Farm/Food Bill up for its 5 year review - influences food choices & prices

Morganthe

New member
Yesterday, I telephoned Smucker's 800 hotline to complain about their Strawberry Preserves having a bright yellow label saying "All Natural Ingredients". It fooled dh into just putting it into the shopping cart without checking what was in it. Ingredients: Strawberries, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Sugar, Fruit Pectin, Citric Acid.

The customer service agent tried to convince me that HFCS was completely 'natural'. :rolleyes: It's not. And why does a jar of simple preserves require 3 types of sweeteners? She couldn't answer that, but said there were enough varieties of jams to choose from for everyone. :shrug-shoulders: Yeah, but the others were smaller jars & more expensive than the basic preserves :( Costs higher to eat less sugars in simple Strawberry Jam. :thumbsdown:

Then I read this excellent article just now and thought of the great information on food I've learned & shared with y'all. I hope I'm not overstepping the rules by posting this. I try to eat better than when I was childless to set a good example. Recently, it's been so darned HARD!

Personally, I'll be contacting my reps & senators to make sure they're attentive to this usually overlooked bill. Change is necessary. I HATE paying considerably more money to eat basic healthy foods here in TX than I did in Europe.. even with the terrible exchange rate figured in to the costs. :(
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April 22, 2007
The Way We Live Now
You Are What You Grow
By MICHAEL POLLAN
NY Times
(free reg' req'd)

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the subsidies are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine what sort of food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow. The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of America’s children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.

To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.

And though we don’t ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms, few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don’t have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides what happens on private property in America, but that’s not exactly true. The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship. The health of the American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.

Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the nation’s political passions every five years, but that hasn’t been the case. If the quintennial antidrama of the “farm bill debate” holds true to form this year, a handful of farm-state legislators will thrash out the mind-numbing details behind closed doors, with virtually nobody else, either in Congress or in the media, paying much attention. Why? Because most of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren’t paying attention, they pay no political price for trading, or even selling, their farm-bill votes. The fact that the bill is deeply encrusted with incomprehensible jargon and prehensile programs dating back to the 1930s makes it almost impossible for the average legislator to understand the bill should he or she try to, much less the average citizen. It’s doubtful this is an accident.

But there are signs this year will be different. The public-health community has come to recognize it can’t hope to address obesity and diabetes without addressing the farm bill. The environmental community recognizes that as long as we have a farm bill that promotes chemical and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a pipe dream. The development community has woken up to the fact that global poverty can’t be fought without confronting the ways the farm bill depresses world crop prices. They got a boost from a 2004 ruling by the World Trade Organization that U.S. cotton subsidies are illegal; most observers think that challenges to similar subsidies for corn, soy, wheat or rice would also prevail.

And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in America. A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food issues today, and while it is still somewhat inchoate, the manifestations are everywhere: in local efforts to get vending machines out of the schools and to improve school lunch; in local campaigns to fight feedlots and to force food companies to better the lives of animals in agriculture; in the spectacular growth of the market for organic food and the revival of local food systems. In great and growing numbers, people are voting with their forks for a different sort of food system. But as powerful as the food consumer is — it was that consumer, after all, who built a $15 billion organic-food industry and more than doubled the number of farmer’s markets in the last few years — voting with our forks can advance reform only so far. It can’t, for example, change the fact that the system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only ones the poor can afford. To change that, people will have to vote with their votes as well — which is to say, they will have to wade into the muddy political waters of agricultural policy.

Doing so starts with the recognition that the “farm bill” is a misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the interests of eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food — to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from far away. Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on farmers, which is why they would support a bill that guarantees the people who raise our food not subsidies but fair prices. Why? Because they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own food and doesn’t hurt the world’s farmers by dumping its surplus crops on their markets.

The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for farmers won’t solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater’s farm bill could not be more straightforward: it’s one that changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.

Such changes are radical only by the standards of past farm bills, which have faithfully reflected the priorities of the agribusiness interests that wrote them. One of these years, the eaters of America are going to demand a place at the table, and we will have the political debate over food policy we need and deserve. This could prove to be that year: the year when the farm bill became a food bill, and the eaters at last had their say.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer, is the Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”
 
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Amaris

New member
Another one that I really don't like paying more for is unsweetened applesauce. Why does it cost more for the applesauce that they didn't add sugar to???
 

joolsplus3

Admin - CPS Technician
I remember seeing a poor family shopping once, just for a brief moment, choosing between the cheapest brands of trans fat laden sandwich cookies... I just felt so sick and sad for them, because I knew even then that 'bad' calories were cheaper than 'good' calories (no WAY would they take that buck fifty and buy three peaches with it, KWIM?)
 

skaterbabs

Well-known member
Yep, shopping for GOOD food is a LOT more expensive than buying junk food.

I can not feed my family fresh fuits and veggies on a regular basis. Our budget just doesn't stretch far enough to be able to spend 40% of it on fresh produce.

