Farm subsidies make you fat
Everything you buy at the grocery store that has more than 5 ingredients has corn syrup in it. If it doesn’t, it has another corn or soy byproduct: corn starch, corn flour, soy lecithin, soy emulsion. The list goes on and on. But if you look at the same ingredient list in Europe, you won’t see either of those products (you may see others, but not as often, in my experience). That’s a conscious public-policy decision in the United States — and it is harming our health, and literally killing us.
How’s that? Well, first, let me explain why everything processed has corn in it.
Our farm subsidy program, in the United States, is broken beyond the point of repair. Ours is a bizarre, perverse system in which farmers grow far more of certain goods than the market demands (for instance, corn and soybeans and wheat), which drives down the market price; and then, having driven down the price of those goods, the government buys up what the market still doesn’t demand, so that farmers get paid for all their goods.
From the beginning of our farm subsidy program during the Depression up until the Nixon administration, the structure of the program had always been to keep up the price of farm goods — that is to say, in any given year we paid a certain number of farmers the market price of what they could have grown, in order to get them not to grow it. But the Nixon administration decided that this was a silly policy and that it was interfering with the Almighty Will of the Market, etc., so Richard Nixon got Congress to change the program from a price-support program to a supply-support program. In the new program, farmers would produce a quantity of goods above and beyond the market’s demand, and the government would just buy up the overage, so that it appeared that there was that much demand.
I’ve never understood the logic of this program, but it had two consequences in particular: It drove down the cost and drove up the supply of processed goods, by reducing the cost of its ingredients and making substitutes — soybean oil, corn starch and corn syrup instead of butter, gum arabic and sugar; and it caused an explosion in the caloric content of processed foods at the same time that their cost was dropping precipitously.
This is why American soda has corn syrup instead of sugar in it; and it’s one reason that Americans are obese. Michael Pollan wrote an excellent Times Magazine story, several years ago now, about how our farm subsidy program has raised Americans’ caloric intake, on average by 10 percent, by making high-calorie foods much cheaper than low-calorie foods.
Today, Pollan observes, on his excellent [TimesSelect-only] blog, that there’s a reasonable evolutionary explanation for this. Since most of my readers will find the link to be useless, I’m quoting below:
A 2004 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Adam Drewnowski and S.E. Specter offers some devastating answers. One dollar spent in the processed food section of the supermarket — the aisles in the middle of the store — will buy you 1200 calories of cookies and snacks. That same dollar spent in the produce section on the perimeter will buy you only 250 calories of carrots. Similarly, a dollar spent in the processed food aisles will buy you 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of fruit juice. So if you’re in the desperate position of shopping simply for calories to keep your family going, the rational strategy is to buy the junk.
Mr. Drewnowski explains that we are driven by our evolutionary inheritance to expend as little energy as possible seeking out as much food energy as possible. So we naturally gravitate to “energy-dense foods” — high-calorie sugars and fats, which in nature are rare and hard to find. Sugars in nature come mostly in the form of ripe fruit and, if you’re really lucky, honey; fats come in the form of meat, the getting of which requires a great expense of energy, making them fairly rare in the diet as well. Well, the modern supermarket reverses the whole caloric calculus: the most energy-dense foods are the easiest — that is, cheapest — ones to acquire. If you want a concise explanation of obesity, and in particular why the most reliable predictor of obesity is one’s income level, there it is.
The question is, how did energy-dense foods become so much cheaper in the supermarket than they are in the state of nature? This is not a function of the free market. It is very simply a function of government policy: our farm policies subsidize the most energy-dense and least healthy calories in the supermarket. We write checks to farmers for every bushel of corn and soy they can grow, and partly as a result they grow vast quantities of the stuff, driving down the cost of the processed foods we make from those commodities. In effect, we’re subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup. And we’re not subsidizing the growing of carrots and broccoli. Put another way, our tax dollars are the reason that the cheapest calories in the market are the least healthy ones.
I had a debate with my friend Joanna the other day, about whether farm subsidies are a waste of taxpayer dollars and whether they benefit anyone other than the farmers. My summary, because we were conducting this debate over Google Talk, is that I was insistent that farm subsidies really benefit only American farmers, because Americans pay more at the grocery store than we would if we weren’t interfering with demand, because it subsidizes farmers who are farming otherwise unprofitable crops for no reason, and because it locks poor Third World farmers out of the market. Joanna argued, essentially, that it’s a security risk for the United States to rely on importing staple crops, and that it’s still important to support American farmers.
A dimension that hadn’t occurred to me, though, is at work here. First of all, the obvious is that our subsidies are a natural explanation for obesity, and I don’t just mean the average increase in caloric intake. We have made high-calorie foods so much cheaper than low-calorie foods that we have actually thrown our the body’s natural balance of caloric intake: we crave exactly the foods that are now cheaper, because they’re rare in nature. It’s hard learning to fight your cravings, as I myself have discovered, and I don’t always succeed for that reason.
The second is that we could very easily reverse this situation to remedy the long-term problem of obesity that this presents, but we won’t. It would be very easy to subsidize the cost of fruits and vegetables to the point that they’re cheaper per calorie than high-calorie processed foods, and it couldn’t possibly cost any more than it costs us to subsidize corn and wheat and soybeans. (Especially since I don’t think we subsidize most fruits and vegetables to any significant degree; we’re a net importer of bananas and a net exporter of oranges, and neither should be possible if we’re tinkering with the price of goods.) It wouldn’t surprise me if the low cost of domestically grown fruits and vegetables in Europe resulted from a smarter, though still Third World-damaging, agricultural subsidy that encourages farmers to produce healthier foods.
In the U.S., we won’t fix our farm-subsidy program to subsidize healthy, low-calorie foods, though, because the people who grow fruits and vegetables are not electorally important, a small number of people in a handful of very populous post-industrialized states, notably California and Florida, and the people who grow staple crops are from a large number of fairly empty states which wield an outsized influence in our electoral system due to the Senate and the Electoral College. Without farm subsidies, it would certainly cease being profitable to farm in the Midwest and rural West, and generations of be-mullet-ed yokels with bad accents would have to brush their teeth, leave their farms, get an education and do a job suited to a post-industrial country. And no one in this country wants to tell the truth when it comes to electorally influential people who are economic dead weight.
The worst part is the hypocrisy of the World Trade Organization, which has repeatedly refused to demand that the United States and Europe lift their farm-subsidy programs. The whole point of the WTO is to encourage global free trade, and both the U.S. and Europe are in clear violation of the WTO’s rules on free trade, with our enormous subsidy programs.
Imagine, for instance, an America in which Coke contained sugar (and tasted better, as a consequence), fruit was affordable at the grocery store, and the cost of processed foods was high enough to discourage constant gorging. Wouldn’t that be an America worth living in?
It would certainly be a less fat America. And with the endemic epidemic of obesity we’re seeing, that should be our goal.
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