Nov 03, 2008

Can Food Solve Everything?

by Laura Starita

A lack of sustainable energy, a damaged environment, rising healthcare costs…some of the core economic and social problems plaguing the United States today can be mitigated, argues Michael Pollan in a recent New York Times Magazine piece, simply by paying attention to food. Pollen argues convincingly that the fundamentals of current US farm policy were put in place in an era when energy was cheap and food expensive. The consequence has been, until this year, a steep decline in the price of food. But that decline is not a real reflection of what it costs to produce the food Americans eat. Instead, it has been paid for through farm subsidies and other government mechanisms which encourage energy-intensive, industrialized agriculture focused on commodities and bulk meat—the main culprits in the obesity debate—and discourage small-scale, locally grown and processed produce and animal products.

The solution? Pollan advises the next president to adopt a set of policy items that would have a positive impact on energy consumption, the environment and public heath. These include, among other points, providing special government grants for year-round farmers’ markets and local agricultural trade zones, creating a local meat inspection infrastructure, doubling food stamp card values when they are used at farmer’s markets, and, my personal favorite, creating a federal definition of food (which would hopefully mean that ‘cheese food’, that yellow stuff one sprays—sprays!—on crackers will become extinct).

Of course, as a subject, food is not without controversy. Indeed, discussion of food policy is often tainted with accusations of elitism—note the ribbing Barack Obama got when he asked an audience earlier this year if they had seen the price of arugula. To categorize food choice as elitist or non-elitist, however, is to look to the wrong place for blame. That Pop Tart consumption is inversely proportional to household income is a direct consequence of the fact that the government gives lots of money to huge, gas guzzling agri-businesses that grow or process corn and wheat and sugar, and none to those that grow romaine and spinach and, yes, arugula. As viscerally detailed this summer in the Freakonomics blog, It is simply cheaper by an order of magnitude for an adult on a fixed income to feed a child a toaster pastry and tang for breakfast than it is to feed her a free-range egg and orange juice. The price difference is a cost we’re all already paying in the form of childhood obesity, environmental degradation and global warming.

Food policy is not just a US problem. China’s current and future impact on the global food supply and concomitantly on global warming has been drawing more attention. Two areas of note have been the support of the government for Chinese food companies making land purchases abroad and the recent announcement of the government that it will allow peasants in rural areas to lease or sell the land rights they acquire from the Chinese government. This comes after springtime protests among rural peasants in the north of the country over the common practice by local officials of giving manufacturers or businesses the right to build on local lands without providing commensurate compensation to the peasant who held the rights. This practice threatens China’s historic reputation as a country which has fed 20 percent of the world’s population on seven percent of the world’s arable land (according to the FAO). Proponents of the land-right legislation say it will allow peasants to put their land up as collateral for loans, or lease or sell their land, which may open the way for the creation of more efficient and larger farms. Given the high-stakes now attached to agriculture in the form of both food inflation and global warming, China’s evolving agricultural policy will prove to be as crucial to the globe as America’s broken system has been over the last 25 years.