Who'll Cure Our Kids, Big Pharma Or Small Farmers?

by: Living Liberally

Mon May 19, 2008 at 14:15

Eating Liberally Food For Thought
by Kerry Trueman

Isn't it kind of odd for a culture that trumpets its 'family values' to treat its children like cattle, fattening them up on corn and soy by-products? We love our kids so much we've let Big Food turn them into cash cows for Big Pharma. A new study estimates that "about 1.2 million American children now are taking pills for Type 2 diabetes, sleeping troubles and gastrointestinal problems such as heartburn."

Of course, they're just aping their elders; as the study shows, we're the most medicated people on the planet. Apparently, our blessed way of life is a risk factor for depression, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, erectile dysfunction, and any other malady for which Madison Avenue can find a market. Are parents counting on pills to compensate for their children's lousy diet and lack of exercise? As Dr. Daniel W. Jones, president of the American Heart Association, told the AP:

"Unless we do things to change the way we're managing health in this country...things will get worse instead of getting better." Jones noted that "body weights are so much higher in children in general, and so we're going to have larger numbers of adults who develop high blood pressure or abnormal cholesterol or diabetes at an earlier age."

Conservatives and liberals can't agree on how to tackle this impending catastrophe. Remember Hillary Clinton's book It Takes A Village? Its premise-that we have a collective stake in the well-being of every child-raised the hackles of the Let 'Em Eat TastyKakes contingent and inspired a rebuttal from Republican Senator Rick Santorum entitled It Takes A Family.

What it really takes, though, is a family farmer to provide us with fresh, healthy produce. The more fresh fruits and vegetables we pile on our plates, the less pills we need from the medicine cabinet, as the New York Times noted last Tuesday in an article entitled Eating Your Way To A Sturdy Heart. And a study released last month by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy confirmed that people who lack access to fresh produce face "a significantly higher prevalence of obesity and diabetes regardless of individual or community income."

Living Liberally :: Who'll Cure Our Kids, Big Pharma Or Small Farmers?

But we haven't got enough family farmers to keep our fridges filled, as chef Dan Barber noted in a recent New York Times op-ed:

As demand for fresh, local food rises, we cannot continue to rely entirely on farmers' markets. Asking every farmer to plant, harvest, drive his pickup truck to a market and sell his goods there is like asking me to cook, take reservations, serve and wash the dishes.

We now need to support a system of well-coordinated regional farm networks, each suited to the food it can best grow...

But regional systems will work only if there is enough small-scale farming going on to make them viable.

Sadly, support for family farmers hasn't exactly been a cornerstone of any of our presidential candidates' campaigns.

But there's another Hilary who's made it her mission to champion local agriculture-Hilary Baum. Hilary's the president of Public Market Partners, a non-profit whose goals include putting real food back in our school cafeterias and supporting the small family farmers who grow that food.

Unlike the other Hillary--who's banking on bigotry to prop up her presidential prospects--my Hilary's a community builder, not a coalition crusher. Admittedly, she does belong to a dynasty, and one with ties to the CIA. The Culinary Institute of America inducted her father, Joe Baum, the legendary restaurateur who founded The Four Seasons and Windows on the World, and restored The Rainbow Room, into its Hall of Fame.

He could have rested on his laurels, but to borrow a Clinton theme song, Joe Baum never stopped thinking about tomorrow. So he founded the Joe Baum Forum of the Future, a seminar series that focused on the future of the food industry.

When he died in 1998, Hilary continued his legacy, organizing a series of historic conferences now known simply as the Baum Forum. These conferences bring together nutritionists, farmers, educators, public health advocates, chefs, community gardeners, greenmarket leaders, activists, and high-profile folks devoted to revitalizing our local food systems and feeding our children well, including Michael Pollan, Frances and Anna Lappé, Dr. Marion Nestle, Dr. Andrew Weil, and Alice Waters.

But the good food movement's got a tough row to hoe when the food industry spends some $15 billion annually to market unhealthy foods to kids. And the latest version of that $300 billion bit of legislation we bucolically call the Farm Bill-which the House passed last week with enough votes to override President Bush's threatened veto--continues to favor industrial agriculture while doing little to help small farmers.

This year's Baum Forum, entitled Schools, Food & Community, was held last month at Teachers College Columbia University and kicked off with a discussion of the need to teach our children media literacy. As one of the speakers, Melinda Hemmelgarn, a nutrition and communications consultant, noted, the food industry has a positively predatory relationship to our kids, using every trick under the sun to make kids crave their crappy products. We need to teach our kids how to dissect these messages instead of swallowing them whole.

Hilary Baum's prescription for our sedentary, overstuffed little spuds is to get 'em while they're young--put the garden back in kindergarden and instill a lifelong appreciation of fresh fruits and vegetables and the gardeners and farmers who grow them.