We eat a lot of frozen produce (my rule is 2 different colored veggies per meal.) The kids and dh prefer some kinds of produce (green beans) canned. Ick, but easy on the budget. :rolleyes:

Fruit is generally canned in juice- otherwise they'd have a few pounds of bananas or apples on the weekends and nothing during the week. (Bananas last all of five minutes in our house.:whistle: )
 

lynsgirl

New member
Yep, lots of frozen veggies here too :p . I've bought more fresh produce recently than I was buying before, but rarely can I stretch my grocery money enough to get it all at the local organic food store. I go there every week (the organic food store) for milk and cheese and for milk, I'm paying roughly twice as much for organic, as-close-to-raw-as-I-can-get-it-right-now whole milk as I would pay at the grocery store for pasteurized/homogenized milk of any fat content :rolleyes:

I'm trying to do whole foods as much as possible, and as much as my grocery budget will allow. I'm trying to calculate the trade-off, but I haven't sat down and done it yet. For instance, instead of using canned soups, I'm making my own sauces, which isn't hard, just takes longer. But it also uses up more of that expensive milk. I'm making homemade tomato soup with tomato juice and it's yummy, but I haven't calculated the cost comparison out. Pretty much anything processed costs less than unprocessed. Flash-frozen white fish is much more expensive than battered "fish fillets," chicken breasts are more expensive than chicken nuggets (pound for pound), etc. Dry beans or legumes as a source of protein are relatively cheap, however, so that's one good thing lol.

I never related any of this to the farm bill, but that's definitely some very hefty, interesting food for thought to chew on. Thanks for posting it!
 

scatterbunny

New member
Thanks so much for posting this! Food issues have become my new obsession, LOL! I'm trying to hard, like Amy, to let our family eat healthfully, as much organic, whole foods as possible, and finding it very hard to do it on our budget.

For the first time ever, I've actually written up a household budget (bad me, I know). Alotting $350 a month for groceries and household necessities, it leaves us only about $150 of miscellaneous money each month. That's with liability insurance, no savings, just paying bills, buying gas and buying groceries and household necessities.

When I bought the cheapest crap in the store just to fill up our bellies, I could feed our family on about $200-$250 a month. I doubt I can even buy as healthfully as I want on $350 a month, but that's as much as I can budget for, so it'll have to do.

I paid $3.59 for a HALF gallon of organic milk today. I can get a whole gallon of non-organic milk for $1.99. I'm paying over 3.5 times as much for organic! I found organic ketchup for $1.99, though, for 24 ounces--much cheaper than I've found before ($4 for a 20 ounce bottle was all I could find last time). I found organic bread, NO HFCS, for $2!! Woohoo! I was paying almost $4 a loaf before.

So prices are coming down. I still can't afford store-bought organic meat, though. :( I wish I could! But $6 a pound for organic ground beef, $8-$9 a pound for organic chicken (even bone-in chicken), is just too much. On the plus side, Mark has a co-worker who's raised a free-range cow for beef, no antibiotics or commercial feed given, and we just got 20 pounds of awesome ground beef from him, for only $2 a pound!! That's what I pay for the cheap, antibiotic/hormone-laden/fatty ground beef at the supermarket!

I wish I were good at writing letters to officials. Morganthe, if you do write your legislators, would you mind PMing me a copy of the letter so I can plagiarize a little? :eek:
 

southpawboston

New member
that was a good read, morganthe.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives.

yep, because the surgeon general doesn't have a powerful lobby working for him like the corn growers do! :rolleyes:
 

scatterbunny

New member
This thread (and all you people here) is one more reason why I love this board. I learn SO much, way more than just carseats, way more than I ever thought I'd learn on a CPS board! :p

I'm able to better my family's health and safety in so many ways thanks to this place and all the wonderful folks here!
 

AdventureMom

Senior Community Member
Ingredients: Strawberries, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Sugar, Fruit Pectin, Citric Acid...................... And why does a jar of simple preserves require 3 types of sweeteners?

When ingredients are listed, they have to be listed in order of proportions, with the highest content first, etc. Basically, for the jam above there's more sugar than strawberries, but if they said that then parents wouldn't buy it (it would and should read: sugar, strawberries, citric acid). So they use three different types of sugar so they can disguise the fact that it's mostly a jar of sugar. We learned this when researching dog foods years ago: if they list chicken, then corn, corn meal, corn gluten, etc, you can bet it's mainly corn by-products and not chicken - they're breaking it down into components to make it look like chicken is the main ingredient when corn really is.

Nice trick, huh? :rolleyes:
 

ajweeks

New member
Yeah our food industry is horrible. That article was very interesting, especially about school lunches, which are horrible! It is really sad to see all the horribly obese children these days. Now that summer is almost here, going to the pool can be depressing at times.

