New York Times Magazine October 12, 2003
The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity
By MICHAEL POLLAN
S ometimes even complicated social problems turn out to be simpler
than they look. Take America's ''obesity epidemic,'' arguably the most
serious public-health problem facing the country. Three of every five
Americans are now overweight, and some researchers predict that
today's children will be the first generation of Americans whose life
expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The
culprit, they say, is the health problems associated with obesity.
You hear several explanations. Big food companies are pushing
supersize portions of unhealthful foods on us and our children. We
have devolved into a torpid nation of couch potatoes. The family
dinner has succumbed to the fast-food outlet. All these explanations
are true, as far as they go. But it pays to go a little further, to
look for the cause behind the causes. Which, very simply, is this:
when food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get
fat. Since 1977, an American's average daily intake of calories has
jumped by more than 10 percent. Those 200 or so extra calories have to
go somewhere. But the interesting question is, Where, exactly, did all
those extra calories come from in the first place? And the answer
takes us back to the source of all calories: the farm.
It turns out that we have been here before, sort of, though the last
great American binge involved not food, but alcohol. It came during
the first decades of the 19th century, when Americans suddenly began
drinking more than they ever had before or have since, going on a
collective bender that confronted the young republic with its first
major public-health crisis -- the obesity epidemic of its day. Corn
whiskey, suddenly superabundant and cheap, was the drink of choice,
and in the 1820's the typical American man was putting away half a
pint of the stuff every day. That works out to more than five gallons
of spirits a year for every American. The figure today is less than a
gallon.
As W.J. Rorabaugh tells the story in ''The Alcoholic Republic,'' we
drank the hard stuff at breakfast, lunch and dinner, before work and
after and very often during. Employers were expected to supply spirits
over the course of the workday; in fact, the modern coffee break began
as a late-morning whiskey break called ''the elevenses.'' (Just to
pronounce it makes you sound tipsy.) Except for a brief respite Sunday
mornings in church, Americans simply did not gather -- whether for a
barn raising or quilting bee, corn husking or political campaign --
without passing the jug. Visitors from Europe -- hardly models of
sobriety themselves -- marveled at the free flow of American spirits.
''Come on then, if you love toping,'' the journalist William Cobbett
wrote his fellow Englishmen in a dispatch from America. ''For here you
may drink yourself blind at the price of sixpence.''
The results of all this toping were entirely predictable: a rising
tide of public drunkenness, violence and family abandonment and a
spike in alcohol-related diseases. Several of the founding fathers --
including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams --
denounced the excesses of the ''alcoholic republic,'' inaugurating the
American quarrel over drinking that would culminate a century later in
Prohibition.
But the outcome of our national drinking binge is not nearly as
relevant to our present predicament as its underlying cause. Which,
put simply, was this: American farmers were producing way too much
corn, especially in the newly settled areas west of the Appalachians,
where fertile soil yielded one bumper crop after another. Much as it
has today, the astounding productivity of American farmers proved to
be their own worst enemy, as well as a threat to the public health.
For when yields rise, the market is flooded with grain, and its price
collapses. As a result, there is a surfeit of cheap calories that
clever marketers sooner or later will figure out a way to induce us to
consume.
In those days, the easiest thing to do with all that grain was to
distill it. The Appalachian range made it difficult and expensive to
transport surplus corn from the lightly settled Ohio River Valley to
the more populous markets of the East, so farmers turned their corn
into whiskey -- a more compact and portable ''value-added commodity.''
In time, the price of whiskey plummeted, to the point that people
could afford to drink it by the pint, which is precisely what they
did.
Nowadays, for somewhat different reasons, corn (along with most other
agricultural commodities) is again abundant and cheap, and once again
the easiest thing to do with the surplus is to turn it into more
compact and portable value-added commodities: corn sweeteners, cornfed
meat and chicken and highly processed foods of every description. The
Alcoholic Republic has given way to the Republic of Fat, but in both
cases, before the clever marketing, before the change in lifestyle,
stands a veritable mountain of cheap grain. Until we somehow deal with
this surfeit of calories coming off the farm, it is unlikely that even
the most well-intentioned food companies or public-health campaigns
will have much success changing the way we eat.
The underlying problem is agricultural overproduction, and that
problem (while it understandably never receives quite as much
attention as underproduction) is almost as old as agriculture itself.
Even in the Old Testament, there's talk about how to deal not only
with the lean times but also with the fat: the Bible advises creation
of a grain reserve to smooth out the swings of the market in food. The
nature of farming has always made it difficult to synchronize supply
and demand. For one thing, there are the vagaries of nature: farmers
may decide how many acres they will plant, but precisely how much food
they produce in any year is beyond their control.
