Jill Richardson at La Vida Locavore has a diary. "Soda Consumption vs. Diabetes" with some interesting maps--generated from the government's a new online interactive food atlas--particularly these two:
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One of the most pernicious ways in which corporate well-being conflicts with human well-being is clearly visible in these two maps, the larger contours of which--the ways in which corporate food makes us sick--were discussed by Michael Pollan on Democracy Now! last week, here. He said a lot of good stuff, but here's what struck me most:
MICHAEL POLLAN: Of the money we spend on healthcare, about $2.3 trillion, three-quarters of that goes to treat chronic diseases that are preventable. Now, they're not all food-related, but most of them are. You've got smoking and alcoholism in there, and I don't know where you want to count alcoholism. But, you know, upwards of $500 to $750 billion we are spending to deal with the consequences of this diet. It's remarkable it's not a more central part of the conversation.
Actually, it's not remarkable. Nothing related to fundamental solutions can get anywhere near the conversation, because everything related to fundamental solutions is a threat to corporate profits, which makes it a target for corporate power. And corporate power likes nothing better than a pre-emptive strike.
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| What's remarkable, I suppose, is what a complete stranglehold corporations have on America today. It's a major part of what I call the American conservative welfare state, and I was going to write a big diary about it this weekend, but my "Conservative condescension" series sort of moved that idea back a week. Still, I wanted to say something about it, and this seems like the perfect concrete example of what I'm talking about.
The market theory is that corporations make money by meeting human needs, and the more needs they meet, the more money they make, so corporate profitability is a social good. This theory is at least 100 years out of date. Corporations don't make money by meeting human needs--or at least the ones with decent-sized ad budgets don't. They make money by creating human needs, and by meeting these manufactured needs. And often as not these manufactured needs actually conflict with inherent human needs--as when the food that makes corporations the most money is not really good for people to eat. And Pollan said something directly about that, too:
MICHAEL POLLAN: .... I came up with a rule to avoid all these schemes, which is, don't buy any food you see advertised on television. That is the only way to avoid their marketing cleverness. And that rule captures most processed food, because two-thirds of ad budgets go to heavily processed food. Only about five percent of ad budgets go to, you know, prunes or walnuts or real foods. So I'm hoping that your common sense will not-you know, will allow you not to tar them with the same brush.
Now for the wide-angle shot:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, step back for a second. What is it that you mean by the "nutritional-industrial complex"?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, there is a very kind of cozy relationship between nutritional science, as it's practiced in the universities and in the government, and the kinds of advice that emerges from that research, and the food industry, which does a very good job of taking any shred of new information like, oh, maybe fiber prevents colon cancer, and then go to town with really dubious health claims about it. A lot of the research is very tentative and it's changing, because people really-I mean, the great open secret about nutritional science is it's a very young science, to put it charitably. They really don't know a lot. They still haven't gotten straight whether we should worry more about fats or carbohydrates with regard to heart disease. So, but whenever they come out with a new finding, the industry uses that to sell more food to people.
And so, the great example in our own time is the low-fat campaign, a big public health campaign, really begun by the government in the 1970s under Senator George McGovern's leadership at-he was chair of the Select Committee on Nutrition. And they thought they were doing something really good, which was telling people to eat less meat and cut down on saturated fat. But this was seized on by the industry, which took what had been a critique of what they were doing and turned it into a very clever new way to sell new food. So they reengineered the whole food supply to have less fat, but more carbohydrates. And so, people binged on low-fat foods, like Snackwells was the great example. Remember that line of-you know, it was basically no-fat junk food that Nabisco came out with, and it was all over the supermarket for a few years there in the '80s. And people felt, well, if one of these is better for me, a whole box is even better! And so, people binged on low-fat food.
And since the low-fat campaign started, we have gotten an average of eighteen pounds heavier. So it hasn't worked. And the reason it didn't work was-well, there are two theories. One is, maybe the science about fat was wrong, which is increasingly becoming clear, not certain, but clearer. Or, maybe whenever you demonize one nutrient, you're giving a free pass to another, and you're allowing the industry to come up with what it always wants to do, which is another "eat more" message. And they did. They're really clever.
We really need to get corporations back under control. There is really no other way we can have a functioning democracy or a functioning economy that's not riddled with as many "bads" as "goods".
Right now, people who are high up in corporations hear this kind of talk, and they hear it as an attack on them. But here's a secret: poor people may be sicker, and may eat more junk food, but plenty of folks high up in the business world are living sicker and/or shorter lives than they have to because of the corporate food they eat. And that's only one way that corporations make life worse for people including top corporate executives.
I'm a big believer in over-determination and multiple-causation, which makes me a general unbeliever in magic bullets. But that doesn't mean there aren't partial solutions out there that can make a huge difference in moving us toward a total solution.
When it comes to corporate power, one such partial solution is incredibly simple: Require for-profit corporations to provide a public benefit, the same way that non-profits do. This will do two things: First, it will give corporations a conscience. As things stand now, the only thing corporations are supposed to do is make money for their shareholders. Require them to provide a public benefit, and profit-making will become subordinate to providing that benefit--which, according to the market theory I alluded to above, should not be all that onerous for them, since since providing a public benefit is what they're already doing in theory.
Originally, for-profit corporate charters were based on a such a model--if not explicitly so. Corporations were charted for specific tasks requiring more money than a single individual could reasonably raise themselves--tasks such as building a canal, or a bridge. We need to get back to that sort of model--but one that allows for more abstract forms of public benefit, the way that non-profits now do.
This brings us to the second thing that such a proposal would do: It would prevent the growth of corporations trying to do too many different things that really don't fit within a unified mission to provide a form of public good. How this would work depends on how my idea is implemented, but the basic point is this: When a business is well-defined in its purpose, that purpose can be kept in focus, and fulfilling that purpose can be kept foremost, with profitability resulting from achieving the purpose. When the purpose is not well-defined, then profitability alone will inevitably tend to encroach on all else.
So that's my big thought to go with this diary. And now for a couple more maps from the atlas, that I generated while playing around there.
The first shows the relative concentration of farms that sell direct to consumers--farms with the least impediment between themselves and consumers. The second shows the relative concentration of people who don't have a car, and live more than a mile from a food store--people who have the greatest impediment in obtaining food. The impediments are different, of course. But it's interesting to note how much the concentrations tend to be complementary rather than overlapping:
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