As I’ve written before, so many of the hot problems today can draw their roots back to a dysfunctional food culture–climate change, energy independence, and most importantly health issues and reform. Combating the problem, though, seems like an impossible battle for a few reasons.
Consider first the driving forces for changing how we eat: nobody. Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman write about it, Alice Waters talks about it, but for the most part, nobody is particularly driving to get anything done. This wouldn’t seem so problematic if the competition weren’t so fierce. Huffington Post reported that the recent rumblings of a soda tax have kicked the food lobby into overdrive. They note:
During the first nine months of 2009, the industry groups stepped up their lobbying in Congress. They have spent more than $24 million on the issue of a national excise tax on sweetened beverages and on other legislative and regulatory issues, according to an examination of lobbying reports filed with the Senate Office of Public Records. The review shows that 21 companies and organizations reported that they lobbied specifically on the proposed tax on sugar-sweetened beverages – which among other things would include sodas, juice drinks and chocolate milk.
About $5 million of that money was spent on a national ad campaign, whose backers include “Burger King Corporation, Coca Cola, Pepsico and Domino’s Pizza.” Simply the notion of a soda tax pulls out the deep pockets of the soft-drink, agriculture, supermarket, and fast-food lobbies. Which would be fine, if there were someone spending money on the other side, talking about the amount of sugar in our diets, ballooning serving sizes, etc. etc. But of course, there isn’t anyone.
Part of this, I think, is a failure of organization. The food lobby has a well-defined goal: keep things the way they are. That means companies can unite over soda taxes, agricultural subsidies, and any other threats that emerge. The opposition, on the other hand, is all over the place. The health officials can talk about rising obesity rates, the slow-food and environmental people will point to the carbon footprint of beef or the overall industry, and locavores will opine for more farms and farmer’s markets, but on the whole, nobody is united on any sort of message. And, as the Democrats are making painfully obvious in the health care debate right now, message is the make or break in American politics. Simply put, the average American isn’t aware of any of the problems associated with the Western diet, and food lobby is doing a good job to keep it that way, with an assist from the disjointed opposition.
Moving forward, though, the necessary shifts will prove to be a difficult undertaking. Ezra Klein took Zeke Emanuel (the nice Emanuel) to the White House Farmer’s Market in one of the best reads of the week, and Emanuel laid out some of the hurdles on the horizon. The biggest problem is that right now as a country, we’re set up to easily modify things like health care, but not health, particularly since it represents a shift in behavior, not policy. The obvious blueprint, though, should be the fight against smoking:
The smoking case is an interesting one. Emanuel brings it up repeatedly as one of the few examples where public-health advocates managed to change the culture around a previously unexamined act, which is exactly what they’re going to have to do with diet. “On smoking, there are a combination of things that had to happen,” he says. “We had to make smoking socially unacceptable. We took it outside the building. We raised taxes on it. It became linked to cancer.” But as he admits, “you can’t take eating outside the building.” Nor can you demonize it entirely. Certain products can be attacked, but in a world of organic Oreos and Splenda with added fiber, it won’t just be an uphill climb. It’ll be a climb with constantly changing footholds.
The other major problem raised by the article is the simple fact that Americans don’t want the government telling them what to put on their plate. Which, of course, is a little weird since the government (via Medicare and Medicaid, and who knows, maybe some new reforms) will end up paying for a lot of the consequences. But that’s the reality of the situation.
In the end, the more I think about American food, the bigger a problem it seems. We really have to start from the ground up; there won’t be an easy government fix or bill that puts us on the right path. Instead, it’s about changing relationships, developing a healthy culture, and bringing the complicated connections of what we eat and how we live to a national dialogue.
Gosh, I couldn’t agree with you more. My life was changed when i got a rare cancer that’s associated with being male and fat (seriously)- I survived, lost weight, started working out, went to culinary school, and have become a cook on a mission to help change the culture of food. It’s not easy.
I was thinking that with all this social media, twitter, facebook causes, that there needs to be a fund for a full-time lobbyist to get paid to lobby congress on behalf of the slowfood, locavores, Alice Water devotees, etc..
With an army of lobbyists, the food industry has a major advantage in all ways but one- they’re not fighting the right fight. They may have more money, they may have the ear of senators- but they are selling poison. So even though our battle is uphill, we have the advantage of fighting for the health and vitality of our communities.
I recently did a broadcast story on the soda pop tax. I interviewed a nutritional bio-chemist from the national dietary guidelines committee who seemed to think that the tax and other food taxes were not a viable solution (which i mostly disagree with, nevertheless I did find most of what he said quite interesting). Instead, he believed that the best solution was to go to the root of the problem as you mentioned, and change how we educate children and families on nutrition.
As I think back to my own experience at both a private and public elementary school, a private middle school, and a public high school, at not one stage of that whole educational process did I ever really spend any length of time learning about nutrition. In fact, the only thing we ever got in health classes were sex-ed. When it comes to education reform, there are obviously plenty of larger issues that mostly hang on lack of funding and inability to retain and develop quality professional staff and educators, but I say how hard could it be to implement nationwide a mandatory nutritional facet of elementary education? If we start to impress the importance of balanced diets and healthy food choices on children at a young age, perhaps these lessons will grow along with them to be more of lifestyle necessities than suggestions.
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Interesting post. I think there’s also an issue of institutional priorities and industrial organizations. Why is that that schools themselves don’t integrate themselves with farmer’s markets or community support agriculture- from my experience, we had a lot of shitty lunch food. Also, why is it that organic or healthier alternatives to corn syrup is so expensive? A lot of these are a result of policy choices that favor certain industries over others.
Though I think that education is an issue, it doesn’t matter how many times you tell a child that candy and soda are bad for them, they’re still going to like them. Unless teachers go in-depth with the risk factors and use scare tactics like they do with smoking, it’s going to be really difficult to change the way young people feel about health. I think that even if it’s not the best solution, a tax on unhealthy foods like fast food or soda are the best option. And I think that the best hope for these taxes comes from the health care industry. Think about it: once the health care bill passes and everyone is provided health care, the industry is going to look into ways to lower their costs, like making health a priority in America. With such a big industry supporting things like a soda tax, it may eventually become a reality.