Subsidies Send Mixed Messages About Diet

Sightline has found a couple of studies that indicate that as food with poor nutritional quality gets relatively cheaper, our waistlines grow larger. Since 1985, the price of food in the “sugar and sweets” category of the University of Washington study actually fell (when adjusted for inflation). While nutritional foodstuffs cost significantly more today than in 1985, with a price increase of more than 20 percent. Not surprisingly, we buy and consume more of what’s cheap.

Seattle Times asked the lead researcher, Pablo Monsivais, for an explanation of the price disparity. He responded that government subsidies may be to blame since they do not cater to “nutrient-rich agriculture.”

Conversely, many junk food producers that rely on corn and soy (and all of their wondrous by-products) get a major break thanks to federal subsidies. In the last ten years, U.S. subsidies for corn alone has totaled more than $75 billion. The corn that’s not used in making processed food often goes to fattening livestock.

The federal government endorses a food pyramid that ranks fresh fruits and vegetables above meat and sweets, yet it allocates billions of dollars to support the production of the same foods it denounces as unhealthy.

If corn subsidies are eliminated, sweetened food products wouldn’t be as cheap. But that’s not enough. We should be encouraging healthy eating, even if that means spending federal dollars on supporting a variety of crops to make them more affordable for consumers. (Not to mention, beginning to level the playing field after all these years of unfairly stacking the deck against fresh fruits and veggies is the least the government can do for small-scale farmers that have been sticking it out this whole time.) Why not redirect money currently sent to commodity crop farms to farms that focus on “nutrient-rich agriculture”? Additionally, taxes on junk food have been found to be effective in reducing consumption. However, solely taxing junk food is not a viable option unless the price of better alternatives is concurrently dropped. Once the federal government actually follows through by financially supporting the foods they promote, the nation can begin to reverse this deadly obesity trend.

Related posts:

1. Mark Bittman on Farm Subsidies
2. Dan Imhoff on the Farm Bill
3. Propping Up Corn Production Is Bad For Our Health

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