We Can't Reform Health Care without Reforming Food
If and when health care reform finally passes, we will have successfully ameliorated only half of the crisis. The treatment half. The next step has to be focused upon doing something about the poisoned filth we've collectively nicknamed "food." Without any real changes in how our food is produced, the health care system will continue to bloat and fall apart. Not unlike the insides of an average American body.
Corporate agribusiness has invested nearly $1.2 billion (and growing) on lobbyists -- more money than even the defense lobby. Naturally, much of this lobbying has been aimed at deregulating how food is processed and manufactured, as well as how corporate agribusinesses raise and process livestock. It's an industry that's entangled in everything from Big Tobacco to human trafficking and illegal immigration.
Most recently, and speaking of poisoned filth, you may have watched as Rick Berman was eviscerated by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC a few weeks ago. In case you missed it, Berman's Center for Consumer Freedom is financed by corporate agribusiness, among others, and tasked with deceiving the public about everything from high fructose corn syrup to transfat, mercury levels in fish, obesity issues, food labels, and tobacco laws. CCF is all about confusing the public by muddying scientific fact and skewing the debate onto ridiculous tangents to the point where it's difficult to tell the difference between what's healthy and what's crap. It's Glenn Beck's rodeo clown strategy applied to food.
The consequence for you and me, of course, is that the food is becoming increasingly toxic, both in terms of what goes into our bodies, and in terms of how deregulation and deception is hurting the economy. What good is health care reform if we're still being fed poison? What good is an economic recovery if big business is still gaming the system?
Here's a perfect example of what they're getting away with. In Ohio next week, voters will be deciding on a ballot measure known as Issue 2.
As I'm sure you're aware -- and I'll spare you the gruesome videos -- corporate farms maximize profit by packing as many animals into ridiculously tight spaces. Imagine being forced to live out your life in the equivalent of a high school gym locker. While confined and unable to move, the animals are injected with a variety of hormones, antibiotics and other medications. Medications designed for animals, not humans. They're force-fed grains laced with pesticides and other chemicals. And when they're not eating chemically-tainted grain, they're often fed the remains of other animals -- old or sick animals that aren't shoved through the system and turned into food for humans (we often share food with, you know, our food). The list of atrocities is lengthy, but the end result is that a variety of unhealthy, possibly deadly toxins and diseases wind up, unannounced, on our mouths.
...the American Journal of Epidemiology reported that people who eat eggs from hens confined in cages are 250% more likely to contract Salmonella. The extreme confinement of animals is also a major factor in the emergence of diseases like H5N1 and H1N1 (bird and swine flu).
And that's with the Department of Agriculture, along with public participation in oversight, keeping an eye on things.
Issue 2, however, would for all intents and purposes replace federal regulation with something called the Livestock Care Standards Board. The thirteen member board would be appointed by the governor and would include members who have skin in the game. The stated goal of the board would be to regulate how animals are kept. So it sounds like it's a good thing. They're going to protect Babe and his cute barnyard friends!
But that's not how it'll work.
Naturally, the board will be susceptible to intense lobbying and coercion from the usual corporate villains. Imagine Rick Berman types unleashing their evil fury of confused logic and lie-mongering on a small 13 member state board, as opposed to the massive and monolithic federal government. The end result will be conditions that are far, far worse than they are today -- producing food that's even more dangerous, and all of it overriding the authority of the federal government.
While sounding wholesome on the surface, Issue 2, to paraphrase Grover Norquist, is designed to shrink regulatory oversight so it's small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. Corporate agribusiness will be able to run the show and maximize industry profits by continuing the very practices that Issue 2 claims to repair. And it'll all be codified into the Ohio Constitution. Ultimately, any attempts to reverse course will have to clear much larger hurdles.
And here's the really scary news.
"We've tried to model this in a way that other states can look at it," said Jack Fisher, executive vice president of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation. "This involves farmers, ranchers, everyone in the food chain."
Oh good. So instead of spending large sums of cash lobbying Congress and the federal government, Big Food and corporate agribusinesses will be able to focus their efforts on small states and their quaint little livestock boards -- crushing them and reprocessing the remains into liquid form and dumping them into the factory feeding troughs. Not literally, of course. I hope.
So while this may seem like a small issue about animal welfare in one state, it's actually step one in a process that will make an already deadly national crisis even worse.