We spend a lot of money on food. Thankfully our local supermarket has started carrying their own brand of organic, which is a bit cheaper. Also, our BJs club has also started carrying organic milk for $2.99 a half gallon (better than the $3.69-$4.12 at the regular store) and also organic butter at a reasonable cost.
 

Morganthe

New member
I wish I were good at writing letters to officials. Morganthe, if you do write your legislators, would you mind PMing me a copy of the letter so I can plagiarize a little? :eek:

Awww, now you're putting the pressure on :p I'll compose it early this week after we get house dealt with. Summer's coming and we're almost ready for the HEAT!
 

scatterbunny

New member
Hey, I understand if you don't get to it--totally! I have a ton of things I'm supposed to be doing right now, but without a set deadline for them, I have a hard time pushing to get them done. All the sunny weather has my energy focused elsewhere!
 

vonfirmath

New member
I guess I always thought that the canned, etc stuff was cheaper because 1) less spoilage (I image stores throw away a LOT of fresh fruits and vegetables because it goes bad faster thn it can be sold) and 2) they can use the less "pretty" veggies, etc in the cans. Things people wouldn't buy if it were out in the fresh bins.
 

southpawboston

New member
Another one that I really don't like paying more for is unsweetened applesauce. Why does it cost more for the applesauce that they didn't add sugar to???

just speculation, but could it be that the unsweetened versions are made in less quantities, therefore raising the per unit cost for manufacturing? or another idea is that it's pure marketing? healthier = more expensive?
 

UlrikeDG

Admin - CPS Technician Emeritus
I always assumed that apples were more expensive than water and corn syrup, which act as "fillers" in the sweetened versions.
 

arly1983

New member
You can do what I do! Make your own!

(But then this is not really heard of in other parts of the country for some reason :()

I pick peas and squash and corn and butter beans and tomatoes and potatoes and strawberries and peachs and figs and well, just about anything they grow in s. Georgia and put it up (can it, freeze it, or just gorge out on it while its in season)

You don't know what your missing untill you've had it strait from the field. My granny cuts up raw turnip roots for us to it while she is putting up turnip greens. I LOVE raw turnip roots. And I will eat a tomato like an apple strait from the field (it is not runny and squasy but firm and slightly sweet) Now that being said, it does cost money.

You actually have to PAY to PICK the fruit/vegatables (usually by the bushel) and then pay for jars (reusable) or zip lock bags and then take a day or two to shuck/shell and blanche/stew everything.

I know that for some people this is imposable but boy its good food!
 
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JaRylan

New member
You can do what I do! Make your own!

(But then this is not really heard of in other parts of the country for some reason :()

I pick peas and squash and corn and butter beans and tomatoes and potatoes and strawberries and peachs and figs and well, just about anything they grow in s. Georgia and put it up (can it, freeze it, or just gorge out on it while its in season)

You don't know what your missing untill you've had it strait from the field. My granny cuts up raw turnip roots for us to it while she is putting up turnip greens. I LOVE raw turnip roots. And I will eat a tomato like an apple strait from the field (it is not runny and squasy but firm and slightly sweet) Now that being said, it does cost money.

You actually have to PAY to PICK the fruit/vegatables (usually by the bussle) and then pay for jars (reusable) or zip lock bags and then take a day or two to shuck/shell and blanche/stew everything.

I know that for some people this is imposable but boy its good food!

I agree! I'm fortunate that my mom puts in a big garden (has to since the deer eat most of it). My sister's SIL runs an organic green house and whenever someone comes into the city they bring produce. Her MIL has fruit trees so I always end up with lots of jam and such. My grandma always canned everything. I usually have farm meat in the freezer (people like to give it to me for some reason). Though I still buy way more of the processed crap than I should at the grocery store.

Even though I have zero space to plant anything in my little cement yard I always have tomatoes growing in pots and usually put a row of green onions in the flower bed. You would be surprised at how many tomatoes you can grow in a pot. Search vegetable container gardening and you will find lots of resources and ideas. I think I may have just talked myself into planting more than tomatoes and onions, lol.

Rylan loves his veggies, more than fruits. A large portion of the grocery bill goes to fresh veggies.

Thanks for posting the article Morganthe.
 

UlrikeDG

Admin - CPS Technician Emeritus
JaRylan, I've seen some seriously amazing container gardens. Check your local library for books.

Another good solution for getting locally grown fresh veggies (besides the farmers' market, which is also awesome) are CSAs, Community Supported Agriculture. The Local Harvest site can help you find one nearby.
 

remken

Member
This thread (and all you people here) is one more reason why I love this board. I learn SO much, way more than just carseats, way more than I ever thought I'd learn on a CPS board! :p

I'm able to better my family's health and safety in so many ways thanks to this place and all the wonderful folks here!

:yeahthat:

Trying to buy stuff without HFCS is frustrating though now that I'm looking for it. It's in alot more stuff than I thought it would be.

I've already been trying to buy most stuff without hydronated oils in them, so trying to find stuff without both is making me want to pull my hair out sometimes.
 

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