthy items. There’s more than one way to level the field. Healthier for the overall economy, besides.
Agricultural welfare seems like a nice big target for government savings.
I remember how the dairy industry a few years ago complained and had the offical nutrition food pyramid redone to put more dairy products at the top. .So if we’re too fat it’s all in the name of ‘fairness’ to equal market share.