Fifty years ago, the average American household spent twenty percent of their income on food.  Today, this figure has fallen to just ten percent.¹ At first glance this appears to be good news.  It implies that we are spending fewer dollars on food yet still feeding our families.  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.  The mere fact that we are spending less of our income on food belies bigger issues, and those issues have implications for our personal health, our health care system, our environment and even our foreign relations.

Agriculture

Just after World War II our systems for getting food to our tables began to take the shape that we are familiar with today, and it all started with agriculture.  Part of the agricultural transformation stemmed from the government encouraging the manufacture of chemical fertilizers and pesticides from unused bomb and nerve gas ingredients, such as ammonium nitrate.  This effort to dispose of excess munitions provided a progression from the growing processes that were the norm at that time (processes referred to today as “organic”) to a system that relies heavily on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  The passage of government initiatives such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and the Agricultural Act of 1949 resulted in the government providing subsidies to farmers for growing corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.  Farmers sold these grains for whatever price they could get, and the government made up for the deficit.  These government-granted subsidiaries essentially discouraged farmers from growing fruits and vegetables (deemed “specialty crops”) through sheer economics.  By growing as much of these subsidized grains as possible (which simultaneously forced farmers to reduce space for growing other crops or for raising cattle), farmers could simply make more money than was previously possible via small, diverse farms.  This, in part, undermined the financial stability of small farms, which were eventually bought out by huge industrial farms.  Large farms received more governmental money and thus continued to engulf small farms.  This trend was clearly the goal of the government, as illustrated in the 1970s by the words of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, encouraging all farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow” and “get big or get out”.

Fattening Foods

In addition to the disappearance of small family farms, grain subsidiaries also resulted in a market influx of cheap grain- grain that was being sold for considerably less than it cost farmers to grow.  Again, however, the government’s subsidiary checks made up for the farmers selling their crops at such low prices.  Subsidizing grain was the beginning of the price decline of grain-based food products, and grains subsequently began to find their way into more and more foods.  From the high-fructose corn syrup in sodas to the soybean oil used to fry potatoes, subsidized grains became a part of our processed foods because they were cheap and in abundance.  Read the label of a majority of mainstream processed foods and you are almost certain to find corn syrup or high-fructose corn syrup amongst the long list of ingredients.  Studies show that high-fructose corn syrup is not metabolized in the body in the same way as regular sugar; it does not stimulate insulin secretion or leptin production- which boils down to your brain not receiving the signal that it is full.  Is it coincidental that consumption of high-fructose corn syrup increased over 1000% between 1970 and 1990, mirroring the rapid rise in obesity rates in the United States?

Grain subsidiaries even affected the price of meat, as farms could no longer afford to grow grains and keep cattle.  Instead farms turned into factories, using inexpensive grain to fatten animals at much less cost than was possible through the traditional method of allowing cattle to graze on grass.  This took animal protein from its status as a specialty item to a commonplace addition on nearly every dinner table.  Thus, American meat consumption increased to today’s average of nearly a half-pound per person per day.

Whatever the original intention of our government’s efforts, they have brought us to a place of disconnection from our history of wild-food gathering, hunting, and subsistence agriculture.  Ask a child today where food comes from, and you will likely hear in reply, “the supermarket”.  In fact, “in the United States in 2002, fewer than two percent of people were involved in direct agricultural production”¹.  Before these agricultural changes, farms were run by families and depended upon by communities.  Farmers used crop diversity and photosynthesis to nourish their soil and manage pests.  Cheap energy eventually brought mechanization to the farm.  Mechanization and government subsidies led to monocultures (growing only one crop on a plot of land), and monocultures substantially increased the productivity of the land and the farmer.  Despite today’s high yields, we don’t directly eat much of the corn and soybeans that we grow today, but instead process forty percent of them into animal feed and another eleven percent into biofuels.

