Food Policy
I was listening yesterday to food philosopher Michael Pollan on Fresh Air talking about our food policy and how it shapes what we eat. (New York Times article here) Some of the ideas he had:
- Bad food is cheap food because that’s the food we subsidize; if we stopped subsidizing it and subsidized healthy food instead, it’d be much easier for all of us to eat fresh fruit and veg.
- Our food subsidies discourage growing a variety of foods and encourage large “monocultures” — farms that only produce corn or soy, for example. If we reversed this, localities could depend on local farms for a larger share of their produce, lowering prices and encouraging consumption.
- Plants and animals need to share the land. Our current policies encourage separating the two, breaking the Nitrogen cycle and creating two new problems: too much manure on feed lots and no natural fertilizer on the soil.
We tend to think that the “market” will drive what people produce — if more people bought bison, there would be more bison farmers. If more people bought grass-fed beef, ranchers would stop using corn. If there’s a strong local demand for home-grown broccoli, farmers will step up to the plate. But the double-whammy of farm consolidation and government subsidies have us eating what the farms provide and market to us, not the other way around.
At the end of the interview, Pollan said one of the campaigns had approached him and asked him to summarize his eight-thousand-word essay into a couple-thousand words, and he refused. Which made me wince: he grabs the attention of one of the candidates, and given the opportunity to establish a dialog he decides to insult them instead? Pollan might be smart, and he might be right. But at that moment he was a dumbass.
Apparently Obama didn’t let that stop him, however — Obama either read the full thing anyway or got a synopsis from somewhere because he dropped Pollan’s name and talked about his recommendations. That’s very exciting. Hopefully we can re-align our food policy over the next few years. A monumental task to be sure, but since Nixon’s the person that gave us the one we currently have (minus some fiddling around the edges), surely we can do that again.
Thud, don’t go blamin’ the market for government subsidies! Last time I checked, government intervention, pro or con, was generally a socialist policy. I can help it if the idiot Republicans have paid lip service to the free market while doing their level best to subvert it for the past eight years!
Farm consolidation was driven by subsidies – I know, my Granddad lost his farm in the Sixties, and my dad and my stepdad both lost farms in the Seventies. They just couldn’t get big enough, fast enough, and sold out to those connected farmers who got the government loans to expand. Then those poor sots ended up selling out to the likes of ConAgra or contracting with scum like Tyson, because they weren’t big enough, either!
I’m still out here, barely hangin’ on, but the last thing I want or need is any “agricultural policy”.
Shut down the subsidies, drop the insane regulations that only apply to small farms, and you’d see local food thrive again. I don’t need subsidies, I need the government to leave me the Hel alone, to stop trying to tag every chicken I own, to stop trying to make me report every animal movement, to allow me to sell eggs off my back porch and generally get out of the way.
And although I’m an Obama supporter, of sorts, in this election, and I know you are, too, don’t let that blind you to the vote the junior Senator from Illinois cast in favor of Big Agribusiness, while his rival actually got that one right. I doubt that we’ll see the changes we desire from an Obama Administration.
Be well,
Dave H.
What about the whole booming organic food industry? It seems like that was the result of greater demand coming from the bottom up. That “fad” also actually seems to be driving more people to buy local as well. Of course I don’t have any statistics
, just going on my own observations and my own experience, but the fact that I can buy organic whole wheat pasta at, dare I say “Wal-mart”, I mean, that’s gotta say something about demand driving the market.
Those giant over-worked farms are a shame, a tragedy really – our produce is actually losing nutritional value. It used to be that you needed 5-7 servings of fruits & veggies a day. Now they recommend 9-13! to get the same benefit. And that so many “heirloom” plants and crops are having to be specially preserved and cared for, otherwise they’ll be lost. And don’t get me started on dairy farms and chicken farms and the cruelty there. I would gladly pay more to know my eggs came from happy healthy free-range hens, and support those endeavors. I think more people are feeling that way too, as they become more aware. The “buy local” lightbulb just recently went off for me, as I think it has for a lot of people, and realizing we need to keep the $$ local, in our own communities.
But I may need help breaking my Walmart addiction though. I mean, I can get 8 frozen burritos for $1.88! ….Help!
I thought this post might get some attention from you, Dave! Agribusiness certainly has contributed to the current regulatory / subsidy conditions. I don’t think either party comes off smelling particularly well here in terms of smart policy, though.
