The Sickness in Our Food Supply
“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system...
The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. Somewhat less obviously, the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well...
It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves.
Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes...
post-pandemic politics would also need to confront the glaring deficiencies of a food system that has grown so concentrated that it is exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.
michaelpollan.com
The way we eat here has always disgusted me. The lack of nutrition and variation in our diets has caused so many health problems for the american people and our government knows this. The worse off our health is due to diet, the more we spend in medical bills. Eating healthy is expensive and time consuming in america. We spend so much time fat shaming people and treating obesity as some kind of disease when in reality it comes down to income as most things do in our country. It has been a cycle of fattening up Americans, getting them addicted to food, and then making tons of money off of the medical bills they will no doubt procure. It is sad how the greedy in this country abuse the poor in every way possible, exploiting human beings for monetary gain per usual.
ReplyDeleteThe potential good news, though, as Pollan says, is that this deplorable state of affairs is due to political choices that the right leadership and paradigm- or zeitgeist-shift could reverse. We'll need to wean a generation off of fast and processed "food" first, though. It won't be easy or quick, and as we've discussed, "quick" is urgent.
DeleteReading this makes me sick. It makes me think that fast food and processed grocery foods are an FDA approved way for the government to control our population with the increase in deaths set forward by obesity. I've carried this thought with me for a while and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense and see things that people do in everyday life that shortens their life span such as smoking, chewing tobacco, and even driving cars. If my mental conspiracy is true it would be a double whammy for the rich to get richer from these products that kill people, and would also help their subscribed politician that is in favor of population control. Perhaps this ideology is far fetched but it makes me sick thinking about if it is possibly true.
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