Teacherken totally nailed it in his diary today. He spoke of the Kristof piece in the NYT that calls for changing the Secretary of Ag to a Secretary of Food. The way Kristof puts it, 35% of Americans used to farm and now it's closer to 2%. Or what I said a few days ago is that about 2% of Americans farm but 100% of us EAT. And the USDA is totally sold out to "Big Ag."
Teacherken then took the next step, connecting his role as a teacher to a major interaction he has with the USDA: the National School Lunch Program. Well done, Teacherken. I'd like to add to this thought because the National School Lunch Program is up for reauthorization THIS YEAR. So if you want to change it NOW IS OUR CHANCE!!! Whaddya say? "Yes we can"?
I was going to write a diary on a number of topics today, so let me just refer you to my blog, and I'll be posting it all there as I have time.
Comment on Bad Proposed Organic Rules: The deadline is December 13, 2008, aka IN TWO DAYS. The details for what the rules are about (mostly dairy) and how to comment are here and I'll put up another diary today on the front page of http://www.lavidalocavore.org with info as well.
Funny High Fructose Corn Syrup Ad Spoof: Have you seen the nasty ads for HFCS? Well, the makers of King Corn posted a funny spoof of the HFCS ads - an absolute MUST SEE!
OK, now into the stuff about the USDA and the National School Lunch Program. The USDA has a dual purpose of marketing ag products and regulating ag products at the same time. When there's a conflict, often the marketing side wins. That's the big picture.
Obviously people focus in quite a lot on the crop subsidy programs. These were developed in 1933 and the profile of which crops are subsidized has a lot to do with 1. foods that store well and 2. foods/ag products that were grown in 1933. Of the list of stuff grown in 1933 that initially got subsidies, I think only tobacco's been removed and that was a RECENT change.
As for why the foods need to store well, it's because the idea was initially to smooth out prices and supply over time. When we grow too much the government buys it up and releases it onto the market when we grow too little. That's an overly simplified explanation of how it worked but it was the basic idea.
Going back to your classic Adam Smith, you reach your optimal supply and price where the supply curve meets the demand curve. Grow too little and you have a shortage with high prices. Grow too much and you have a surplus with prices that can go below the cost of production. And sure we consumers may loooove those low prices, but the high prices hurt. For farmers it's vice versa. So we might as well meet them in the middle by keeping supply steady with demand and paying them a fair but moderate price all along.
Over time this got co-opted by Big Business, and that leads us to where we are now. The supply management idea was gradually tossed out the window. The government started setting a target "fair" price, telling farmers to grow as much as possible (specifically "plant fencerow to fencerow" and "get big or get out") and promising to pay them in subsidies enough to meet that target price no matter what.
Whereas before there was a (more or less) government determined price floor, now there is not. More is more, grow as much as you can, no matter how environmentally destructive your practices are, and Uncle Sam will make sure to pay you back. Because margins are so low (Uncle Sam's "fair" price isn't too generous) farmers need to grow A LOT to eek out a meager living.
The real winners aren't really farmers. It's Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, Exxon Mobil, Tyson, Smithfield, and all of the other companies that sell farmers crop inputs or buy up their crops and process them into what my friend Hank Herrera calls MESSes... Manufactured Edible Substitute Substances.
Food is an edible plant or animal that grows, walks or swims on the earth and its waters with no genetic engineering, no hormone-driven growth, and no synthetic chemical substances to mimic natural qualities. Over millennia human metabolism and cultures have adapted to the foods growing in every ecological niche.
Any other edible substance is a manufactured edible substitute substance, or MESS. A MESS has ingredients that depend on genetic modification and genetic engineering, hormone and antibiotic residue from concentrated production, and synthetic additives. Emerging research demonstrates that human metabolism cannot handle MESSes. MESSes subvert food cultures and food sovereignty. MESSes and the processes used in their manufacture and packaging contribute to the alarming toxic load that every human being now carries.
The funny thing is that these MESS makers are now often positioning themselves as either "healthy" or "green" when they are neither. They are only possibly green when you fail to consider an alternative to the nasty agricultural system we currently have. It's like saying that a hybrid SUV that gets 22 mpg is "green" and failing to recognize that someone could actually walk, ride a bike, or even drive a Prius.
