Why are the most affordable foods always the ones that are bad for you? Studies show Americans want to eat healthier, but Federal subsidies policy and a skewed pricing structure at our grocery stores has reinforced bad consumer habits.
By Jon Gingerich
It was the sort of news we didn’t want to hear. As fate would have it, most of us didn’t.
A study published by the International Journal of Biological Sciences in December determined that rats fed three of the most popular genetically modified feed and consumer grade corns on the market developed Hepatotoxicity, or chemically driven liver damage.
One of the products tested, NK603, is the Glyphosate-tolerant strand of seed better known as Roundup Ready, manufactured by agricultural giant Monsanto. It’s estimated that Monsanto’s genetically modified patents have been inserted into 80% of all corn grown in the U.S. and as much as 95% of all soybeans.
Because GM foods don’t require any labeling in the United States — and because corn is now a staple in every American food from sodas and sauces to breads and cookies — it’s not much of a stretch to consider ourselves unwitting lab rats in a biotech gamble where the outcome is anything but certain.
The next month, Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant was gracing the cover of Forbes, stoically leaning over the sycophantic banner “company of the year,” a nod to Monsanto’s valiant efforts in gaining a virtual monopoly of the seed market.
It’s an apt paradox given the state of the food industry, an enterprise built on satisfying multiple financial and regulatory objectives which often results in a blurred mission of double standards, like a production system that favors high volumes of poorly made foods, or a nation of citizens who remain fed but for all purposes nutritionally malnourished.
Food is everywhere in America, and it’s a good thing. There’s a higher demand for it than ever, though we still manage to spend only about 15% of our take-home income on food — a worldwide low. As a result, we’ve always held the expectation that food would be cheap. But these low prices have come at a greater cost.
The number of Americans living with Type 2 diabetes doubled between 1990 and 2005, now accounting for nearly 24 million people — or about 8% of the population. Obesity is the standard; heart disease is the leading cause of death. Soil damage from dangerous pesticides, as well as the loss of biodiversity from patented-seed takeover, has had an indelible impact on our nation’s farmland.
We’re also paying for it literally. America’s current Federal agricultural policy is designed to reward farmers who produce high yields that can only be met with pesticide-heavy crops, making it cheaper for manufacturers to implement cost-cutting preservatives or introduce genetically modified ingredients that seamlessly bypass the regulatory and labeling lines.
The result is a skewed pricing system that favors processed, poor quality foods over healthy ones, and it’s for this reason that it’s cheaper for a struggling family to eat at McDonald’s than it is to buy and prepare a meal at home, or why it’s cheaper in many cities to buy soda than milk.
Choose organic foods for your family and you can expect to triple your costs. Unhealthy choices are the default; the underlying policy that manages our food industry has had a direct affect on our consumption habits.
The ultimate irony is that eating healthy foods in the most agriculturally abundant country in the history of the world is now limited to those who can afford it.
“The price at the supermarket only includes a small portion of the costs we’re paying that aren’t included on the sticker price,” said Chris Hunt, Research and Policy Analysis Director for nonprofit food organization GRACE. “Part of the question you have to ask when addressing these costs is how we’ve managed to internalize these negative externalities generated by America’s agro-business. There’s definitely a chance that we can change, but it takes a grand acknowledgement that there’s something wrong with our food system today.”
The cost of choice
Study after study shows that Americans want to eat healthier. For the average American family however, these desires are met with economic obstacles at every turn. Retail food prices typically climb between 2% and 3% each year, but recent fuel prices, handling costs and weather woes sent food prices soaring at a time when the American public couldn’t choose to be frugal.
Food costs went up nearly 6.5% in 2008, the fastest hike since 1990.
Concurrently, a recession, high unemployment rates and record bankruptcies loomed, creating conditions where consumers were expected to spend more money on less. The sharp decline of consumer food spending in 2009 was contrasted by the skyrocketing demand for food banks. Getting by was hard enough. Making healthy choices was seen as a luxury.