Much like we've witnessed with the health insurance cartel and Wall Street, without a strong regulatory body keeping an eye on even the smallest details, we all end up screwed in the process. Opponents will suggest that regulation only makes everything more expensive. But I would rather pay a little more for a pound of beef than to suffer through Stephanie Smith's ordeal with E. Coli:
Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed.
Corporate profits and cheap food to put on your families -- or bloody diarrhea, a nine week coma and paralysis. Hmm. That's a tough call. Let's have a small, vulnerable livestock panel decide!
Sorry, no.
If Issue 2 is written into the Ohio Constitution next week, it'll be that much more difficult for Americans to remain healthy, with or without reforming the health care system. Help us out, Ohio, and vote against this thing.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Quitting Meat: A Process Of Change
When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not. It's a strange formulation, and it's distracting.
Loading comments…
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
I wonder how many working people realize that they are paying for two health care insurances. You pay a private insurance company for your healthcare while you are still young and low risk. And you pay FICA payroll taxes for retirement healthcare, when the private insurance companies drop you for being to high risk.
If only we could combine these two payments into ONE single payer system, there would be plenty of revenue to support comprehensive coverage for all and in accordance to income and ability to pay.
I dare say that 90 % of all working people would pay less for comprehensive coverage than they do now. That is a good thing and when those savings are spent on other goods and services it would also have a positive impact on the economy. Any patch work compromise will surely end in failure.
Food gets distributed all over the nation and falls clearly under the Constitutional mandate of "regulation of Interstate commerce". Our founding fathers had it right, but of course our "freedom to choose conservatives" have conveniently forgotten that little sentence in our Constitution.
As much as I agree with many points in this article, I also think no one is forcing anyone to buy toxic food. No one forces us to buy Big Macs and Little Debbies on a daily basis. If we are truly a consumer-driven culture, then as consumers, we can demand healthier food. If consumers stop buying the processed foods, and start buying more healthy foods, the healthy stuff will start to populate the shelves. Consumers determine what stores stock, through our purchases. So it's up to us to purchase different items. It's starting, with grocery stores having organic sections. That clearly came about from consumer demand. More people just need to get on board. The more healthy foods people demand, the lower in price that will become as well.
I agree with your philosophy in general, but the problem lies in the number of people involved, crowded in cities. Aside from choosing healthy foods for oneself, there still must be government regulation and inspection to insure that food supplies are not contaminated with e-coli, etc. Even healthy foods are not immune from infection. When we look at the overall food supply system, there must be government oversight. That is part of the job of governing.
So, people who can't afford organic eggs should just deal with getting Salmonella? The problem is, people don't view ground beef, eggs, cheese etc as being 'unhealthy', and unless people are educated, what are they going to do? What do you do if your supermarket doesn't carry all of these organic products? The fact that lobbyists are endangering peoples health and lives for their profit is disgusting, and it shouldn't be solely up to the consumer to find out about it and deal with it. That's what these government bodies are for. That's what taxes are for. To protect us from unhealthy, unsafe foods. If the humane society was saying people who eat X food FROM *CHINA* are 250% more likely to get salmonella, people would be freaking out beyond imagining. It's the same damn thing. And corporations should never be in charge of the quality of our food supply. Never.
Well said! It's the corporations and their lobbyists that are making sure the purest food remains the most expensive despite its being the least processed. The FDA has already weakened the "natural" designation on foods and is working on gutting organic standards.
I'm trying to find where I typed that people who can't afford organic eggs should deal with getting Salmonella, but just can't find it. I believe I said "no one is forcing us to eat Big Macs and processed foods." You can still buy conventional (non-organic) vegetables that are far healthier than processed, frozen mozzarella sticks with 35 fake ingredients. A bunch of broccoli is $2.99 in Manhattan. It's probably just $2.00 in the suburbs. That and a bag of salad greens (also packaged) could create a healthy meal - same price or less as fast food.
But I dont' disagree, that corporations are guilty of putting unhealthy choices in front of us. However, we still do not have to buy it. Americans, even on this web site, view the concept of being vegetarian as an infringement on their 'rights." Puh-leeze. People adamantly refuse to change their ways because they are stubborn. People view education as an attack, and refuse to listen. It really is up to us - the customer - to choose what to buy.
The problem is, it's not just the obvious suspects like the examples you cite that are "junk" anymore. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides are used on what is more likely than not to be genetically modified seeds. Did you know that chickens somehow can tell when modified corn is put before them and won't eat it? Or how these seeds infest other crops and alter them, reducing the diversity and variety within plant species?
