Assignment 17-Eliot Smith

After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan this summer, I asked a good friend of mine, Alex Reese, what he thought of the book.  “The only thing I learned,” he said, “was that everything is corn.  I am a walking tortilla chip.”

All of you in this room know Alex, and know that his bodily width really is that of a tortilla chip.  And, although we aren't “Alex Reese thin,” none of us in here are constantly struggling with a threatening weight problem.  Therefore, it is easy for us to respond with a hearty chuckle at the claim.  However, Alex’s remark is indicative of a very real, although not immediately recognizable, problem.  

The food system in our country has been completely revolutionized over the past five or six decades.  The weight distribution in the United States has been completely flipped.  In the 1930’s, the word skinny was associated with poverty, as the lower class struggled to find and consume sufficient calories to maintain body fat, and the rich “fat cats” were, well, fat.  These men had vast amounts of money to spend on course after course of steak and potatoes which inevitably led to their being overweight.

Whereas now, the poverty-stricken are those with excess weight and the wealthy are those with slim physiques.  Thinking about this in a practical manner would yield that this idea is blasphemy; if you don’t have a lot of money, you can’t eat a lot of food, and therefore cannot be obese.

This way of thinking may be logical, but is disproven only by the current transformation of America’s diet brought upon by the corporate monopoly on food production.

In a study published in April of 2011 that attempted to find a concrete reason for this inversion, researchers sent a man to the supermarket with two things: a dollar, and the goal of buying as many calories as possible with said dollar.

According to the study, “What he found is that he could buy well over 1,000 calories of cookies or potato chips.  But his dollar would only buy 250 calories of carrots.  He could buy almost 900 calories of soda...but only 170 calories of orange juice.”

While this idea may sound rather confusing, the explanation behind it is rather simple.  Large food companies have invested extraordinary amounts of money, through lobbying and other efforts, into encouraging the government to keep corn, wheat, and soybean prices low via subsidies.  By doing this, these companies are able to rearrange the components of these very pliable crops, transform them into cheap, unhealthy calories, and sell the end products at a huge profit.

They have sued innocent farmers just because their genetically-modified seeds blew onto their land, leaving the farmers bankrupt and hopeless.

They have invested money into stripping regulations from farms and slaughterhouses.  Livestock now die sick from the cheapest diet possible and depressed from the despicable living conditions, just so the companies will save a few dollars.  In the words of Michael Pollan, “Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

Another, rather crude and inhumane, way of looking at this problem is as a capitalistic success.  In all aspects, our current food system is the epitome of an economic victory, as companies put in much less than they get out.

Having said this, I sincerely doubt that there is really an opposition to the necessity of the changing of our country’s food scheme, but rather conflicting views on what we, regular citizens of the United States, can do to alter it.

Many call for the abolition or change of the same economic system that has prospered in our country since the Gilded Age.  Some proponents favor a monetary slap on the wrist for big food companies, others, a doing away with all food subsidies in the United States.

Others propose less radical changes, such as protesting against the excessive breaks that the government has given food companies such as Monsanto and Tyson, or lobbying for tax deductions for local, non-genetically-modified-crop-growing farms.

But every one of these methods has been tried.  Over and over.  We still continue to see the monumental explosion of obesity in America, complemented by the inhumane treatment of livestock.  These complicated methods are not the answer.

Food Inc., a 2008 documentary directed by Robert Kenner, urges its audience to think of each purchase as a vote.  Will you support the massively over-funded bigot, the common corporate food company, or the morally correct, humane candidate, your local farm?  

We must favor the small over the big, the right over the wrong. We must slowly, but noticeably, deprive the corporate businesses of their familiar multi-billion-dollar cash flow by purchasing only produce in season and free-range meat. As The Economics of Obesity proclaims, we must not buy food with ingredients, but rather buy the ingredients themselves.

Slowly but surely, the companies will start to see the changes; our nation will become healthier, and our corporate food businesses less affluent. Our poverty-stricken will slowly be able to afford more organic foods, and will shy away from the chemically flooded Twinkies and Hohos.

The power is in our hands.  We can re-revolutionize our food chain, and bring balance to the American diet.

But most importantly, we all must remember that we can change the world with every bite.

Food Inc. Dir. Robert Kenner. Magnolia Pictures, 2008. Film.

“The Economics of Obesity.” Institute for National Healing. N.p. 13 April 2011. Web. 30 June

2013. <http://institutefornaturalhealing.com/2011/04/theeconomicsofobesitywhyarepoorpeoplefat/>

Simon, Bernard. “Monsanto Wins Patent Case On Plant Genes.” New York Times. May 22 2004

Print.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/business/monsantowinspatentcaseonplantgenes.html>

Corn Products. 2008. Food Inc. Live Whole Be Free. Web. 12 December 2013. http://livewholebefree.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Corn-Products-1000x500.jpg

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. New York: Penguin Group, 2006. Print.