In my last column, I looked at the shortfalls of Michelle Obama’s new “Let’s Move” campaign to end childhood obesity and the problems it poses regarding body image issues. This week I’m going to use the campaign as a springboard into what I feel is an even more dire issue: what lies at the heart of the obesity problem — our broken food system.
Contrary to Michelle Obama’s laments in her video on the Let’s Move campaign’s Web site, parents aren’t struggling to feed their children healthy meals simply because they don’t have time to cook dinner. Americans (and, likewise, Americanizing nations) are becoming obese because our food system is in the hands of a few powerful corporations that produce sugary, fatty, processed foods that lack high nutritional standards but are cheap and therefore most appealing to consumers. People are now spending more of their income on medications to deal with obesity-related illness and less on wholesome food that would have prevented them from becoming ill to begin with.
The way I see it, when corporations like Tyson or Kraft say, “Jump!,” the USDA asks, “How high?” In fact, I used to blame the problems with our food system entirely on government agencies like the USDA. But after learning more and recently speaking with Kathy Dozer, a representative from the National Family Farm Coalition, I’ve learned it is not government subsidies of commodity crops like corn and soybeans (read: high fructose corn syrup, oils used in processed food and cheaper, calorically-dense livestock feed) that are really to blame. These commodity subsidies were only ever started because a few huge agribusinesses were able to control prices, which forces farmers to rely on help from the government in order to survive.
This power structure explains why poverty and obesity often go hand-in-hand in America. One example of this is how the poorest families are encouraged to eat free and reduced-price school lunches. Therefore, it makes sense to focus on the National School Lunch Program as one of the most significant causes of childhood obesity in America.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, recently provided evidence for this with a study where she found that students who ate public school lunch gained more weight after starting school than students who brown bagged their lunches. Students who ate school lunches consumed between 40 and 120 more calories a day, which doesn’t seem like such a big deal — until you multiply that number by 180 days.
I decided to investigate the lunch menus at three local public elementary schools. I figure if you see one public school’s lunch menu, you’ve seen them all, because they are all subject to the same guidelines, requirements and subsidies. However, in an effort to be more comprehensive, I looked at the lunch menus of elementary schools in three local school districts: Montgomery County, Fairfax County and the District of Columbia. Around the time I started kindergarten, Adam Sandler released his classic musical tale of hoagies and grinders, navy beans, meatloaf sandwiches and sloppy Joes. Surely those days have passed, right?
All three school lunch menus I looked at feature the same foods they did 17 years ago: pizza, hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, cheese steak pockets — the gang’s all there. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Fairfax and Montgomery both offer meat alternatives — veggie burgers and meatless “chik’n” nuggets from Morningstar Farms (which is owned by Kellogg’s, an industrial food producer, and the reason why you’re now throwing your arms up and saying, “Well, for crying out loud, what CAN I eat?!”). D.C.’s menu appears nutritionally inferior compared to the other two. For example, I saw more fried foods than baked in the D.C. schools, and every day featured meat, no doubt filled with plenty of growth hormones. I can’t help but think that has a lot to do with D.C.’s lunch price being over $1 cheaper than Fairfax and Montgomery Counties’ $2.65.
I decided to also look at the lunch menu of a local private school: the Sidwell Friends School, that Sasha and Malia Obama attend. The Obamas have come under fire for sending their daughters to a private school to the tune of just under $30,000 per child per year, while students in D.C. public schools struggle on all sorts of fronts. My suspicions were realized: Sidwell’s menu today features, “celery stuffed with cream cheese and raisins, chicken and broccoli Asian sauté, bok choy, steamed rice and local apple slices” — sounds healthier than pepperoni pizza and canned peaches. Can you smell the inequality?
I’m not knocking Sidwell or the Obamas. I would send my children to a private school too if I were them. We just need public schools to be able to offer quality food like private ones can. In fact, as AU students, we are also fortunate to attend a university whose dining program is run by one of the more sustainable, socially-conscious management companies in the country, Bon Appetit. How can we extend this nutritious food to public schools as well?
Obama’s campaign mentions two actions to improve public school lunches: reauthorizing the Child Nutrition Act and doubling the number of schools participating in the Healthier U.S. School Challenge. In my opinion, both of these measures would be akin to putting a Band-Aid on this problem without actually dealing with the cause of it.
Reforming our farming policies would actually help us to do this. If the USDA incentivized biodiversity instead of monoculture commodity crops, it would encourage farmers to grow more fruits and vegetables, and help to end our obsession with high-fructose corn syrup and processed foods created using corn and soy surpluses. We should also move away from free trade agricultural policies, which encourage agribusinesses to buy crops from countries with poor environmental standards and labor conditions, and move more toward food sovereignty and local, domestic farmer support. Cafeterias at schools and other institutions could also be funded and provided infrastructure to allow them to purchase foods from regional farmers. These initiatives would pave the way for healthier, more sustainable food for America’s children and help to combat the obesity epidemic throughout the country, even in the poorest areas. Some experts are saying that, for the first time in history, parents in this country will live longer lives than their children due to obesity-related illness. Let’s prove those experts wrong.
I understand all of these overwhelming facts offer little advice about what we can do on a personal level to help combat this crisis. Next time, I’ll wrap up this series by looking at ways we can use our power as consumers to take back our food and our health.
You can reach this columnist at kbarrett@theeagleonline.com.
