Who Decides What Poor People Eat?

Tags:agriculture, farmers markets, food pantries, food stamp benefits, hunger, President, rising obesity, soup kitchens.

In the October 9, 2008 New York Times Magazine, author Michael Pollan called on the next President to dramatically overhaul U.S. agriculture and food policy.

While I agree with many of Pollan’s continuing criticisms of a world food system dominated by just a handful of corporate agribusinesses, I am troubled by his continuing insensitivity to the realities faced by low-income Americans. My reply, to be printed in the October 26, 2008 magazine, speaks for itself:

Even though 35.5 million Americans live in households that can’t afford enough food and 25 million are forced to use food pantries and soup kitchens, Michael Pollan insists that food scarcity is no longer a problem in America and that rising food prices can be a positive development. He glosses over the reality that the nation’s rising obesity is directly tied to the inability of low-income Americans to physically obtain and economically afford less fattening, more nutritious foods.

Pollan’s suggestion that the federal government start preventing low-income families from using food-stamp benefits to purchase what he deems to be junk food is as class-biased as it is unworkable. In his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he admits that he and his son occasionally enjoy junk food and supersize Cokes. Who is he to decide that low-income American families could never again enjoy that same guilty pleasure?

I, too, would like to live in a nation in which everyone is able to buy nourishing food year-round at “four-season farmers’ markets.” But just as the reality is that most Americans don’t live in regions with year-round growing seasons, tens of millions of people on limited incomes simply can’t afford to buy the healthiest foods.

The answer is not, as Pollan suggests, to reduce their already meager choices but rather to ensure that they have wages high enough and a government safety net robust enough to give them the real-life ability to eat more nutritious foods.”

You can see my published letter, as well as an excellent letter from a previous boss of mine, former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, here.

A few other related points:

• Pollan is wrong to claim that the WIC and School Lunch Programs value raw calorie counts over nutritional content. The foods purchased through the WIC program were recently re-calibrated to conform with nutritional guidelines established by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, offering fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, soymilk, and tofu as options for the first time.
• Under federal law, school lunches must be served in accordance with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, ensuring that less than 10 percent of calories come from saturated fat and requiring that each lunch provides at least one-third of the recommended levels of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, iron, and calcium. Yes, school lunches are still far from perfect, and yes parents and activists need to be vigilant in continuing to improve their nutritional quality, but we should at least acknowledge the nutritional advances. And we should remember how much worse off low-income children were before they had access to school lunches at all.
• With billions of dollars at stake, the battle to define junk food in the Food Stamp Program would be epic, with nutrition experts pitted against food-industry lobbyists, slugging it out one food item at a time. Are Raisinets junk food or fruit? Junk food, you say? Then how about a caramel apple? What about a Fig Newton? Wouldn’t it be better to let parents decide for themselves?
• It is also wrong to imply that the Food Stamp Program increases obesity. A major USDA study published in 2007 found no significant difference between the body mass index of people who received food stamps and people who were equally poor who did not.
• Micromanaging the lives of poor people—or anybody, for that matter—is patronizing and usually backfires. A far better strategy than limiting food choice with food stamps, banning fast food, or passing a “fat tax” is to increase the average benefit amount of food stamps so people can afford to buy the healthiest foods—which most food stamp recipients desperately want to do.

I discusss all these issues in greater detail in my book.

Presidential Candidates Discuss Domestic Hunger

Tags:2008 elections, Barack Obama, campaigns, hunger, John McCain, poverty, President.

The Obama/Biden campaign issued a detailed (two and a half page) statement this week on how they would end child hunger in the U.S. by 2005. Given that 35.5 million Americans – including more than 12 million children – live in homes that can’t afford enough food, this is a huge issue.

On May 4, 2008, Obama said on Meet the Press: “We’ve got rising food prices here in the United States. My top priority is making sure that people are able to get enough to eat.”

Some highlights of the Obama plan:

• Focusing first on the most vulnerable populations by ensuring that low-income senior citizens, infants, and toddlers have more access to federal nutrition assistance benefits;
• Enacting a serious, multi-pronged plan to slash U.S. poverty, which has soared under the Bush Administration;
• Eliminating child hunger by 2015 by providing all poor children with free school meals and expanding summer meals for low-income children; and
• Increasing support to community-based providers, such as food banks, soup kitchens, and food pantries, both faith-based and secular.

On the same day that Obama issued his statement on domestic hunger, the McCain campaign also issued the following statement: “John McCain supports fully funding food and nutrition programs and carrying out a robust Emergency Food Assistance Program. He supports indexing food stamps to reflect the current cost of living and he would fill shortfalls in the Emergency Food Assistance Program. John McCain also supports providing marketing tools for the fruit and vegetable industry focused on promoting healthier American diets.”

The McCain statement raises a few questions:

1. What does McCain mean by “fully funding?”
2. If McCain is for a “robust Emergency Food Assistance Program” (which aids food banks, soup kitchens and food pantries) why did he vote in 2005 (as part of GOP-sponsored across-the-board cuts) to cut that very program?  Why, in the same 2005 vote, did cut the WIC Program, which provides specially-targeted nutrition assistance and health advice to pregnant women and infants?
3. How in the world does McCain square his position that he is for across-the-board cuts in all non-homeland security domestic spending with his call for “fully funding” nutrition programs and indexing food stamps to inflation? (As an anti-hunger advocate, I certainly support increases in these programs but that could cost billions of dollars extra per year, which would seem to be at odds with “across-the-board cuts”)

I just report. You decide.