| First of all, I should start by saying that there's plenty of blame to go around. It's not just the USDA. Congress passes the laws. The president sets the policy direction. The USDA interacts with the EPA and the FDA and even the CDC and the FTC. But the sum total of all of these agencies is this:
The vast majority of cropland in the United States is dedicated to four crops: corn, soy, alfalfa, and wheat. We grow some cotton, some canola, some rice, some sugar... and then there's the tiny fraction of our land devoted to fruits and vegetables. Meanwhile, we take the corn, soy, hay (not really the wheat) and feed it to animals, most of whom live in so-called factory farms. All that soy is also used to produce oil, for human consumption.
The end result is a food supply based on cheap meat and cheap commodities, much of which are turned into cheap salty, sugary, packaged foods with a shelf-life of a zillion years and little nutritional value to speak of. And these foods, which are available in every drive thru, gas station, vending machine, etc, are the ones we're told not to eat. Or to eat less of.
Of course, human nature plays some role in this. It's a simple fact of life that humans love eating fat, salt, and sugar, particularly if you combine 'em all together. And we respond to advertising and fancy packaging. Plus, the whole long shelf-life thing is both convenient and profitable. And it's nice to open a package and have a ready to eat food instead of messing around with cooking. So you've got a win-win here for the parts of our brains that can't keep our hands out of the cookie jar and the companies that want to sell us those cookies. And I'm certainly not advocating a ban on cookies (or any other foods).
But here are some ways policy allows, or even promotes, this toxic food environment in which we all live:
1. School lunch is underfunded so that schools can't afford the healthiest foods, nor can they afford to hire or train staff or buy the needed equipment for their kitchens.
2. Harmful farming methods are allowed, which in many ways break nature's checks and balances that we co-evolved with, allowing us to produce foods we should be eating less of more cheaply and abundantly than ever before. (Here, I'm referring to pesticides, nitrogen fertilizer, factory farms, hormones, antibiotics, etc.) Environmental regulations are sometimes not even enforced on farmers who violate them.
3. The government allows massive consolidation in the food industry, making for an unfair marketplace for smaller players who try to compete.
4. Junk food is allowed to be advertised as healthy, and even advertised to kids who are too young to understand the persuasive intent of ads.
5. Commodity subsidies are designed specifically to encourage maximum production and to allow prices to go below the cost of production.
6. Additives and ingredients that are untested or suspected as harmful are allowed in our food, sometimes unlabeled. Consider the Taco Bell "beef" that was only 35% beef. It was only breaking the law because it didn't meet the 40% beef threshold required by law. That means that something that is 60% not beef can be called "beef" and it's legal.
7. Small producers are required to meet costly and impossible one-size-fits-all regulations that were designed for large producers. While the regulations were likely passed for good reason (i.e. food safety), more scale-appropriate regulations would allow smaller producers to contribute to our food supply.
8. The minimum wage is not high enough to allow someone who works full time in one job to make enough to get by. This puts more pressure on families to buy and eat cheap, junky foods.
9. Food stamps (a.k.a. SNAP) does not provide enough in benefits for recipients in many areas to buy food needed in a healthy diet. The cost of healthy food depends not only on the cost of living in each part of the U.S. but also on where in a city a person actually lives. Often suburban groceries sell produce at reasonable prices, while grocery stores in poor, urban areas jack up the prices.
Healthy eating is, of course, ultimately up to the individual, but there's no sense in making it really, really, really hard to do so that only the most able are capable of actually doing it. It's wonderful to tell us to fill up half our plates with fruits and veggies, but dude... can you align the rest of your policies with that point of view so we've got half a chance? |
