Food Rules #5

Where's our food grown? What's in it? And why is it so cheap? Pollan says that ever since WW2, Americans have been on this "quest" to make food as cheap and abundant as possible. This has been the direction of all our agricultural policy to drive down the cost of food, which is always popular obviously, politically very popular, especially starting with the Nixon administration when we really went into overdrive in organizing subsidies to drive down the cost of corn and soy which were the building blocks of fast food. In real dollars were spending less on food than anyone in history. Only about 9% of our income goes toward our food. Its succeeded in a sense...we have lots of cheap and abundant food, but its almost succeeded to well. Much of America suffers from obesity, and type two diabetes. And as it turns out cheap food has many hidden costs. So how is it that we get the food so cheap? You have to brutalize the workers, and brutalize the animals, shoot them up with drugs, and feed them inappropriate diets. There are so many hidden costs that we are not aware of and if you think about it its quite gross. The food corporations and farms don't care about your health, they care about the money they get. If you can grow a chicken in 49 days why would you want one you gotta grow in three months? This is just an example of what farmers are doing in order to fulfill the idea that food needs to be made faster, fatter , bigger, cheaper. Look at the tobacco industry, the battle against tobacco is a perfect model of how an industries irresponsible behavior can be changed. Imagine of what it would be if as a national policy the idea would be to have such nutritionally dense food that people actually felt better, had more energy, and weren't sick as much. Its up to the people, we need to start demanding good wholesome food and really take this issue seriously. Only then will we see changes.