The new organic garden at the White House gotten a lot of attention, but a story in last Sunday’s NY Times business section says that the administration’s agricultural policies go much deeper. If the story is right, and if the changes are sustained, Americans may move back to eating the way our grandparents did on the farm.
The long Times piece talks about food’s impact on health and the environment, class issues around healthy eating, and the entrenched agricultural industry.
The most vocal booster so far has been the first lady, Michelle Obama, who has emphasized the need for fresh, unprocessed, locally grown food and, last week, started work on a White House vegetable garden. More surprising, perhaps, are the pronouncements out of the Department of Agriculture, an agency with long and close ties to agribusiness.
In mid-February, Tom Vilsack, the new secretary of agriculture, took a jackhammer to a patch of pavement outside his headquarters to create his own organic “people’s garden.” Two weeks later, the Obama administration named Kathleen Merrigan, an assistant professor at Tufts University and a longtime champion of sustainable agriculture and healthy food, as Mr. Vilsack’s top deputy….
(Vilsack) has said he hopes to devote more resources to child nutrition to improve the quality of school breakfasts and lunches. He also wants to make sure that only healthy choices are available in school vending machines….
Noting that the department’s recently released Census of Agriculture included more than 100,000 new small farmers, he said he wanted his agency to help them develop regional distribution networks. The small farms’ produce could be sold to institutional buyers like schools.
Vilsack was generally seen as an agribusiness supporter in Congress and wasn’t a popular choice with the organic and local foods communities, but they’ve been pleasantly surprised. If Vilsack and the local food activists succeed in getting their crops into supermarkets and school lunches, it could be a sea change in American eating habits.
The market is ahead of the government on this. Chains like Whole Foods have brought organic to the big grocery business and now Safeway and Wal-Mart have organic produce sections. Farmer’s markets that sell locally grown food are springing up around American cities, and my guess is that the many of those 100,000 small farmers are selling to them. Portland’s metro area has over 30 farmer’s markets – downtown, in low income working-class neighborhoods, and in the suburbs. Healthy school lunches were pioneered by Bay Area celebrity chef Alice Waters, who got the Berkeley schools to plant gardens for their cafeterias. With Michelle Obama out front, the healthy food movement is poised to make another giant step forward.
Agribusiness is similar to Detroit automakers in many ways. “Big Ag” has subsisted on subsidies and fought reform, while marketing products heavy in corn syrup made cheap by subsidies, and petroleum-based fertilizers are a major oil user. When I was a kid growing up in California’s agricultural Central Valley, my father worked for a poultry feed manufacturer. He brought home calendars from Shell (I think) with cartoon pictures of gigantic tomatoes grown with chemical fertilizers. Now the Valley’s aquifer is poisoned by fertilizers and pesticides and the tap water is unsafe to drink.
March 26th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Who’s going to tend the “first garden”? Michelle?
There’s a bit of a disconnect here. The items that we should really be eating more of (fruits and vegitables) are generally ones that are not processed by “Big Ag”. Most subsidies go to corn, wheat, soybeans, things of that nature.
As far as what children are eating, or lack of access to healthy food, how is the answer raising the prices of those items? (which is what you’re really talking about when you say locally grown organic).
Farmers markets are great as far as they go, but I’m still shopping at the superstore in the “offseason”.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Buzzcut,
Good questions. Michelle says she’ll do some of it, the kids will do some and there’s a local school that’s helping. We’ll see how much gets done by the groundskeeper and the “Weeder in Chief.”
The problems with “Big AG’ are many. The subsidies are flat out wasteful, they encourage the wrong foods to be cheap (corn syrup), they compete with small farmers for land, they encourage petroleum overuse, etc. But you’re right, most subsidies don’t go to healthier foods.
As far as organic, you make a good point. A recent piece by Times food columnist Mark Bittman says the same thing about organic. And he quotes Michelle as saying you don’t have to have a garden or buy organic to eat better, “You can begin in your own cupboard by eliminating processed food, trying to cook a meal a little more often, trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/weekinreview/22bittman.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=bittman&st=cse
That said, using organic rather than chemical fertilizers and growing foods close to where they’re sold is better for the land and will become cheaper as distribution channels get established and some of the small farmers get economies of scale.
Farmers markets certainly have their limitations, chief being seasonality. The ones here are price competitive with the chains if you shop carefully. But eating what’s in season locally isn’t a bad thing, and there’s nothing nutritionally wrong with canned or frozen foods in the winter.
The major thing is getting Americans to think about their diets. The Bittman article says “…the truth is that most Americans eat so badly — we get 7 percent of our calories from soft drinks; the top food group by caloric intake is “sweets”; and one-third of the nation’s adults are now obese — that the organic question is a secondary one.” And “Americans each consume an average of nearly two pounds a day of animal products.”
