Michael Pollanwrote an splendid clause in the October 3 , 2011 issue of The Nation ( cite and yoke below ) , objurgate the lack of literal progress in rectify the broken intellectual nourishment scheme in the United States .
Congress is stuffed with intellectual nourishment industriousness - supported Representatives , and President Obama has n’t yet project a undivided blood line of Agriculture statute law to meliorate public health via the food system . This , in spite of the fact that Medicare and Medicaid ’s escalating costs , can in part be attributed to our poor food choice . Obesity , diabetes , and heart disease are frequently disease we eat ourselves into .
Pollan notes that , “ Whatever its cost to public health and the environs , cheap food has become a column of the advanced saving that few in regime dare to question . “
According to Pollan ’s article , “ In the forty years since the issue ofFrances Moore Lappé ’s Diet for a Small Planet , a movement commit to the reform of the food system has taken solution in America . Lappé ’s groundbreaking ceremony Koran connected the dot between something as average and all - American as a ground beef and the environmental crisis , as well as earth hungriness . Along with Wendell Berry and Barry Commoner , Lappé taught us how to think ecologically about the implication of our everydayfoodchoices . you could now see that way of thinking , so radical at the time , just about everywhere — from the pages of Time magazine to the carte at any number of local restaurants .
“ To date , however , the nutrient apparent motion can claim more success in alter popular consciousness than in shifting , in any fundamental way , the political and economic effect shaping the food system or , for that matter , in change the “ standard American diet”—which has only gotten worse since the 1970s . Recently there have been some political accomplishments : food movement activists played a role in shaping the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act and the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act , both cash in one’s chips in the last Congress , and the last couple of farm bills have thrown some significant rotter in the direction of sustainable agriculture and levelheaded food . But the solid food movement can not yet point to legislative achievements on the decree of the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act or the establishment of the Environmental Protection Administration . Its greatest victories have fare in the media , which could hardly be friendlier to it , and in the food marketplace , rather than in the halls of Congress , where the power of agribusiness has hardly been disturbed .
“ The pronounced snag between the movement ’s profit in the indulgent top executive of ethnical influence and its relative weakness in ceremonious political terms is faithfully mirror in the White House . While Michelle Obama has had famous success raising knowingness of the child corpulency problem and linking it to the food arrangement ( as well as in pushing the manufacture to change some of its most egregious practice ) , her husband , after raise expectations on the campaign lead , has done comparatively little to push a reform agenda . prognosticate anti - trust initiatives to foresee food industry concentration , which putsfarmersand rancher at the clemency of a diminished handful of processors , come out to be languishing . Efforts to reform crop subsidies during the last farm bill disputation were halfhearted and got nowhere . And a USDA programme to localize new restrictions on genetically modify crop ( in ordination to protect constitutional farms from contamination ) was reportedly override by the White House .
“ There are two manner to see the very different approaches of the president and the first dame to the food issue . A cynical interpretation would be that the administration has decided to deploy the first lady to pay lip service to reform while continuing business as common . But a more large-hearted interpretation would be that President Obama has determined there is not yet enough political support to take on the severe body of work of food organization reform , and the best thing to do in the lag is for the first madam to establish a all-encompassing constituency for modification by mouth out about the grandness of food . ”
Read the entire article,“How Change Is Going To fare In The Food System ” , in the October 3 , 2011 variation of The Nation