Then this already tainted product goes to factories where it is stripped of all its natural nutrients and flavor and replaced with artificial colorings, flavorings, emulsifiers, preservatives and synthetic nutrients which are not used by the body in the same way as the natural ones, because the original natural components in the food work synergistically, not in isolation (and because they're synthetic).
Either that or the crop will go through toxic chemical treatment to alter its chemical structure into something entirely not found in nature, but which agribusiness can still claim is "natural" under current law (I'm thinking specifically of high fructose corn syrup here).
I looked at the ingredients on a can of vegetarian vegetable (alphabet) soup, something which sounds healthful, and the second ingredient after tomato puree was HFS! Why would you want a super sweet fake sugar in SOUP?? ICK!!!
Look at the packaging of just about any commercial food product in a regular grocery store and look at the long list of gunk in it. Things that are modified and hydrogenated aren't good, either; even if the latter is one of the "good" oils, hydrogenating makes it not so good. Speaking of, has anyone else noticed how the flurry over trans fats died out so quickly and supposedly no one's using them anymore? Yet I look at a jar of peanut butter these days and all the fats have gone from partially hydrogenated--bad!--to fully hydrogenated--worse! Fully hydrogenated oil is in fact trans fat, and yet if you look under trans fat on the label, they are claiming 0 grams.
This needs to end, but big agribusiness and the FDA will continue to find excuses to keep this poison in our food. We need to revert to a smaller, localized model of fresh locally grown food, from natural seed, with as few toxic chemicals and as little processing as possible.
For those of you who don’t think government healthcare will reach its tendrils into every facet of American life, look at this article.
“You can’t change healthcare until you change food.” Is the same as saying, “once we have healthcare we’ll change your food.” Because, “we’re all in this together.” You neighbor who eats cheeseburgers isn’t just ruining her health, it’s costing the government (and you) more money. So let’s office “incentives” for her to not eat them. Oh, and by the way, for you not to eat them.
Healthcare reform goes way beyond what doctor you see, and what pills you take. It reaches into every single facet of your life from birth to death. To be functional, it has to. Enjoy your Mcdonalds (while you can)!
Did you read the article? Cause I did. It isn't talking about McDonalds, or banning candy. It's talking about the fact that the quality and safety of our food is being screwed with by corporate lobbyists. This isn't about forcing people to eat X or Y, it's about ensuring that your food is free of e-coli, salmonella, is clean and safe. That is a huge issue, and one I would think any reasonable person would support. Unless you don't mind the idea of eating tainted meat and getting sick because corporate lobbyists have screwed with the regulations.
Man, fearmongering is just pathetic. Dislike healthcare all you want, but to try and frame it as something that's going to shut down McDonalds is one of the most asinine leaps I've seen yet.
The public relations war between government and private for-profit companies is being won by the latter. Which is strange if we take the stated purposes of each side at face value.
Government is "For the People, By the People". Corporations are "For the Company, By the CEOs".
Where did we end up trusting the people who want to make a profit on you more than the people who serve the People.
A few years back the state of New Mexico tried to get aspartame declared illegal, but the other side had huge phalanxes of legal hounds who got the effort squashed. That particular poison is in more than 9000 food products in this country and causes so many health problems such as diabetes, lymphoma, mental confusion, blah blah. It is the standard replacement for sugar in diet foods. What a joke. After reading all the studies that had been produced in opposition to its use one has trouble buying food at the grocery store any more.
The same goes for factory-raised animal products. I had a vet tell me years ago that more than 4 cats in a single household heightened the probability of disease occurring in the animals; can you imagine the production of diseases occurring in a building full of thousands?
This poor country is so sick on so many levels. I doubt if we would see a reversal of this trend in our lifetimes, and it will probably take a catastrophic collapse before there is a chance of starting anything new that benefits people over profits. Unless whole communities start supporting their own local growers over huge supermarkets there will be no change. That would mean spending more for better food and eating less in the long run.
A recent BBC radio program investigating the lack of minerals and vitamins in the food we eat stated that while 1 billion people were calorie deficient over 3 billion were mineral or vitamin deficient so the problem of hunger and malnourishment is far greater than is realised. This being true this is why there are so many unhealthy people in countries that do not seem to have a lack of food.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mw2nk
If the solution grows out of the hysterical side of this movement, people will go hungry.
I kill and butcher my own meat; raise my own eggs; and grow my own vegetables. By taking responsibility for the quality of the food I eat, I greatly reduce the threat posed by commercially raised and processed food.
