The food industry is the biggest sector of the economy. Food is a major factor in health. Food production has a major impact on the environment. Food is a factor in policies about poverty, foreign aid, and entitlements. Shouldn’t we have a coherent national food policy, other than an agriculture bill that rewards farmers for producing food that isn’t necessarily good for us? A group of food activists is making the case that we should. See what they are proposing after the jump.
Would this just be big government infringement on liberty, or is there something to this? What would be some free market solutions to these concerns?
From Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Ricardo Salvador and Olivier De Schutter, How a national food policy could save millions of American lives – The Washington Post:
How we produce and consume food has a bigger impact on Americans’ well-being than any other human activity. The food industry is the largest sector of our economy; food touches everything from our health to the environment, climate change, economic inequality and the federal budget. Yet we have no food policy — no plan or agreed-upon principles — for managing American agriculture or the food system as a whole.
That must change.
The food system and the diet it’s created have caused incalculable damage to the health of our people and our land, water and air. If a foreign power were to do such harm, we’d regard it as a threat to national security, if not an act of war, and the government would formulate a comprehensive plan and marshal resources to combat it. (The administration even named an Ebola czar to respond to a disease that threatens few Americans.) So when hundreds of thousands of annual deaths are preventable — as the deaths from the chronic diseases linked to the modern American way of eating surely are — preventing those needless deaths is a national priority.
A national food policy would do that, by investing resources to guarantee that:
● All Americans have access to healthful food;
● Farm policies are designed to support our public health and environmental objectives;
● Our food supply is free of toxic bacteria, chemicals and drugs;
● Production and marketing of our food are done transparently;
● The food industry pays a fair wage to those it employs;
● Food marketing sets children up for healthful lives by instilling in them a habit of eating real food;
● Animals are treated with compassion and attention to their well-being;
● The food system’s carbon footprint is reduced, and the amount of carbon sequestered on farmland is increased;
● The food system is sufficiently resilient to withstand the effects of climate change.
[Keep reading. . .]
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In