The Environment

Simply put, food today is cheaper, we’re more efficient at producing it, and we have a vast array of convenient choices available to us.  Unfortunately, these benefits are not without cost.  In order to produce these higher yields, agriculture increased its reliance on “chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing, packaging and transportation”.  In 1940, 2.3 calories of food energy were produced for every calorie of fossil fuel energy used, while today it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce just one calorie of those foods on your grocery store’s shelves.² Second only to cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy.

Like growing grains, transportation is subsidized in the United States, making it possible for New York City to get its produce from California instead of the “Garden State” next door.  These subsidies encourage practices such as catching salmon in Alaska, shipping it to China to be filleted and then shipping the fillets back to California to be eaten.  Our cross-country and global food economy contributes to outstanding environmental costs, including groundwater and ozone depletion, global warming, soil erosion and mineral depletion.  The systems we use to put food on our tables contribute as much as thirty-seven percent of the greenhouses gases to the atmosphere, more than any other single factor.²

Health

It’s not just our environment that is suffering.  Our health is suffering as well. In 1960, Americans spent just five percent of our national income on health care.  Today that number has risen to sixteen percent.  These costs continue to climb to treat the diseases caused by pollution and chemical residues in our food.  More directly, we are overburdening our health care system through the increasing demands to care for and treat preventable chronic diseases.  These disease rates are skyrocketing due, at least in part, to the ever-increasing calorie loads of our foods and drinks.  Diet is a causational link to four of the top ten deadly diseases in America today: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.  So while our spending on food has decreased from twenty percent of household income to less than ten percent, national spending on healthcare has risen from five percent to sixteen percent.  These figures are absolutely related; this is not just happenstance.

Unfortunately, this is not just an issue for adults.  Our children are bearing the brunt of the ill effects of our poor dietary habits, and it looks to only get worse.  The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes.  Type 2 diabetes is often associated with being overweight or obese, and carries with it an increased risk for developing other conditions such as heart disease and stroke.  Our children are being confronted with the very real possibilities of blindness, amputation or early death.  People with type 2 diabetes have not only this myriad of health concerns to preoccupy them, but also the financial struggle to pay for an ever-increasing load of prescription medications.

The American diet is in shambles.  Our society values cheap, convenient food.  The information age puts us at the mercy of the marketing machine, informing us of our need for the very processed foods that are contributing to our current health crisis.  At some point we became convinced that quantity had more value than quality, that balanced meals didn’t have all that much of an impact on our lives.  Even at school, with lunch programs designed by Registered Dieticians, our children are consuming meals that typically specify a minimum number of calories rather than a maximum.  Nutritional quality simply isn’t found in a meal of hamburgers and potato wedges, and corn syrup-laden ketchup doesn’t count as a vegetable.

The Natural Order

What if we went back to a time when farmers grew many different kinds of crops and raised animals like cattle and chickens, with the power of the sun and hand labor, rather than relying on machines?  If we return to utilizing sunlight to nourish grass and grains, the cows will graze on the grass, rather than getting artificially fat in a grain feedlot.  The chickens will clean up after the cows by eating the larvae and grubs out of their manure, subsequently spreading the manure as fertilizer while eliminating parasites.  When the chickens then defecate on those same fields, they release nitrogen to further fertilize the land.  The animals nourish the soil, preparing it to grow the next season’s grasses and grains.  Thus, the greater the diversity on a farm, the less need to rely on fertilizers and pesticides.  Not only has a farmer in this scenario cut fossil fuel use, he’s also raised high-quality beef.  Grass-fed beef isn’t just an example of the natural order of things; it’s actually better for you.  It has increased levels of omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid.  These substances are important for health in many ways, from anti-inflammatory benefits to a reduction of percentage body fat.