At last year's Baum Forum, I heard several stories about kids who were utterly disconnected from nature; one community gardener talked about instructing a child to locate a tomato plant where it would get full sun, only to discover that the kid had never realized that the light changes depending on the time of day. Another urban ag advocate talked about how he had to provide kids with plastic bags to protect their precious sneakers before they'd deign to set foot in the garden.

At this year's Baum Forum, Jane S. Park, a curriculum specialist with Sesame Street, announced that the venerable kids' show is devoting its next two seasons to reconnecting kids with nature. I'm not sure how powerful Big Bird is compared to Big Ag, but I'm glad to see someone in the mainstream media-even if it's only the Muppets--doing something to save a generation of kids who don't know how food is grown and think that dirt is, well, dirty. Because that's a really unnatural state of affairs. Almost as unnatural as putting your kids on drugs in the name of making them healthy.

Tags: food justice, children, drugs, big pharma, agriculture, farming, Eating Liberally, Living Liberally, (All Tags)

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Who'll Cure Our Kids, Big Pharma Or Small Farmers? | 2 comments

as a progressive (0.00 / 0)

put me down on the side of science.

"Small farmers" vs. "Big Pharma" is a false choice.

None of the above.

We're permanently "disconnected from nature" when "nature" is a construct that hearkens back to a long lost Eden.

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by: demondeac @ Mon May 19, 2008 at 20:09:22 PM UTC

Good science is helpful, but not nearly enough (0.00 / 0)

I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, demondeac, but much of what poses as "science" today is not real science, but biased research funded and manipulated by big pharma and agribusiness, and presented in the guise of unbiased experimental design based on scientific methods.

And even though real and unbiased scientific research can be very useful, if we wait for it to fully understand the incredibly complex and multivariate processes associated with human health rather than educate ourselves and our children to experience our own bodies and health directly, then we're going to keep moving--probably at an ever faster pace--ever more dangerously away from health and a healthy society. We shouldn't need a guy in a white coat with test results to tell us what's good for us to eat (do animals need this?), and the fact that we believe we do need it is a sign of how far we've moved from real health and self-awareness.

As one anecdotal example, my wife and I typically eat a pretty healthy balanced diet, including lots of fresh fruits and vegetables (much of it organic), moderate amounts of animal protein (much of it without hormones, etc.), virtually no alcohol or coffee, and only small amounts of processed starches and sugars. We're not "religious" about healthy eating, we've just come to recognize that it helps us feel good and actually feels and tastes good as we do it.

We just spent a few days in a situation where we only had access to the kind of food that many Americans eat every day (e.g., burgers on buns, chips, cookies, sugared drinks, etc.) It was an eye-opener for us. Rather than eating food that nourishes and balances the body, the experience was more like abusing the digestive system and the body in general in order to stimulate the taste buds (and further addictive consumption) with sweet, salty and tangy flavors. As I ate my second consecutive meal of this sort, I could sense how, if done repeatedly, this kind of eating will likely lead to escalating cycles of unhealthy eating and drinking, eventually leading to use of meds to beat back specific symptoms of that consumption, which in turn leads to further escalation of the unhealthy cycles, consumption of more meds, lack of the natural ability to recognize healthy foods and influences, etc.

My point here is that relying too much on "science" to tell us what to eat and how to live can lead to an abandonment of one's natural ability to recognize real food from packaged food-like substances derived from heavily processed foods combined with artificial flavors and preservatives in ways that lead to addictive eating and that serve profit-maximization goals of agribusiness, while also supporting similarly destructive but profitable dynamics in the drug industry. This is especially true if big pharma and big agra have any significant influence on the direction and interpretation of research results, which they very much do today, and probably will, even under a less corrupt political regime.

I agree that "nature" isn't a construct that hearkens back to a long lost Eden. But it is something we are all part of and that we can understand and harmonize with through a more conscious and regular experience of our connection to it. Science can help some in that process, but it can also do the opposite, especially if we try to use it to replace the direct experience of being part of nature.

I'm no expert on the subject of food and drug industries, and am not real clear on how family farms should best fit into the kinds of changes that are necessary. But they certainly seem much better suited to make a contribution toward these changes than big pharma and agribusiness, since the latter's priorities and entrenched interests seem hopelessly at odds with the promotion of healthy, balanced living.

Science has a role to play, but so does the process of re-learning to be a conscious consumer of foods. One of the benefits of family farms is that the people who run them are more likely than their big pharma and big agra counterparts to understand and experience this as they run their businesses and deal with their customers.

This ties into a broader argument about the distortions and false definitions (e.g., "efficiency") in our economic system and the associated jargon, but that'll have to wait for another day.

by: mitchipd @ Mon May 19, 2008 at 21:27:28 PM UTC

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