America’s Food System: The Problems With Our Plate

PART 1
WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE FOOD SYSTEM IN THE UNITED STATES?

Once upon a time, our country was largely supported by small, local agricultural farms that would grow fresh produce, wheat, and other healthy commodities to feed neighbors.  Those days have vanished.  Our government has failed the farmers, ensuring that it is hardly profitable to grow real, nutritious foods.  Meanwhile, it instead subsidizes farmers to grow a surplus of unhealthy “foods” on unfertile lands – and then gives additional support to giant companies like Monsanto that aim to control crop fields with dangerous GMO seeds (genetically modified organisms).  In fact, only 2% of American farmland is used to grow fruits and vegetables.  And just 1% of US-grown corn is sold and eaten whole – most is used to feed livestock, converted to biofuels, processed as cornstarch, high-fructose corn syrup, or unhealthy cooking oils.  Much of the healthy produce that is grown gets contaminated with toxic, cancer-causing pesticides or herbicides.  Meanwhile, 70% of Americans are overweight, 40% are obese, and half of our adults are at least pre-diabetic (1 in 4 teens).  By 2030, approximately 85 million Americans will suffer from 3 or more chronic diseases – which will incur a projected $95 trillion cost burden on the US government in the next 25 years.  All virus fears aside, 11 million people die every year from a bad diet…but does anyone seem to care?

The US government has established far-reaching welfare programs to ensure that none of its citizens go hungry, thus solving the calorie problem.  But what about the empty calorie problem?  SNAP (food stamp) users qualify for an average of $120/month in food benefits, but there are no nutritional qualifiers for what foods they can buy.  Indeed, 75% of food-stamp purchases are ultra-processed junk foods – including a whopping $7 billion on sugary beverages!  (Coca-Cola alone made $30 billion total in 2018 on its sugar-water sales).  Laws requiring nutrition labels to list ingredients first by amount can be side-stepped, with sugary junk food companies listing many different chemical variations of sugars to deceive shoppers.  Since residents in low-income areas are most likely to be surrounded by unhealthy (and cheaply-priced) empty calorie foods, this creates a vicious cycle of metabolic disease (more on this topic in Part 2 of this blog).  To make matters worse, our health insurance system will pay for the expensive associated hospital stays…but no money is ever awarded for healthy food consumption that could save billions in health care costs.  And if all that doesn’t scare you: even our national security is compromised when more and more young people are not physically fit for military service…and our schools are partly to blame.

HOW COULD WE REMEDY  SOME OF THESE PROBLEMS?

Many of these problems start with our jaded Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA must set the example by first promoting transparency in nutrition labeling and better regulating products that are GRAS (generally recognized as safe – yes, they actually use that term at the expense of our health); all while decreasing the amount of harmful antibiotics and growth hormones in livestock feed.  We need to introduce salad bars in schools; and establish local farm-to-school food programs – making sure that pizza is no longer classified as a vegetable just because big food corps pressured lawmakers.  We can’t support govt subsides for “crops” like HFCS which  hurt people’s health.  Instead, we could levy a 25% tax on processed foods – or their distributors – and use that money to pay for subsidies; or to incentive SNAP users to purchase healthy produce, nuts, and whole grains…all of which would also benefit farmers.  And what about Food Savings Accounts?  Similar to a HSA, money could be stored tax-free and used to purchase healthy groceries.  Research providing nutritious meals to those chronically ill has been found to cut their medical bills in half – thereby realizing food as a source of medicine all its own.

These are big problems, with some big aspirations to resolve them. But we must each do our part to improve our own diets, and then educate those around us…until one day enough people have had enough of our broken food system and its disastrous effects.