“When you can buy 2000 calories for under $10 at your
neighborhood McDonalds, but have trouble getting your hands on an apple, it’s
difficult to justify trying to shame anyone into skinniness.” -Dhruv Khullar of
the Yale School of Medicine and Harvard Kennedy School.
Khullar
is right. While everyone is responsibility for his or her own health, when
people who are willing to eat
healthily struggle to do so because of their external environment, it is not the
individual who should feel shamed, but the environment.
Nearly
three quarters of Americans are overweight. Statistics about obesity are thrown
around left and right, but take a second to appreciate this figure. These
figures are off the charts when compared to the rates of fifty years ago, and
the trends show no signs of the increase leveling off. So are Americans just
getting more undisciplined? It’s unlikely. What’s more likely it that our food
chain, from the seed to the grocery shelf store, has been poisoned by the free
market. Food companies are to blame: they spend $2 billion dollars a year
advertising food that has been stripped of any sort of nutrition, they impose
farmers to extract as much of their product as they can, disregarding the
consequences of over producing, and they sent their lobbyists to Washington to
ensure that their nutrition-depleted food, if you can even call it that, gets
to stores shelves at a lower price than fairly and organically grown real foods. This isn’t news to many.
So what’s the solution?
Let’s
get the free market out of the food industry. It’s radical, it’s huge, and with
the two so deeply intertwined and so many people making huge profits, it’s much
easier said than done, but why not? The US is currently joining the rest of the
developing world in creating a universal health care system. The idea behind
government run health care is that every human being should have a right to
health care. This is a right that countries with national health care systems
deem important enough to protect by keeping in public hands and out of hands of
profit-driven corporations. I think these countries have the right idea.
If
a country values its citizens’ health enough to ensure access to medical
treatment through government run health care, why would it be so bizarre for a
country to protect its citizens’ health by ensuring had access to healthy food by creating government run food
companies. That way, governments wouldn’t only play a role in treating disease,
but preventing disease. The goal of these companies would be to offer
nutritious food untainted by cost-cutting measures associated with private and profit-driven
companies. Of course, it’s unlikely a government could meet all the food
demands of a population, and so there would still be room for the private
sector – so people wouldn’t be deprived of choice, but they would have more healthy
choices and less unhealthy ones.
It’s
a big idea, too big to contain within a small blog post, but an idea worth
thinking about – Some food for thought.
http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=5796&blogid=140
2 comments:
What?! Nearly 75% of Americans are overweight, and you suggest that we nationalize the food industry?
I agree that this statistic is unnerving, and that it a symptom of something more insidious than simple obesity. But why pin it on the food companies instead of on the people who are eating the junk food in the first place? I get that it’s cheaper to buy a greasy Big Mac than it is to eat an apple, but that’s no reason to put the Golden Arches out of business. All we need is a little regulation — maybe a tax on junk food advertising — to fix it. And maybe we need to change our culture of perpetual productivity that incentivizes eating quickly and snacking whenever possible. But considering how much resistance the health care bill is getting (and don’t misunderstand, I am all for universal health care), I don’t think it’s feasible to nationalize another huge American industry, even if it is a logical, if stretched, extension of universal health care.
As I was reading the Wall Street Journal over breakfast this morning, I saw an op-ed that criticized some piece of legislation working its way through Congress (1). This law would prevent certain companies (whose products were deemed too unhealthy) from advertising their products, the idea being that restricting advertising would halt the epidemic of childhood obesity. The author, a professor of law at George Mason, argues that reducing advertising for junk food will most likely lead companies to lower their prices and expand consumption of junk food, rather than simply use advertising to steal consumption from rival companies. He says that cutting advertising will have the effect of increasing aggregate demand for junk food, clearly not what we should be trying to do.
I think his conclusions are debatable, from an economic point of view, but that’s not really what matters. What matters is that, even if the legislation passes and it backfires, it will not be a failure of capitalism. It will be a failure of government, a smaller, more benign version of Stalin’s failure in nationalizing the farming industry in the USSR (which starved millions of peasants due to its inefficiency). Do we really want to go down that road; wouldn’t it be better to try something a little less drastic, like government regulation and re-incentivizing the production of healthier foods?
(1) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577339643514031030.html?KEYWORDS=spongebob
While I agree that non-free market food would solve some of the problems of unhealthy food consumption, it seems almost impossible to implement. To enact such a law would mean taking away valuable monetary investments from many US farmers, a practice which would be difficult to justify. In addition, there would likely be heavy lobbying against such a bill both from fast food companies as well as some sort of farmer’s conglomerate. Perhaps a more feasible solution would be to drive the prices of organic foods down by subsidizing them. This way, you could allow people to buy more healthy food without having to deal with some of these ethical and political issues.
Post a Comment