Another point of PR that MESS makers like to use is calling for more food as the solution to hunger. Guess what? That's a myth. We have enough food to feed every man women and child in America (including babies) something like 3900 calories PER DAY. That's enough to make us all fat. Globally, we've got more than enough food too.
The problem is that we've got a system that a) doesn't want to sell food to those who can't pay and b) doesn't want to sell healthy food to people when it can make more profit on junk. That's why we've got the ironic situation of the poor being more likely than the rich to be obese.
So the large scale big picture goal for us is to dismantle the USDA's support of MESS production and to return it to promoting food and fiber (like cotton, hemp, etc) production. But to go to Teacherken's specific point about school lunches, here are some specific things you can write your House or Senate reps and ask for:
First of all, TELL YOUR STORY: I'd like to get a bunch of stories out there, told from the perspective of parents, doctors, teachers, and even school kids themselves. And please, post what you have to say on my blog so others can read it. It's one thing to cite some statistics or to name off some federal programs, but it's quite another thing to bring up the 3 year old in my Mom's preschool class who was 73 lbs because his parents both worked at Burger King.
Then say you're writing about the Child Nutrition Reauthorization and you want all children to have access to healthy food.
If you want less junk allowed in schools: Please ban (or limit - use whichever word best expresses your view) competitive foods, and please put an end to pouring rights agreements.
("Competitive foods" is government-speak for junk, and pouring rights agreements are when schools receive kickbacks from Coke or Pepsi for exclusively selling their products.)
If you want more school gardens & local foods: Please fund school gardens and farm-to-school programs and help remove barriers to allowing schools to serve local foods.
If you want schools to have enough money to serve quality meals: Please raise the federal reimbursement rate for the National School Lunch program from $2.57 to $3.00 and also provide funding for schools to improve their kitchen facilities so that they can actually cook healthy foods for the kids.
(Currently, schools receive only $2.57 per kid per meal, which means they have only $1.00 for the food - the rest goes to stuff like supplies and labor. On average, schools currently spend about $2.88 per kid per meal.)
If you want more low-income women, infants, and children to receive vouchers they can spend on fruits & veggies at farmers' markets: Please expand the successful WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program so that all WIC recipients can participate.
(This program gives $20 per year to low-income pregnant & breastfeeding women and children under 5, but it currently isn't available for all eligible participants, only some. It's been very successful as it does not only benefit women & children's nutrition, it also gives business to small farmers.)
More things you can ask for:
- Please prohibit schools from serving any dairy products from cows treated with rbGH, a growth hormone that is cruel to cows and leads to increased antibiotics and pus in the milk - and is linked to cancers in humans.
- Please make funds available for schools that want to upgrade their kitchen facilities. Right now a major limitation of schools is that many simply don't have kitchens and can't do any form of food processing other than warming up pre-made meals. That virtually guarantees they will serve junk.
- Please make WIC an entitlement program like Food Stamps. Food Stamps (now called SNAP as of this past year) will always be funded entirely so that anyone who qualifies gets what they are entitled to under the rules - hence the term "entitlement." WIC is not an entitlement - they set aside a certain amount of money and that's all there is. If need exceeds the funding, then too bad.
(WIC, Women Infants and Children, for those who don't know, is a nutrition program for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and children under age 5 who are below 185% of the poverty level and demonstrate needs for nutritional help).
- Please reform the commodities that are given to schools for free. Right now the government buys up agricultural commodities and provides them for free to schools for lunches. It's a form of subsidy to agriculture. That would be a brilliant idea, except when you look at WHAT is bought and given to the schools: processed crap.
So there's my rant for the day. Good on Teacherken for calling out this issue and writing an excellent diary. And I'm sure he'd agree with me that schools need to be funded, period, and not just in the lunch room. The ridiculous and crappy school lunch programs are often results of cash strapped schools trying to resist pulling funds out of academics.
They get overcrowded and need to shorten lunch periods or get rid of their kitchens, and they are broke so they need to make the lunch program "pay for itself" or even turn a profit by selling more junk food to the kids. Is that pathetic and immoral or what???? So while we can focus in particular on WIC and the National School Lunch Program during the debate in the next year on the Child Nutrition Reauthorization, in the end we need to fix the USDA and fund education if we're going to really solve the problem. (And end the war... and pass a living wage... and universal health care... and invest in green infrastructure to stimulate the economy... and so many other large scale progressive changes that are needed...)