If consumers become responsible, they can shape the food marketplace. Then "the movement" can focus on the "dirty dozen" offenses...like marketing bottled tap water as something special, "organic" labeling ... genetic engineering of plants & animals, bad feed, bad feed lot conditions and so on....
Meat, dairy products and sugar are killers! The meat and dairy industries will of course tell you differently and that we can't get the protein we need unless we eat meat and drink cows milk, but this is, quite simply, a bold faced LIE! Protein can be found in a multitude of foods.
Eating meat is responsible for many types of cancers, heart disease, and a host of other serious problems and studies continue to prove this to be true.
We are a nation addicted to sugar. We eat the cow and guzzle her milk. Try to find a food product at the store that does not have high fructose corn syrup ... almost impossible! Is it any wonder that childhood obesity has doubled in the last few years?
We need health care reform, in part, due to the fact that most people in this country eat so very poorly, basing their choice of foods entirely on the taste with little/no regard for what all this processed food is doing to their bodies.
Halloween is this weekend. I shudder to think of how much sugar these poor kids are going to take in this weekend and I'm sorry to say, the parents are to blame, not the kids!
Eat fruit, vegetables, whole grains and nuts! This has been my diet for some years now and I feel so much better, have lost weight and have a lot more energy!
Thank you. I think I understand the "green movement" now. It seems like it is a bunch of Communists that want to control every area of other people's life. No, let's not regulate people's food. Mind your own business.
If we did not already have food regulation (understaffed and underfunded as it is), you wouldnt last a year without getting seriously ill from some contamination. No regulations??
Have you forgotten the chinese petfood scandal, the lead in toys, the cardboard in foods?
If you have to shop for your foods, better pray that it has been regulated and inspected.
In this country where you can be easily penalized for all sorts of silly stuff, why not penalize the people who will cost the insurance the most. When I see the many children that are obese, then I wonder what if the parents get to pay a obesity fine, like smokers are already paying into a health fund by tax on cigarettes, then we either add a tax on all "bad' foods, or have people pay their premiums according to their weight.
There is a lot of bad food in this country, but it is in other countries too, with one exception that I know of and that is High Fructose Corn Syrup. I do not want to make a case for or against HFC, rather I like to make a case to why people are overweight.
Maybe having side walks and functional playgrounds, bike to school instead of buses, and bring back a normal relationship to food. Americans are obsessed with food, either way, the skinny ones or the fat ones. Food is energy, no more no less, and we need to eat, and if we eat in moderation with enough physical activity in our life then that should be the end of the discussion. It is a cultural thing, not just fast food.
I'd rather make fresh food cheaper and easier to get than worry about putting penalties on other food. To do that you could remove all taxes related to non processed food. Or maybe subsidize small local farmers instead of the huge corn and soy growers so they would be able to compete with the imported cheap labor.
At some point it would be nice if one of these "experts" on what is wrong with food production in this country would casually mention that farmers are people too, and while we realize how important it is to produce food for the consumer, it is also our job(and a darned important one at that) and at the end of the day, we also need to make money at our job, because we have bills to pay too. It doesn't matter if we grow vegetables or milk cows, whether you consider our farms to be "family", "organic" or "factory" we farm the way we do because in our society the least cost producer wins, and just like all of you we have taxes to pay(real estate, income, sales, self-employment) must pay our own health insurance, want our kids to go to college, and generally have land payments to make, along with the everyday costs of running a farm. So, when you social engineers are planning how we should farm our land to produce food that is politically correct, try to remember we are not serfs as in days of old, but regular Americans who would like to have some degree of financial security in our lives. Judging by the long lines for food in this nation, obviously we don't know what we are doing, and really need help from all you non-farmers to explain how we can feed the world with just organic beans and good intentions.
I think the idea of the post wasn't a general attack on all farmers, rather just dangerous farming practices. You make a good point about least cost winning. Right now, the dangerous practices are the least cost. If we eliminate the cheap, unhealthy food, then farmers who grow healthy food won't have to compete against them. This should be a good thing for conscientious farmers.
It's not social engineering or "political correctness". It's about health and safety.
