I know we're in the middle of a political dogfight over health care legislation, and now is the time to put our heads down and yank on that rope as hard as we can to make sure that there will be a strong public option in the final bill. However, it's important to remember that this is not an isolated battle, but only one facet in a much larger web of cause and effect. While hunkering down for the storm to come it's a prudent move to look through the periscope at the bigger picture and keep an eye on what it is that we are looking to ultimately achieve: Healthy humans and a healthy planet.
Ultimately, no health plan, doctor, or hospital is going to be able to cure our illnesses if the food we eat is slowly killing us. No health care reform can succeed in its ultimate goal of creating a healthy society where doctor visits are rare and mostly preventative without addressing the way we grow and take in food. I know this has been written, talked and blogged about, but it is such a fundamental issue upon which so many other problems in our modern world rest that I think it deserves any and all attention it can get.
First off, if there's only one thing you do regarding this issue, go see the new movie Food Inc. Better yet, take a friend or family member who usually doesn't think about what they eat. It's the Inconvenient Truth of agriculture, a two hour commitment to reshape consciousness and be entertained in the process. In fact, it really is the sequel movie that connects the dots between practices like the burning of fossil fuels and methane emissions that lead to Global Warming, and the perils of industrialized farming. It got under Monsanto's skin, so it's a good one. If you prefer to read, check out Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma or In Defense of Food, or Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. The movie puts into pictures what these journalists have been writing about, and they're both narrators in Food Inc.
It's evident President Obama knows how interrelated our crumbling health care is with our food system. Having a vegetable garden speaks louder than a thousand words, and we keep hearing him emphasize prevention and the savings we could have in our coverage if we took a broader look at why it is that so many people are sick. However, since the Office of Management and Budget considers these kinds of things intangible and doesn't (want to) see any direct savings attributable to more nutrients in our food, his hands are tied. And Big Agribusiness of course is lobbying hard to make sure that the nutrient-deprived food-like substances they sell to us never make it into the equation.
How bad is the food we're buying at the mainstream supermarket? Well, at times it is so devoid of life-giving minerals that keep our bodies healthy and fit that the cardboard boxes it comes in may be healthier than the content. In a presentation given at the annual conference of Consumer Health of Canada, March, 2002, entitled Dirty Secrets of the Food Processing Industry, journalist, chef, and nutrition researcher Sally Fallon describes a rat experiment in the 1960s by researchers at the University of Michigan that obviously never got published:
18 laboratory rats were divided into three groups: one group received corn flakes and water; a second group was given the cardboard box that the corn flakes came in and water; the control group received rat chow and water. The rats in the control group remained in good health throughout the experiment. The rats eating the box became lethargic and eventually died of malnutrition. But the rats receiving the corn flakes and water died before the rats that were eating the box! (The last corn flake rat died the day the first box rat died.) But before death, the corn flake rats developed schizophrenic behavior, threw fits, bit each other and finally went into convulsions. The startling conclusion of this study is that there was more nourishment in the box than there was in the corn flakes.
This experiment was actually designed as a joke, but the results were far from funny. The results were never published and similar studies have not been conducted.
There is certainly a growing awareness of the perils of our industrialized food system, but until more people make the connection between our health and food policies, we'll be putting band aids on a broken leg. Having a national conversation about health care is a great opportunity to educate the public about the important role that food plays in their health or lack thereof. While agricultural policy and farming in itself has been so far removed from people's reality (that's how the problem of our unhealthy eating habits came about in the first place), health care is much closer to home because most people have a first hand experience with it, for better or worse. If the issue of where our food comes from could get even half as much public attention as the issue of how to choose your doctor, we'd be on our way to actually healing what ails us.
There are signs that the light is slowly filtering in. In a June 21, 2009 New York Times Op-Ed entitled Lettuce From the Garden, With Worms, Nicholas D. Kristof writes:
I’ve often criticized America’s health care system, and I fervently hope that we’re going to see a public insurance option this year. But one reason for our health problems is our industrialized agriculture system, and that should be under scrutiny as well.
There are many cracks in the industrial food matrix, and it is being challenged from a lot of different angles, whether it's the horrible conditions for workers, animal cruelty, soil depletion, methane emissions, seed security, pesticides, diseases like E.Coli, fossil fuel burning for transportation, or simply the crappy taste of engineered food. However, I think that tying the lack of nutrients in the groceries we have on most supermarket shelves into our health care policy discussion is the most effective and far-reaching approach to educate the public about the dangers of commercially processed foods and at the same time garner support for a public plan that doesn't profit from making people sick. Time to make the "intangibles" tangible!
Bon Apetit!