To add one more thing, Pollan seems bent on trying to use logic to solve this supposed mystery. He says things like: That's bullshit. Smoking is a personal choice, too, but tobacco farmers were pretty limited to NC and a bit else here and there. No matter how much money PhilipMorris ever spent buying votes, the political fallout was limited to two Senate seats, not nearly enough to make a filibuster last. Fallout from bringing down the hammer on Big Ag would be catastrophic for whichever party decided to pull the trigger (Dems, most likely). Go on a map of the US and count the Ag states. My guess is that it's between a third and a half. Logic from an individual's perspective has literally nothing to do with why no one will attempt to regulate the food industry. They don't try, because they know the only thing that will happen is that they will get pummeled in the next election."People’s eating choices are more fundamental and closely tied to their identity than their driving decisions or how they choose to heat their house or anything else," Pollan says. "If you challenge my right to have a cheeseburger, that’s getting a little intimate." And so politicians steer clear of anything that sounds critical of the American plate.
Michael Pollan is reductivist in most things. It can make his message simple and pure, but it also misses a lot of nuance. Take, for example, how quickly "organic" and "natural" and "gluten free" showed up on store shelves. That's agribusiness, catering to the granola hippies and their foodie paranoia. Not out of the kindness of their hearts, but because if you can charge more for an "organic" apple than a normal apple, your profit margins go up. And hey - it costs you nothing to relabel your popcorn as "gluten free." It always makes me chuckle but I've also observed someone struggle with what "asparagus" is. I suspect you could sell a "small farms bill" that would make both the Mother Earth News crowd and the Cargill crowd happy. Nobody's had any incentive to do so yet. Michael Moore got McDonald's to drop Super-Sized stuff for a while and sell more salads. They stopped selling the salads, though, because nobody fucking bought them. Subway, on the other hand, went from the number nine million to the number two fast food chain by pushing health. Turn it into an issue and watch how quickly it gets monetized. That's the sort of thing that Michael Pollan doesn't focus on most of the time.
Personal choice is all well and good; I just wish you and I didn't have to subsidize it. Nobody is subsidizing the avocado, cucumbers and brown tomatoes I ate for dinner tonight (but they sure subsidized the shit out of the $2 soup I ate for lunch at the hospital cafeteria today...mmmm, factory chicken). Fuck me for having to subsidize some jerkoff's Big Mac,and oversized Walmart t-shirt. If there's one thing that would change our eating habits it would be for things to cost what they cost, and no less. The nominal prices of meat and major crop products are a joke, and unfortunately the environment and all the countless animals slaughtered in factories are the butt of it. Edit: For the record, I do think that Pollan is a good writer, and I've learned a lot from reading him over the years. I just happen to think this is more a political issue wrought by our out of date political system, than one of simply money vs. sanity. We've won those issues before, such as tobacco and acid rain. This one would need a constitutional amendment to make obsolete Iowa and the like.
This is gonna really bake your noodle: The three things you ate for dinner aren't even food according to the USDA. They're "specialty crops." "Food" is corn, soy, wheat and rice. Here's a PDF from the FDA on growing the "specialty crop" of plums. For the record, I agree with the intent of your edit. But I think a constitutional amendment isn't necessary, simply incentivizing different things. Everyone just wants to make money. The way we're doing now the people who make the most are pushing the hardest. I simply think change is going to be gradual and largely invisible to the consumer.
Well, it's not that it started off as subsidies for these products, the subsidies appeared elsewhere with good intentions (Overproduce, stockpile, prevent famine + destitute farmers). It's just that then others hopped on board to make money on the cheap crops.Fuck me for having to subsidize some jerkoff's Big Mac,and oversized Walmart t-shirt.
Oh, slightly different story from the one I'd remembered. Looking it up, the wikipedial says that subsidies I think I was thinking about started in the 20s-30s, but ended in the 70s?...
A large portion of the Republican manifesto has been rolling back the New Deal. '20s and '30s stuff was all about keeping The Red Menace at bay through selective socialism. Huey Long was pushing hard from the left and Prescott Bush and buddies were pushing hard from the right, so FDR went big into subsidies. Nixon and Ford were bargaining with grain and corn exports to the Soviet Union so they made sure you got lots of money for raising lots of grain and corn. Crop rotation was considered somehow communist.
Smoking regulation also took a long time (and wasn't nearly as pressing to our health as obesity is). Maybe someday the backlash will be big enough that some Democrats will run on an ag-regulation platform... ...next century. When we're all dead anyway, probably. Maybe we need Yellowstone to explode after all.