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snowy · 05-25-2007, 06:03 PM

Quote:

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.

This is from the NYTimes Magazine in April. The entire article can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/ma...a17c0e&ei=5070

Here are some other things to consider: our food supply systems into the inner cities of the United States do not work well. The availability of fresh produce in those areas is low. Consider NYC: most produce found at local bodegas is badly bruised and low-quality. Where is a poor person supposed to get their greens? This has led to an expansion of the NYC Greenmarket program, and allows users of food stamps to purchase produce at Greenmarkets. As far as I've read on the issue, that is really the only place for low-income residents to get good produce--the other choice is Whole Foods, and obviously an apple from Whole Foods is going to cost a lot more.

The fact is that it's a combination of lack of resources, lack of time, and lack of education about nutritional options and programs. People who work 40+ hours a week are exhausted at the end of the day, and and so they want to have foods that are easy to prepare. As Charlatan already pointed out, these prepared foods (the kind you find for cheap in the center aisles) are not the best nutritionally, but they are easy to make and don't require much skill. Lack of money leads them to choose something cheap, lack of time leads them to choose something fast, and lack of skill leads them to choose the easiest option. The fact is, modern American society is too busy working to learn how to cook--and this extends up into the middle class, as evidenced by the proliferation of outfits such as Dream Dinners and Super Suppers, and it's evidenced by a recent piece by Dr. Gupta on CNN about blaming working mothers for childhood obesity (Dr. Gupta's piece concluded that it was a variety of factors).

Economically speaking, the United States is putting a lot of people between a rock and a hard place regarding food quality and security. We are subsidizing hundreds of acres of crops that are going to do nothing but make us fat (thank you HFCS). With the decline in secure blue collar labor, the squeeze is on lower middle class families to have two working parents in order to make ends meet. Additionally, we are only beginning to increase access to locally grown crops and quality produce everywhere. Those of us who live in the suburbs take our sanitized Safeways for granted. The fact is, a great number of people in our country do not shop at Whole Foods or Safeway. They shop at Wal-Mart or the local corner store, because the first is cheaper and the second is easier and the most accessible. When you're exhausted, poor, and stressed out, you take a break where you can get it.