Food politics

I started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver this weekend and it's pretty interesting! It's not exactly the soapy, sleepytime fare I normally favor, but a coworker gave me a copy after I told her that Honey Bunny and I try to make at least 60% of our food purchases organic and/or locally grown.

Kingsolver wrote this book with her husband and daughter(s) after they uprooted their lives in Tucson, Arizona, to live in southern Appalachia. They vowed that, for one year, they would make "every attempt to feed themselves animals and vegetables whose provenance they really knew." In addition to reducing their carbon footprint by as much as possible, they wanted to really know where their food came from (who grew it, bartered it, raised it, killed it) or more importantly, to grow and raise as much of it themselves on their own farm.

Color me surprised by her mention of food politics as it relates to fat folks. The ensuing passage follows her explanation of how "the government rewrote the rules on commodity subsidies so these funds did not safeguard farmers, but instead guaranteed a supply of cheap corn and soybeans." These two crops were/are parlayed into not just feeding people, but feeding animals that are being raised for slaughter, "to make high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and thousands of other starch- and oil-based chemicals." The net result is that farmers were/are overproducing those crops just to keep their financial heads above water -- but where does the overage of these crops go? Well, the food industry apparently had some ideas on what to do with it...

No cashier held a gun to our heads and made us supersize it, true enough. But humans have a built-in weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgement of this genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them. Children have been targeted especially; food companies spend over $10 billion a year selling food brands to kids, and it isn't broccoli they're pushing. Overweight children are a demographic in many ways similar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually the suppliers. We all subsidize the cheap calories with our tax dollars, the strategists make fortunes, and the overweight consumers get blamed for the violation. The perfect crime.*

Worth mentioning (at least to me): Barbara Kingsolver is not fat, nor is her husband or children.

Coincidentally, I read this article by Marion Nestle in the Sunday, June 21st, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle Food section. I have often, myself, wondered, "Aren't organics elitist?" Nestle's response was completely eye-opening and furthers that of Kingsolver's assertion above.

*Kingsolver, Barbara (2007), "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," pg. 15, Harper Perennial.