You are what you grow

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THE WAY WE LIVE NOW, NY Times Magazine

You Are What You Grow

By MICHAEL POLLAN

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named

Adam

Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to

figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America

today is a person's wealth.

For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a

shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with

the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be

overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase

as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the

most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the

towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American

supermarket, the fresh foods - dairy, meat, fish and produce - line the

perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.)

Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato

chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down

those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but

only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more " energy dense " than fresh foods: they

contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them

both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen

to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the

foods that contain them " junk. " Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the

food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a

budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly - and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable

result of the free

market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one

iconic

processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated,

high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many

themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty

marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these

synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely

unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes

around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules

for the American food system - indeed, to a considerable extent, for the

world's food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be

subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the

Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the

cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a

clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans

and wheat - three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports,

to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.)

For the last several decades - indeed, for about as long as the American

waistline has been ballooning - U.S. agricultural policy has been designed

in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities,

especially corn and soy.

That's because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them

a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by

supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The

result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added

fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived

from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support

farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark

display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables

between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of

soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least

healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the

ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation

faced with what its surgeon general has called " an epidemic " of obesity

would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of

high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the

nation's agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its

public-health objectives. And the subsidies are only part of the problem.

The farm bill helps determine what sort of food your children will have for

lunch in school tomorrow.

The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of

America's children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural

commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is

overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh

food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough

calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater

Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The farm

bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the

unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to

overproduce.

To speak of the farm bill's influence on the American food system does not

begin to

describe its full impact - on the environment, on global poverty, even on

immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops

abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps

determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and

therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the

land, to migrate to the cities - or to the United States. The flow of

immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow

of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that

the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and

other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently,

the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that

country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to

ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico's eaters as well as its

farmers.) You can't fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration

without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural

agriculture in Mexico.

And though we don't ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms, few

pieces of

legislation have as profound an impact on the American landscape and

environment.

Americans may tell themselves they don't have a national land-use policy,

that the market by and large decides what happens on private property in

America, but that's not exactly true. The smorgasbord of incentives and

disincentives built into the farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly

half of the private land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild,

whether it will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused

with chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship. The health of the

American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look

of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and

formulae buried deep in the farm bill.

Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the

nation's political

passions every five years, but that hasn't been the case. If the quintennial

antidrama of the " farm bill debate " holds true to form this year, a handful

of farm-state legislators will thrash out the mind-numbing details behind

closed doors, with virtually nobody else, either in Congress or in the

media, paying much attention. Why? Because most of us assume that, true to

its name, the farm bill is about " farming, " an increasingly quaint activity

that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake.

This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat

it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their

Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren't paying attention, they pay no

political price for trading, or even selling, their farm-bill votes. The

fact that the bill is deeply encrusted with incomprehensible jargon and

prehensile programs dating back to the 1930s makes it almost impossible for

the average legislator to understand the bill should he or she try to, much

less the average citizen. It's doubtful this is an accident.

But there are signs this year will be different. The public-health community

has come to recognize it can't hope to address obesity and diabetes without

addressing the farm bill.

The environmental community recognizes that as long as we have a farm bill

that

promotes chemical and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a pipe

dream. The

development community has woken up to the fact that global poverty can't be

fought

without confronting the ways the farm bill depresses world crop prices. They

got a boost from a 2004 ruling by the World Trade Organization that U.S.

cotton subsidies are illegal; most observers think that challenges to

similar subsidies for corn, soy, wheat or rice would also prevail.

And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly

concerned, if not

restive, about the quality of the food on offer in America. A grass-roots

social movement is gathering around food issues today, and while it is still

somewhat inchoate, the manifestations are everywhere: in local efforts to

get vending machines out of the schools and to improve school lunch; in

local campaigns to fight feedlots and to force food companies to better the

lives of animals in agriculture; in the spectacular growth of the market for

organic food and the revival of local food systems. In great and growing

numbers, people are voting with their forks for a different sort of food

system. But as powerful as the food consumer is - it was that consumer,

after all, who built a $15 billion organic-food industry and more than

doubled the number of farmer's markets in the last few years - voting with

our forks can advance reform only so far. It can't, for example, change the

fact that the system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the

marketplace the only ones the poor can afford. To change that, people will

have to vote with their votes as well - which is to say, they will have to

wade into the muddy political waters of agricultural policy.

Doing so starts with the recognition that the " farm bill " is a misnomer; in

truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the interests of

eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest

that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But

there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food -

to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse. At a

minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our

public-health and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food

cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most

healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful

ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local

farms rather than processed surplus commodities from far away.

Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on farmers, which is why

they would support a bill that guarantees the people who raise our food not

subsidies but fair prices.

Why? Because they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own

food and

doesn't hurt the world's farmers by dumping its surplus crops on their

markets.

The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for

farmers won't solve

these problems; overproduction has afflicted agriculture since long before

modern

subsidies. It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to

encourage

farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production,

on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for

food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current

farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater's farm bill

could not be more straightforward: it's one that changes the rules of the

game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above

its quantity.

Such changes are radical only by the standards of past farm bills, which

have faithfully reflected the priorities of the agribusiness interests that

wrote them. One of these years, the eaters of America are going to demand a

place at the table, and we will have the political debate over food policy

we need and deserve. This could prove to be that year: the year when the

farm bill became a food bill, and the eaters at last had their say.

Pollan, a contributing writer, is the Knight professor of journalism

at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is " The

Omnivore's Dilemma. "

Don Prohaska

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