The rules of classical economics just don't seem to operate very well
on the farm. When prices fall, for example, it would make sense for
farmers to cut back on production, shrinking the supply of food to
drive up its price. But in reality, farmers do precisely the opposite,
planting and harvesting more food to keep their total income from
falling, a practice that of course depresses prices even further.
What's rational for the individual farmer is disastrous for farmers as
a group. Add to this logic the constant stream of improvements in
agricultural technology (mechanization, hybrid seed, agrochemicals and
now genetically modified crops -- innovations all eagerly seized on by
farmers hoping to stay one step ahead of falling prices by boosting
yield), and you have a sure-fire recipe for overproduction -- another
word for way too much food.
All this would be bad enough if the government weren't doing its best
to make matters even worse, by recklessly encouraging farmers to
produce even more unneeded food. Absurdly, while one hand of the
federal government is campaigning against the epidemic of obesity, the
other hand is actually subsidizing it, by writing farmers a check for
every bushel of corn they can grow. We have been hearing a lot lately
about how our agricultural policy is undermining our foreign-policy
goals, forcing third-world farmers to compete against a flood tide of
cheap American grain. Well, those same policies are also undermining
our public-health goals by loosing a tide of cheap calories at home.
W hile it is true that our farm policies are making a bad situation
worse, adding mightily to the great mountain of grain, this hasn't
always been the case with government support of farmers, and needn't
be the case even now. For not all support programs are created equal,
a fact that has been conveniently overlooked in the new free-market
campaign to eliminate them.
In fact, farm programs in America were originally created as a way to
shrink the great mountain of grain, and for many years they helped to
do just that. The Roosevelt administration established the nation's
first program of farm support during the Depression, though not, as
many people seem to think, to feed a hungry nation. Then, as now, the
problem was too much food, not too little; New Deal farm policy was
designed to help farmers reeling from a farm depression caused by what
usually causes a farm depression: collapsing prices due to
overproduction. In Churdan, Iowa, recently, a corn farmer named George
Naylor told me about the winter day in 1933 his father brought a load
of corn to the grain elevator, where ''the price had been 10 cents a
bushel the day before,'' and was told that suddenly, ''the elevator
wasn't buying at any price.'' The price of corn had fallen to zero.
New Deal farm policy, quite unlike our own, set out to solve the
problem of overproduction. It established a system of price supports,
backed by a grain reserve, that worked to keep surplus grain off the
market, thereby breaking the vicious cycle in which farmers have to
produce more every year to stay even.
It is worth recalling how this system worked, since it suggests one
possible path out of the current subsidy morass. Basically, the
federal government set and supported a target price (based on the
actual cost of production) for storable commodities like corn. When
the market price dropped below the target, a farmer was given an
option: rather than sell his harvest at the low price, he could take
out what was called a ''nonrecourse loan,'' using his corn as
collateral, for the full value of his crop. The farmer then stored his
corn until the market improved, at which point he sold it and used the
proceeds to repay the loan. If the market failed to improve that year,
the farmer could discharge his debt simply by handing his corn over to
the government, which would add it to something called, rather
quaintly, the ''ever-normal granary.'' This was a grain reserve
managed by the U.S.D.A., which would sell from it whenever prices
spiked (during a bad harvest, say), thereby smoothing out the
vicissitudes of the market and keeping the cost of food more or less
steady -- or ''ever normal.''
This wasn't a perfect system by any means, but it did keep cheap grain
from flooding the market and by doing so supported the prices farmers
received. And it did this at a remarkably small cost to the
government, since most of the loans were repaid. Even when they
weren't, and the government was left holding the bag (i.e., all those
bushels of collateral grain), the U.S.D.A. was eventually able to
unload it, and often did so at a profit. The program actually made
money in good years. Compare that with the current subsidy regime,
which costs American taxpayers about $19 billion a year and does
virtually nothing to control production.
So why did we ever abandon this comparatively sane sort of farm
policy? Politics, in a word. The shift from an agricultural-support
system designed to discourage overproduction to one that encourages it
dates to the early 1970's -- to the last time food prices in America
climbed high enough to generate significant political heat. That
happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the Soviet Union
broke, a disclosure that coincided with a spell of bad weather in the
farm belt. Commodity prices soared, and before long so did supermarket
prices for meat, milk, bread and other staple foods tied to the cost
of grain. Angry consumers took to the streets to protest food prices
and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the high cost of
hamburger, that American birthright. Recognizing the political peril,
Nixon ordered his secretary of agriculture, Earl (Rusty) Butz, to do
whatever was necessary to drive down the price of food.
Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields ''fence row to
fence row'' and set about dismantling 40 years of farm policy designed
to prevent overproduction. He shuttered the ever-normal granary,
dropped the target price for grain and inaugurated a new subsidy
system, which eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with direct
payments to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but in
effect it was revolutionary. For instead of lending farmers money so
they could keep their grain off the market, the government offered to
simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their harvests on the
market no matter what the price.
The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to: the price of
food hasn't been a political problem for the government since the
Nixon era. Commodity prices have steadily declined, and in the
perverse logic of agricultural economics, production has increased, as
farmers struggle to stay solvent. As you can imagine, the shift from
supporting agricultural prices to subsidizing much lower prices has
been a boon to agribusiness companies because it slashes the cost of
their raw materials. That's why Big Food, working with the farm-state
Congressional delegations it lavishly supports, consistently lobbies
to maintain a farm policy geared to high production and cheap grain.
(It doesn't hurt that those lightly populated farm states exert a
disproportionate influence in Washington, since it takes far fewer
votes to elect a senator in Kansas than in California. That means
agribusiness can presumably ''buy'' a senator from one of these
underpopulated states for a fraction of what a big-state senator
costs.)
But as we're beginning to recognize, our cheap-food farm policy comes
at a high price: first there's the $19 billion a year the government
pays to keep the whole system afloat; then there's the economic misery
that the dumping of cheap American grain inflicts on farmers in the
developing world; and finally there's the obesity epidemic at home --
which most researchers date to the mid-70's, just when we switched to
a farm policy consecrated to the overproduction of grain. Since that
time, farmers in the United States have managed to produce 500
additional calories per person every day; each of us is, heroically,
managing to pack away about 200 of those extra calories per day.
Presumably the other 300 -- most of them in the form of surplus corn
-- get dumped on overseas markets or turned into ethanol.
Cheap corn, the dubious legacy of Earl Butz, is truly the building
block of the ''fast-food nation.'' Cheap corn, transformed into
high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the
svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70's to the chubby
20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is
what allowed McDonald's to supersize its burgers and still sell many
of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of
new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken
nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a
most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it
contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together.
You would have thought that lower commodity prices would represent a
boon to consumers, but it doesn't work out that way, not unless you
believe a 32-ounce Big Gulp is a great deal. When the raw materials
for food become so abundant and cheap, the clever strategy for a food
company is not necessarily to lower prices -- to do that would only
lower its revenues. It makes much more sense to compete for the
consumer's dollar by increasing portion sizes -- and as Greg Critser
points out in his recent book ''Fat Land,'' the bigger the portion,
the more food people will eat. So McDonald's tempts us by taking a
600-calorie meal and jacking it up to 1,550 calories. Compared with
that of the marketing, packaging and labor, the cost of the added
ingredients is trivial.
Such cheap raw materials also argue for devising more and more highly
processed food, because the real money will never be in selling cheap
corn (or soybeans or rice) but in ''adding value'' to that commodity.
Which is one reason that in the years since the nation moved to a
cheap-food farm policy, the number and variety of new snack foods in
the supermarket have ballooned. The game is in figuring out how to
transform a penny's worth of corn and additives into a $3 bag of
ginkgo biloba-fortified brain-function-enhancing puffs, or a dime's
worth of milk and sweeteners into Swerve, a sugary new ''milk based''
soft drink to be sold in schools. It's no coincidence that Big Food
has suddenly ''discovered'' how to turn milk into junk food: the
government recently made deep cuts in the dairy-farm program, and as a
result milk is nearly as cheap a raw material as water.
As public concern over obesity mounts, the focus of political pressure
has settled on the food industry and its marketing strategies --
supersizing portions, selling junk food to children, lacing products
with transfats and sugars. Certainly Big Food bears some measure of
responsibility for our national eating disorder -- a reality that a
growing number of food companies have publicly accepted. In recent
months, Kraft, McDonald's and Coca-Cola have vowed to change marketing
strategies and even recipes in an effort to help combat obesity and,
no doubt, ward off the coming tide of litigation.
There is an understandable reluctance to let Big Food off the hook.
Yet by devising ever more ingenious ways to induce us to consume the
surplus calories our farmers are producing, the food industry is only
playing by a set of rules written by our government. (And maintained,
it is true, with the industry's political muscle.) The political
challenge now is to rewrite those rules, to develop a new set of
agricultural policies that don't subsidize overproduction -- and
overeating. For unless we somehow deal with the mountain of cheap
grain that makes the Happy Meal and the Double Stuf Oreo such
''bargains,'' the calories are guaranteed to keep coming.
Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, teaches at the
Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at
Berkeley.
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