Better diets are probably the single most important thing we can do to control healthcare costs. And if you can grow your own vegetables, digging up the ground throws exercise into the bargain. A nation of gardeners could afford universal healthcare a lot easier.
March 26th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Wow. 7% of calories come from “pop”. I can’t understand why people don’t just drink diet. Of course, I don’t have a sweet tooth. I’m one of the lucky ones, I guess.
Regarding healthcare cost, I await your study proving that healthy eating lowers costs. The only proven thing to lower health care costs is to just spend less on healthcare. That’s why the countries with socialized medicine can have just as good health as the US, despite spending far less. There is very little health care spending categories that actually improve health, and certainly none improve health more than they cost. There are no free lunches when it comes to health.
March 26th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Buzzcut,
I expect we don’t really disagree here. Countries with universal healthcare tend to have more public health services, including prevention and nutritional services, that reduce the need for expensive treatment. There are two ways to spend less on healthcare — lower what medical providers are paid, or reduce the amount of care provided. Healthy eating and behavior reduces the amount of care needed.
In terms of healthy eating and better health, the studies are legion. High fat/high sodium diets contribute to obesity, diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure) and heart disease according to practically all research. There are also less proven links to cancer and other chronic diseases. Check out the CDC for studies.
Better overall health results in fewer serious episodes and less costly treatments. A pioneer in this is Dr. Dean Ornish, who developed a program of low-fat vegetarian diet, exercise, meditation (stress reduction) and social support that not only helped treat heart disease but actually reversed it. The key, outside the usual realm of “traditional medicine” was the social support, like family involvement and mutual support groups. Establishment doctors said “oh yes, we know diet and exercise work but our patients won’t follow directions, so we just schedule bypass operations.” But with the support groups, people did change their behavior and eat healthily and avoid the bypasses.
March 26th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
“There is very little health care spending categories that actually improve health, and certainly none improve health more than they cost.”
To expand on my last comment, you’ve identified one of our major problems. We define “health care spending categories” much too narrowly.
If we include the costs of healthier food in school cafeterias and required gym classes, childhood obesity and its attendant health costs would go down.
If more people, children and adults, had regular dental cleanings, their overall health would improve.
If we encouraged healthy eating, as I said above, health care costs would go down.
If we seriously encouraged regular exercise, general health would improve. More than just a Surgeon General’s report but reductions in insurance premiums, bike paths, organized exercise for adults, etc.
If the unconscionable advertising for new drugs were stopped, health care costs would go down. A recent study showed that patients demand new expensive drugs, even when older cheaper ones work better.
To be a little facetious, if we banned the use of remotes for all electronic devices it would probably increase overall exercise rates.
March 26th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
I’m skeptical that “prevention and nutritional services” lead to lower treatment costs. I think that, for the most part, a great deal of health care services are hit or miss (maybe 50% of spending is of no value, or worse, actually causes harm, based on a famous RAND study from the ’70s). Thus, if you simply cut the amount spent on health care (like countries with socialized medicine do by rationing) you don’t really negatively impact actual health at all.
And since genetics is the most important factor in health, and a lot of the countries we comare ourselves to are blessed with good genetics (the Japanese, for example), we end up looking really bad in comparison. You can see this if you compare, say, Japanese-Americans with Japanese, where the differences in life expectancy are not that great.
As for your other suggestions, they’re a little too… fascist… for me (especially the remote ban). The devil is in how you “encourage” behavior. Carrot or stick. Or just mind your own business.
March 26th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
The remotes is a joke.
What part of less diabetes and fewer heart attacks mean less major medical treatments are you skeptical of? And how is good food in cafeterias and gym class more fascist than bad food in cafeterias and math class?
Sometimes your logic puzzles me.
March 27th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Like I said, the devil is in the details. This isn’t like banning smoking, where nonsmokers simply don’t like smelling smoke. When you start telling people, “Hey fattie, don’t eat that”, you’re going to run into resistance on the personal level.
I happen to go to my kids school and eat lunch with them every other Friday. I see what they serve in the cafeteria (healthy stuff), and what the kids actually eat. More salads end up in the garbage than just about anything else.
Regarding diabetes and heart attacks, much like smoking, you have to die from something. It is not at all clear that if you prevent, say, lung cancer by discouraging smoking, it is a net savings over the life of the individual. Might be the same situation with diabetes and heart attacks.
The bottom line is that we don’t know, and few if any of these “studies” done by the CDC take lifetime cost/ benefit into account.
Also, we should not factor “savings” from prevention into any of the possible health care reform plans we might come up with. The only way to get savings is to ration care. That’s what HMOs did in the mid-90’s, and I recall that Americans didn’t like it so much.