Kids Cuisine

In the April 22 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Science writer and U.C. Berkeley Journalism professor Michael Pollan wrote up a fascinating critic of the Farm Bill. (Subscription may be required)

The Farm Bill? (yawn). Much as we like to keep abreast of current events, arcane legislation is very low on the radar of busy parents like us.

Ah, but as Pollan writes, the Farm Bill, due to come around for re-examination this year, does indeed set the rules for the American food system (and by extension, the rest of the world’s food system). And we parents should take an active interest, since it plays a large role in determining what kinds of foods our kids eat in school.

The school lunch programs started back when undernourishment was a problem for poor kids. Now, of course, the tables have turned, making obesity the public health crisis of the day. Part of what the Farm Bill does is subsidize the overproduction of the sorts of grains used for fast foods and soft drinks.

Pollan cites this alarming statistic: “Where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40%, the real price of soft drinks (a.k.a. liquid corn) declined by 23%. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.”
The system is rigged to make the most unhealthy calories the ones that are most affordable. This is not lost on budget-strapped school districts. So instead of helping local lunch ladies make nutritious meals from whole foods grown and bought locally, the politics of American food policy conspire to keep our kids in high-calorie ‘Tator Tots and processed chicken nuggets.

How is that helping combat childhood obesity? It isn’t. So the time has come for parents (and everyone else who eats) to sit up and start paying attention to what’s going on with our country’s food policy — from the top down.