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November 8, 2009
As Michael Pollan points out in The New York Times, our industrial food system is now characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table. It has enabled an Australian to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, chips and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labour at the minimum wage.
However, the food and agriculture policies we’ve inherited from the industrial-food system, which were designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap fossil fuel energy to do so, are in difficulties. There is a need to address the problems they have caused: excess production pollutants, lack of water, junk food, antibiotic-resistant bacteria in our food supply, and ever increasing public subsidies to prop up the old system of maximizing production (get big or get out) from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures.
The rise of markets for alternative kinds of food (organic, local, regional) indicates a shift away from cheap convenience foods full of fat and sugar, whilst the environmental or public-health price keeps increasing during a time of climate change. Time to rethink the way we produce food? Time to question industrial style food?
Pollan, who is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, says:
As I write, the FDA has just signed off on a new health claim for Frito-Lay chips on the grounds that eating chips fried in polyunsaturated fats can help you reduce your consumption of saturated fats, thereby conferring blessings on your cardiovascular system. So can a notorious junk food pass through the needle eye of nutritionist logic and come out the other side looking like a health food.
The smart thing to do, he argues, is stay away from any food that trumpets its nutritional virtues, since:
for a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be a processed than a whole food...The genuinely heart-healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking the financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute.
At the policy level there should be a change from the policy to shrink the number of farmers by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation to building the infrastructure for a regional food. There needs to be a ban on the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning.
Thirdly, confined animal factories should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality. It is a shift to a more sustainable agriculture. Fourthly that the health minister should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Australians about their diet. Pollan says:
That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The public needs to know and see precisely what [Type 2 diabetes] means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry.
Fifthly, the industrial agricultural system should be exempted from an emissions trading scheme designed to increase the cost of using cheap fossil fuel.
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The snack food soft drink aisle in a supermarket is pretty large compared to the healthy food one.
The Woolworth's supermarket in Victor Harbor has selling increasingly shifted to stocking processed food as opposed to ingredients to cook your own food.