I think I could let you and Jane have a conversation about what “organic” really means, though — because of poor (and corrupt) regulation, it’s become more of a marketing term than anything else. Am I correct? Lots of companies are selling things as organic that have no business being called organic. And small / local farmers are still having difficulty supporting themselves even though there’s much greater demand. Demand is driving the marketing message, but not so much the production processes.
Hey Thud – you’re spot on about organic driving the marketing message and not the production process. In fact, most “organic” foods sold at, dare I say, Wal-Mart, are absolutely no different than non-organic foods sold at Marsh, Kroger or Piggley-Wiggley. The manufacturers have simply filled out some extra paperwork – that’s all.
Remember the spinach scare last year? Remember the brand that started it? Organic, indeed. Just another factory farm with illegal immigrant labor in substandard working conditions at less than minimum wage, and the same irrigation practices their non-organic field next door used.
Free range chicken is a topic near and dear to to – when I raise meat chickens they’re free range in fact. You can’t walk through my yard without stepping on one! But <span class=“caps”>USDA </span>“free range” has a slightly different definition. The bird has to have “access” to the outside. So you get a barn with 50,000 birds, one hatch and a 100 foot square fenced yard outside, and all 50,000 of them are “free range”.
We had, for while, voluntary organic standards, which were actually pretty good and actually worked. The problems started when the big boys wanted to get in on the action, and pushed <span class=“caps”>USDA </span>to adopt “official” policy on organics. That’s when the label became meaningless.
It’s just the way government works – and it just annoys me to no end when folks blame “free markets” for this kind of silliness. Government interference in the market is the cause – not the cure. Government kills free markets – it cannot help them. The very phrase “Laissez faire!” was first used in France, when the government asked a group of businessmen what it could do to help them. “Laissez faire” is French for “leave [us] alone.”
While I’m at it, I might as well mention tax policy, too. The way the tax structure is set up in this country encourages bigger and bigger businesses. I can produce, at full capacity, about 200 dozen eggs a week. That’s enough eggs to stock an independent grocery store – good luck finding one of those. The big boys won’t even talk to you unless you can deliver 10-20,000 dozen eggs a week, for all of their 300 or 400 stores. And you have to be able to deliver them, too. You can’t sell to just one – it makes the bookkeeping too complicated. Which also impacts small vegetable producers and small livestock guys.
This is why co-ops, like Land’O’Lakes, came into being in the first place. But they soon discovered that mass production is, well, mass production, and factories rule over farms. And now the co-ops have mostly morphed into agribusinesses themselves, leaving the small farmer behind.
I could go on, but I should probably do so in my own web space, and stop eating up yours!
Thanks again for the thoughtful post and,
Be well,
Dave H.
Dave, I don’t have that much faith in an unfettered market. I know they’re supposed to be rational, self-adjusting, and responsive but I haven’t seen any solid evidence of that. I’m also pretty sure that in an unfettered market, powerful and successful companies would consolidate until they had enough political power and authority to regulate the market to their own advantage, and you’d get something that looks very much like what we have now.
On the other hand, we know that the right government intervention at the right time can have significant benefits. But you have to have smart and correct policy — we don’t have smart or correct policy right now.
Oddly enough Thud, I heard the same interview and was in awe in regards to everything he was saying. The way that our current policies support separation of animals and plants was very very interesting.
I, too, tend to agree with you that I am wary of unfettered markets.
However, some would argue that it was government meddling there hands in the housing market that caused the current economic crisis not the lack of regulations.
Those people would be wrong. Fannie and Freddie didn’t get involved in the dangerous investing until 2005, when they were forced to (by economic factors) because other banks were eager to buy the loans Fannie and Freddie used to be the only customers for. And most of the subprime loans were made outside of the <span class=“caps”>CRA </span>framework that conservatives are trying to pin this on.
No government forced the use of credit default swaps, over-extensions of credit, or the radical over-exuberance. The government didn’t require or request extending credit to people who couldn’t even verify income, and the government didn’t force banks to put money in investment vehicles so opaque and complicated the banks couldn’t properly judge the value of the investments they were making. Even Alan Greenspan now thinks lack of regulation was the central problem in the financial markets.
It was lack of enforcement of existing law, as well as a law preventing the regulation of Credit Default Swaps (and which brought down <span class=“caps”>AIG</span>), that caused this mess. Not the government’s attempt to make it just a little easier for poor people to own a home.
Yeah, I saw Greenspan’s “mea culpa” in the paper today. wow!