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2009-10-20 issue:

The obese elephant in the room

Mediaculture

by Gordon Houser

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Perhaps you've heard a story like this: A man travels to another country and eats at a restaurant. He says to his guide: "This is good. What is it?"

The guide replies, "You don't want to know."

Robert Kenner’s film Food, Inc. (PG) pulls away the curtain, as it were, on where our food comes from. Maybe you don't want to know. But what you don’t know is hurting you and many others.

The film exposes America's industrialized food system and its effect on our environment, health, economy and workers' rights. It introduces us to Barbara Kowalcyk, whose 2-year-old son, Kevin, died from E.coli poisoning after eating a hamburger. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 76 million Americans are sickened, 325,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 die each year from food-borne illnesses.

We also meet a poor family of four that eats fast food regularly, even though it's unhealthy. The father has diabetes and takes medication. Meanwhile, they cannot afford to buy fruits and vegetables, a much healthier diet, because these are not subsidized like the sugar, fat and salt that make up much of our diet through fast food.

The film points out that early onset diabetes is skyrocketing in this country, especially among racial-ethnic groups. One-third of African-American teenagers will get diabetes.

Obesity is a major factor in health-care costs. "About 60 percent of Americans are overweight or obese," writes Sharon Begley in Newsweek (Sept. 21), "and their health-care costs are higher: $3,400 in annual spending for a normal-weight adult versus $4,870 for an obese adult, mostly due to their higher levels of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other conditions."

In a Sept. 9 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Michael Pollan, a consultant for Food, Inc., writes that "we're spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet."

"The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care," Pollan writes. But few are talking about food system reform, and the government keeps subsidizing an industry that pollutes our environment and mistreats its workers and the animals it kills to provide our meat.

"The government is poised to go on encouraging America's fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet," writes Pollan. "To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup."

Depressing as this sounds, change is happening, as the film points out. The organic food industry is growing, and many are purchasing locally grown produce and products and turning to farmer's markets and Community Supported Agriculture programs.

The film ends with some suggestions on how to change our food system. Here are 10:
1. Stop drinking sodas and other sweetened beverages.
2. Eat at home instead of eating out.
3. Support the passage of laws requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus.
4. Tell schools to stop selling sodas, junk food and sports drinks.
5. Go without meat one day a week.
6. Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides.
7. Protect family farms; visit your local farmer's market (and ask it to accept food stamps).
8. Make a point to know where your food comes from—read labels.
9. Tell Congress food safety is important to you.
10. Demand job protections for farm workers and food processors, ensuring fair wages and other protections.

Reader Comments

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  • Posted by GregB at Monday, October 26, 2009 at 01:49 AM

    To be sure, organic farming is part of the good news in food, as Gordon Houser states in “The obese elephant in the room,” (Mediaculture, Oct. 20). It offers the only way to produce food that also allows restoration of what has been lost to the damaging methods shown in the movie. Done well, organic farming can cut fossil fuel use for nitrogen fertilizer, eliminate application of synthetic toxins that can contaminate fields and water supplies, improve soil health by adding organic matter, and lessen greenhouse gas emissions by pulling carbon dioxide from the air and putting it in the soil as carbon. Buying local organic food in ways that support diversified independent family farmers (and their employees) increases community vitality, social relationships and interdependence that have been so badly damaged by large-scale, monocrop commodity production. But Jesus followers have profound choices to get beyond the 10 good steps Houser provides. Unless we, individually and collectively, sufficiently reward more farmers to will raise healthy food from healthy soil in biodiverse systems, they will keep on as they are. They will see no way out of the costly high-input, low-profit system of crops and confined livestock featured in Food, Inc. We can’t afford the ecological and health impacts of “cheap food,” even as healthy food costs more than the poor can afford. There are powerful forces at work to both prevent and co-opt a “real food movement.” How can God’s people use their creativity, land, power and prayer to lead in foodways that value human health, food access for every community and restoration of the creation given to all for the common good? ~ Greg Bowman, Bally PA