Maybe you’ve seen grass-fed meat in the grocery store.  Maybe you’ve wondered at the cost of it, especially compared to other meat.  We have come to expect food to be cheap, and therefore balanced diets are pushed aside for balanced budgets.  Especially in today’s economy, who has more money to spend- on food or anything else?  It’s true that raising cattle on grass is more costly and more time-consuming, resulting in an increase in the price that we pay for it.  But one could also make the argument that when we pay for grass-fed meat, we are paying the real cost of meat.  Not only that, we are potentially paying for quality food now, rather than for health care costs down the road.  Perhaps we should view this as an opportunity to refocus on a balanced diet, one that includes less meat and more vegetables than the average American diet.  Not only would shifting the balance in this direction benefit our personal health, it would benefit the health of the environment as well.  “Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for eighteen percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined.  According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.  And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain.  A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.”²

Foreign Relations

We’ve seen some of the ways in which today’s food system is affecting our personal health, our healthcare system and the health of our environment, but it is also affecting our international policies and security.  While our government was pressuring American farmers to convert to monoculture agriculture, they, along with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, also pressured foreign nations to open their markets to internationally traded cheap grain.  In doing so, these nations made it economically impossible for their own farmers to continue farming, forcing them to rely on imported grains, and diminishing the world food supply.  In this way, globalization actually contributes to world hunger rather than reducing it.

It isn’t just food availability that’s an issue, but also safety.  Consider the recent food scandal in China involving the known addition of a banned chemical to watered-down milk.  The deceit of this manufacturing facility resulted in the deaths of several infants and illnesses in thousands more.  Whether accidental or intentional, a single factory that is processing millions of servings of food at any one time could easily inflict significant harm on the American population.  There are systems in place to protect us from such disasters, but a much more simple and fiscally responsible method to preserve our safety would be to simply decentralize our food growing and distribution practices.

The Local Market

Casting safety issues aside, it still doesn’t make sense to import food from halfway across the globe when we can support our own community through local farming.  Traditionally, food was a local resource, created by and for the local community.  Any money spent through local producers continued to circulate locally and stimulate the local economy.  Today we do things differently, as illustrated by an Iowa State University analysis that compared the average distance traveled by a certain set of foods produced locally versus purchased through conventional shopping systems.  The distance from local growers to the university was an average of 56 miles, whereas those same types of food purchased through supermarkets traveled an average of 1494 miles, nearly 27 times farther.  Clearly this has cost implications regarding fuel, but what about the discrepancy in what the farmer earns when selling directly to a consumer versus to a production plant or some other middleman (not to mention the difference in what the consumer pays)?  The 2001-2002 Agriculture Fact Book showed that farmers selling their wares through conventional systems received nineteen cents per food dollar; the remaining eighty-one cents went toward everything else, deemed “marketing.”  Let’s remember as well, that food eaten closer to the land on which it’s grown is fresher, therefore it requires less processing and is more nutritious.

Fortunately for both farmers and consumers, markets for organic and local foods are flourishing.  It is estimated that there are now more than 4,700 farmer’s markets registered with the USDA, which is more than double the amount registered a decade earlier.  There are also nearly 1,500 community supported farms, or CSAs, which allow consumers to pay an annual fee directly to a producer in exchange for a weekly box of produce throughout the growing season.  This is the direction that we as a country need to go in order to reform health care, energy dependence and environmental health.

Quality Counts

Big changes are necessary to get us to a place where we are protecting our health and that of the land.  It must be said that these changes will certainly cost time and money.  However, we need to keep in mind that cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and exploitation of workers, animals and the environment.  We need to remember that “cheap food is food dishonestly priced – it is in fact unconscionably expensive.”² It is negatively affecting our health, our children’s health and the health of the environment.  We must also keep in mind that most of our current forms of food production rely on unsustainable energy, and that they threaten the global food supply, putting us all at risk.  In order to repair the damage that we have done, we need to emphasize the quality of the food that we eat- from the farm to the table.

¹ Katz, SE., The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006.
² Pollan, Michael. “Farmer In Chief.” The New York Times. 9 October 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1

Tags: Agriculture, cancer, children, corn, CSA, diabetes, farming, fattening foods, grains, grass-fed, health, health care, heart disease, high-fructose corn syrup, local, monocultures, obesity, organic, processed food, soybean oil, stroke, subsidies, sugar