Food, Inc., and Farmers Vs. Kids

by Natasha Chart

Published April 03, 2009 @ 09:02PM PT

I mentioned that I saw Food, Inc. on Wednesday, and lo, it was very, very good.

(It's supposed to be out on DVD soon, so if it isn't playing in a theater near you, get a copy. I'll try to keep an eye out and remind you.)

Some of the film's most startling points had to do with diabetes and poverty. The single greatest predictor of obesity in America is poverty, as many poor US citizens live in food deserts where there's only junk to buy, and when there is better food available, it's far more expensive on a per meal basis.

One in three children born after the year 2000, the film explained, will contract Type II diabetes. For minority children, that ratio is one out of every two. This is a public health catastrophe waiting to happen, a Great Depression of healthcare costs, if you will, as White House Budget Director Peter Orszag said recently on The Daily Show.

They profiled a family in the film who had to choose between keeping a diabetic father supplied with medication and giving their daughters healthy food. When their youngest daughter wanted to buy pears at the market, her older sister had to weigh them and say that at two for a dollar, they were too expensive. Dollar menu burgers, providing a whole meal, were one of the family's frequent dinner options.

So of course this brings up once again the recent debate between whether food and farm budget subsidies should go to farmers (in the form of commodity subsidies) or kids (in the form of nutrition and healthier school meal subsidies). Grrr.

The question takes on even more poignancy as it's revealed in the news today that 1 in 10 Americans is now eligible for food stamps. How can we turn away from this sort of mass need?

Then, the budget process has to be considered. It's just a simple fact that the federal budget is divided into big pots of money under the jurisdiction of various committees. Every big omnibus bill, like the Food and Farm Bill, is a multiyear 'authorization' of spending. Every year, a pot of money is 'appropriated' for the purpose of funding the uses and programs authorized, and that's how much you have available to haggle over.

So in plain truth, farm and nutrition programs really are at odds over budget.

Though just as plainly, if farmers can't prosper, neither can eaters. Should we grow food or eat it? That doesn't even make sense. It's self-destructive. It's crazy talk.

The nation's farmers don't want it to be like that. While I often disagree with mainstream farming methods, they're generally proud of how many people they can feed at the least cost. That's what decades of government policy have asked them to do and rewarded them for.

As the film itself pointed out, a modern farmer who feeds close to 150 people with their work might well be one of the "most productive human beings to ever live."

And yet ... they don't really get paid for that work. Government farm subsidies exist in order to make up for the fact that farmers must often sell their crops or animals at below their costs of production. In other industries, that would be taken as a market signal that hey, we don't need this stuff anymore. Except that they make food.

Food being self-evidently useful, no one wants its production to stop. Not even farmers who've had to make up their losses through off-farm income want to give it up. As Elanor Starmer notes, they don't even make more money when food prices are higher:

... Why did record crop prices not turn into record farm incomes for these families? Wise and Harvie explain: “One reason they didn’t pocket more money is that their crops weren’t the only commodities with rising prices. Input costs skyrocketed too, particularly for fertilizer and fuels, which increased 67% and 100%, respectively, from 2003 to 2007. So, as any farmer might have told anyone who asked, prices were high but most of the added income went to fuel, fertilizer, seed, feed, and equipment suppliers.” ...

The money they earn goes mainly to the people who sell them seed and chemicals, and those companies have been earning record profits.

The profits on higher food prices go to the processors and distributors, and those people have been earning record profits.

The government money keeps farming going, but only the tiniest crumbs go to sustainable and organic agriculture. Most of it keeps the current behemoth going, without any thought to how the world will be fed when the fuel runs out and our soil is all degraded.

We could be spending that money in ways that brought local, healthy food to all communities. We could encourage farmers to save seed, grow a greater diversity of crops, and directly serve those who live nearby. We could set price floors for crops to ensure that farming can sustain its practitioners.

We could be spending it, in short, to create robust local economies and food systems that can stand the test of time.

Which, I think we can all agree, would be pretty neat.

So go watch Food, Inc. in a theater or living room near you as soon as you get the chance. It's an excellent summary of what's wrong with our food system and what we need to fight. And it might seem like too big a problem to fix sometimes, but maybe all we need is a few more people working on it.