New York-based PR firm Hunter PR reported in an annual food survey that two of the three most popular food stories of 2009 involved food cost (the third was food safety). Many consumers went to generics in 2009, and this put marketers in instant crisis mode, pleading with manufacturers to drop superfluous packaging expenses and initiate bold cost-cutting campaigns, even as their costs went up.
“It’s a no-win situation,” said Hunter PR President Grace Leong. “Manufacturers are told to keep their prices down, so they use cheaper ingredients, and then they get beat up on their carbon footprint for shipping. If they start looking to save costs by outsourcing, they’re basically killing the industry. Why pay the guy in South Florida when they can do it in South America without all the regulation?”
“There’s such pressure to keep prices down because of the culture we live in,” Leong continued, “but the politics of food involves supporting a very costly industry.”
The Consumer Price Index reported a climb of only about 0.5% for food costs in 2009, hinting that many manufacturers pushed to keep prices low even when it hurt. Predicting economic turnaround, some companies have begun raising prices in recent months.
Marketers now predict manufacturers will have to rely on advertising and marketing campaigns to bring shoppers back from the world of generics. Similarly, some industry experts believe creating an armory of healthy alternatives could be a viable alternative to regain that dedicated consumer base.
“Consumers know exactly what’s going on. Every grocer wants to have locally grown, locally produced food to show they’re in-touch, but in the back they’ll still carry your foreign produce,” she said. “It’s hard to eat healthy, but this is a big opportunity for food companies. They don’t want to go down with the ship.”
Children of the corn
How did it become so easy for manufacturers — and us — to make such bad choices? It’s hard to know exactly where to point the finger, but much of America’s current food problem began from a well-intentioned revolution in the corn industry waged by President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz.
In decades prior, we’d actually paid U.S. farmers to limit their corn production in order to keep inflation on the crop down. By the 1970’s however, the size and scope of America’s palate had changed. Higher food output was desperately needed, and we’d also begun exporting vast amounts of it. In response, Butz designed a bold Federal agricultural expansion that gave massive subsidies to farmers to produce as much corn as possible.
The result was a national corn boon that altered our farming landscape forever.
Due to a vastly devaluating surplus the price of corn soon dropped, and farmers found they had to produce constantly higher yields to make a profit. With the advent of high-tech herbicides, it was now possible to output up to 100 bushels an acre, a feat unfathomable 50 years ago. In the course of doing so, many farmers had grown increasingly indebted to the government, as their yields were being supported by federal subsidies as opposed to the market.
It wasn’t too long before food manufactures found ways to use this newly devaluated crop to lower their costs. Simply put, they began putting corn into everything. Japanese scientists developed a way to rend cornstarch into a liquid sweetener with the aid of chemical enzymes, developing High Fructose Corn Syrup, a fructose/glucose disaccharide that became a cheap alternative to sucrose, or table sugar. HFCS became the de facto sweetener of sodas, cookies, breads, salad dressings, sauces and juices.
Decades later, we discovered that unlike sucrose, the complex chemical bonds in HFCS are metabolized in the liver, where they possibly contribute to fatty liver disease. There are also harmful carbonyl compounds, and studies show high levels of HFCS can disrupt insulin production levels, leading to diabetes. Arguably, the news came too late: Americans’ intake of the ubiquitous sweetener increased more than 1,000% between 1970 and 1990.
Meanwhile, cattle farmers, wary of the market shift, moved their livestock’s diet from a grass staple to that of corn, a food the animals aren’t biologically designed to eat. Feeding them “distiller’s grain,” a corn byproduct made from ethanol, cattle began exhibiting massive weight gain, much to the delight of cattle owners.
Because cows can’t digest corn properly however, they began experiencing ulcers and major stomach ailments, causing farmers to preemptively load them up with antibiotics. Fecal contamination is common, and E. coli outbreaks in the U.S. have boomed since the pathogen’s initial discovery in 1982.
Seattle-based law firm Marler Clark LLP PS, which specializes in E. coli litigation, shared data with O’Dwyer’s showing nearly 48 million pounds of beef were recalled between 2007 and 2010 alone.