Mr. Cesa is 100% right on! Health care cannot be helped in its bloated state UNTIL food is reformed too. But he gets way off base by focusing JUST on animals and caged chickens. The bigger problem is Big Agribusiness and Big Food Manufacturer that is allowed by the FDA to pump out chemical 'food' with labels that don't tell the whole story. They are allowed to put high fructose corn syrup in everything, allow Gluten in 'gluten free' foods, allow allergens in a product not to be labeled if they come from a 3rd source, not label ALL things contained in food, not tell us if the product is Genetically Modified or Irradiated, not tell us where beef and other meats come from, allow raw ingredients to be imported from China and not tell us etc. etc. The list goes on-----and people are sick! But its all legal. And to top it all off, there is talk of taxing the consumers for their bad food choices. This makes no sense----allow the Big Food to make toxic 'food' that is legal according to the FDA, but then tax the consumer for actually purchasing and consuming that food known to make us sick?! Yes----healthcare cannot and will never be 'fixed' until the Big Food stops being able to lobby for their pockets and People come before Corporate Profits.
I think what this country needs is a very well organized consumer protection group. Of course that is the last thing corporate people want to see. I have to search high and low for information, and sometimes think, why is there not one agency that will expose the wrongs of the food industry and then gather the people who will turn activists to make things better (right)...
Finally, a good article about the horrors of the food industry. Can you please write one about High Fructose Corn Syrup? HFCS is processed by the liver and like alcohol over powers the liver preventing it from working properly. With sufficient consumption, HFCS can lead to cirrhosis of the liver. I is one of the main causes of obesity and with children drinking 64 oz sodas, perhaps the main cause. Then there's aspartame - the poison that sweetens over 7000 sugar free items. This poison was originally brought to us by Monsanto - the chemical giant founded by aliens to wipe out the human race. For years the FDA refused to approved its use. Then Monsanto bought Ronald Reagan and he was elected he hired a retired president of Monsanto to head up the FDA and aspartame with all its heavy links to brain cancer was approved.
What most people are eating in this country should never be called food because the definition of food is a substance that nourishes the body. Unfortunately, education in this area is completely lacking and so people continue to buy what tastes good without any consideration of whether or not it will cause long term degenerative diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancer - which it will.
In Europe farmers use artificial sweeteners to mast pigs, so much for that one. They just make you more hungry, and look who drinks diet drinks, fat people mostly. I did not know that HFCS is damaging the liver, will have to read up on that , but we avoid it as much as we can. Lately I see more mainstream foods without, that is a good sign. For some reason sugar is so expensive in this country. I bake and make a lot of sweets at home for the kids instead of buying garbage, so I find sugar expensive.
One thing I always miss in the obesity debate about kids. Stress causes weight gain, and children are constantly under stress. Have you ever sat down and watched one of these "children TV channels", they stress me out, so much aggression, then these super loud commercials, wow, I do not let our kids watch any of those because I worry about the effect. Second, some of these computer games are very stressful also, and kids might play long periods of time. If they are not exercising as most schools don't offer PE every day or at all, then they are doomed. It is the way it is, and giving them a WII to exercise is not the answer. We are losing a generation here in my opinion.
America has a system of quotas and tariffs that keep sugar prices artificially high. While great for sugar growers I guess, it sucks for business and the public. HFCS is used in products in the US and not in the same products internationally, because of the inflated costs of sugar. Some businesses that rely on sugar have lost profits to international competitors, firing employees to save and shifting their operations to countries with lower sugar costs.
I have heard this argument about educating people to eat right, not to smoke, and drink in moderation for years while in the health care field. I also heard on the news yesterday that all fast food restaurants will now have to give all the information regarding calories, fats, etc on their menus. If you are sitting in a line waiting to get a big Mac at McDonalds, I doubt that you are care how much fat it contains. My point is education is a great idea, but it doesnt always work. I recently lost 30 lbs because my blood pressure was really high and I cut down on my salt, am eating more fruit and vegetables, but I have yet to quit smoking. The tax on cigarettes went up so I found less expensive cigarettes I know it is bad, but it is the only bad habit I have left. If my insurance company raises my insurance another $200 a month because I smoke, I will have no other choice but to quit, but is that really the way to go? I know younger people who's diet consists of potato chips, sweets, soda and other junk. and dont have a weight problem. Those people wont be charged a higher premium because they dont smoke. It doesnt seem fair because those bad habits that dont show up now will affect them later in life. There really isnt a good answer to solve the health care problem.
I feel you for the smoking. I tried many times, and the last time was with acupuncture. I am still smoke free since 1999 now. I do sometimes walk past a person and smell it, then I just think, mhhh, one cigarette and a coffee, but I am not going back, it is expensive. I saved so much money since then, because I still put the same money in the piggy bank that I used to put into the cigarette machines. Wish you good luck.
You must be logged in to comment. Log in or connect with
