Today’s New York Times has an interesting article on the link between farm subsidies and obesity. The author has more to say in this article and this book. Allow me to summarize and annotate today’s item.
Federal subsidies (the way they are currently distributed) pay farmers to raise as much cheap grain as possible. This has gotten the Americans and Europeans in trouble with the WTO, who a) consider this dumping b) point out that American markets are not open to many agricultural products from foriegn nations, partcularly the poor ones whose largest industry is growing food. Indeed, most nations can’t compete with subsidized farmers who can afford to sell below cost.
Lower prices causes farmers to grow even more food in a perverse attempt to "stay even." So prices are continually driven down. Companies like Cargill make lots of money selling things to farmers to increase the amount of food they can grow, no matter that the land can realistically only support so much agriculture. The other result is that the family farmer has been is being pushed out of business by continually lower commodity prices and a technological arms race.
Food Processing Companies like Cargill are more than happy to take this excess supply at rock bottom prices! After all, the subsidies mean the farmer does not actually have to make a profit on the sale of the grain. They then turn this food we don’t need into tasty highly processed food we don’t need. Had you noticed that over the years plain old fashioned sugar has been mostly replaced by corn syrup and "high fructose" corn syrup? And that it shows up in such weird places as turkey lunchmeat and premade spaghetti sauce?
Marketing wizardry convinces us that we need this processed food, and how fortunate we are that the package is so large. Never mind that the package of snacky cakes, chips, soda, or whathaveyou that will surely be eaten in one sitting is something like 2 or 5 servings. Those rich people that aren’t fat? They aren’t buying Kraft Dinner. They are buying organic this and naturally sweetened that. They aren’t supersizing their fast food meals, they are having a balanced meal on a china plate and eating it with metal flatware. “Fries” are to “vegetables” as “pork rinds” are to “meat.”
Consumers get fat eating their fair share of the food surplus. This provides opportunities for business to make money off obesity. In fact, the article doesn’t take this last step. Maybe it should.