“From 1993 to 2002 almost every case I worked on was E. coli linked to hamburger meat,” said attorney William D. Marler. “Now it’s routine to see millions of pounds of recalled meat on a yearly basis.”
If the numbers aren’t harrowing enough, consider the physiological implications. Corn is not just the main pillar in our agricultural economy; it’s not just the main ingredient in our diet; it’s not just the main ingredient in our livestock’s diets. We’ve been eating it for so long that it now literally makes up who we are. If you were to take DNA extraction analysis of your hair, chances are you would find large amounts of corn in it. We are what we eat, literally.
Who regulates the regulators?
If we know the looming health risks associated with America’s eating habits, if we know Americans would eat healthier if they could afford it, if we know the current subsidy system favors the production of bad food and if we know the aisle between wellness and affordability is too wide — why can’t we make healthier foods more affordable? Why can’t the government offer similar subsidies to farmers who manufacture healthy foods in the same way that it has guaranteed a paycheck for those who produce pesticide heavy corn and soy?
“It’s not impossible, but I think it’s very challenging due primarily to the power of agro-business,” Hunt said. “They have an exceptionally large lobby and the farm bill is so entrenched in our current policy it doesn’t look like it will budge any time soon.”
Washington’s current power structure seems to reiterate this dismal outlook. FDA Senior Advisor Michael Taylor is a former Monsanto lobbyist.
In 1996, he fought to allow the use of potentially cancerous pesticides in genetically modified foods. Former Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff, who championed legislation in his state to remove consumer labels on dairy products engineered with Bovine Growth Hormone, is currently Obama’s top pick to take the Agriculture for Food Safety’s role of Under Secretary.
Moreover, any bottom-up alternatives seem bleak. The organic community has been notoriously stubborn in its refusal to integrate genetically modified crops into the organic fold, though it could lower de-weeding costs by as much as $450 an acre.
“There will be many who will always be skeptical of it, and for good reason. There hasn’t been sufficient testing on human health and what testing has been done have been on behalf of the industry,” Hunt said.
This position isn’t made any easier by the bureaucratic FDA-USDA-EPA trifecta that currently regulates our foods, where regulatory grey areas can foster gigantic industry loopholes.
For example, because Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn is genetically modified to be immune to the company’s herbicidal spray, small residues of the herbicide exist in the corn.
The EPA has never established a limit of the amount of residues that can exist in the corn because it enters the food via a genetic process instead of a chemical spray, and thus, falls outside of EPA jurisdiction.
GM food companies are not presently required to consult the FDA, and if they do they don’t have to take the agency’s suggestions. Therefore, GM food containing unknown amounts of herbicide are free to go into our crops, where they are passed into our foods, our livestock, our sweeteners, and into our bodies — all completely unregulated and completely unlabeled.
It’s ironic that the most essential commodity in human survivability has been delegated to a stalemate on the fulcrum where science and policy meet. America’s silent food crisis is perhaps only abetted by the fact that we are also a reactionary society: we love a fad, we love a good casuse, we love to go on puritanical crash diets, from “fat free” to Atkins to South Beach, finding boogey foods to lynch along the way like High Fructose Corn Syrup. When regulations don’t help us, we’ve always been quick to help ourselves.
We can take this energy and channel it into proactive consumer choices that demand an alternative to the bad policies and equally bad habits that have shaped our food landscape. Some common sense, and an appeal to moderation and a demand for political oversight could go a long way.
“Food news has become front-page news. The idea has always been there: if big government is not going to do it for me, if I can’t trust them to police food safety, I’ll do it myself,” Leong said.
“Food regulation is a massive, huge job that can’t be accomplished by one agency. Someone needs to go in there and bust it up. If you look at the way food was produced back at the turn of the century — if you look at the books that came out exposing the corruption — it broke the cycle and improved our food quality. There’s hope for that to happen again.”
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Jon Gingerich is the Editor of O'Dwyer's Magazine. He can reached at jon.gingerich@odwyerpr.com or 212/679-2471, ext. 103. |
