We are what we eat

So the obesity epidemic, or at least the fact that the average American's daily caloric intake has jumped 10 percent since 1977, is not exactly an accident.

Well, the logic of the food business and the logic of human biology and ecology are fundamentally in conflict. I don't think we can get around that. The American population is growing at about 1 percent per year, and we can only eat about 1,500 pounds of food per year. So if you're in the business of selling food, your natural growth rate would be about 1 percent a year. But Wall Street will not tolerate a company that grows that slowly. They want 5 to 10 percent growth as a minimum. So how do you get those kinds of margins? One way is to get people to pay more for the same 1,500 pounds of chow, and the other is to get them to eat more. And the food corporations pursue both strategies. Coca-Cola is the perfect example. It's a penny or two in raw ingredients, mostly high-fructose corn syrup and some water. And people will pay you pretty well for that. It's very hard, on the other hand, to make money selling whole foods, the supermarket chain of that name notwithstanding.

If cheap corn is at the root of the problem, why not just get rid of the $19 billion a year in subsidies?

People tend to assume that if you removed the subsidy the price would go up, but from everything I've been able to learn, that may not be the case. The subsidies we have are a response to the price collapse of the Depression. We started a system in which the government would lend farmers the value of their crop so that they wouldn't have to dump it on a weak market. They would hold it until the market got stronger, sell it and then pay back the government. It was a pretty good system. But beginning with the Nixon administration, there was a switch from loans to direct payments. For the farmer it seems like the same thing, but it makes an enormous difference to the system. Say there's a target price of $2 for a bushel of corn but the price at market falls to $1.50, you can lend the farmer $2 until he sells it at a better price or you just cut him a check for 50 cents. But if you're cutting the check, he's free to sell into that bad market and crash it even further. You're not shrinking the supply.

So if they made you secretary of agriculture tomorrow would you go back to a reserve system?

[Laughs] I don't have to worry about that. But the problem with that system would be making it work in an era of global trade. If you're artificially holding up prices in this country, then you also need a system of tariffs so other countries don't dump on our markets. The trouble is that Cargill doesn't care where they buy their corn from. They will go anywhere in the world. And even if we don't allow corn in, they'll just manufacture high-fructose corn syrup overseas. So then what? Do you keep that out?

Why shouldn't we be happy for a system that keeps food cheap?

To think that this food is cheap is a failure to see all the costs involved. The real price is not reflected at the cash register, but in your healthcare bill, in your tax bills, or in your bills for bottled waters after the water supply has been contaminated by industrial chemicals. There's an argument often made that buying the right food is elitist, because it is more expensive. And I'm not going to defend the prices at Whole Foods, because there's certainly profiteering going on in the organic food industry, but, in general you're paying closer to the real costs when you buy organic or local. Organic food is not subsidized in any way. And organic food does not put as much burden onto the public health system.

But, from the perspective of a consumer, buying organic isn't going to reduce your tax bill, it just costs more.

Yes, but I think most people could afford to spend more money on food in this country. There is a segment of the population, probably less than 10 percent, that can't spend more than they're spending now. And we need to help those people by designing food aid that points them to the produce aisle and away from the snack food aisle. But say we already help that 10 percent to feed themselves in healthier ways, the other 90 percent are spending less on food, as a percentage of income, than any people in the history of mankind. We spend 9 percent of our income on food, which is less than we spent 10 years ago or 20 years ago. If we could get that up a few percentage points, we could build a much more sustainable food system. So I think people just have to dig down in their pockets and spend more for food. We seem to be able to afford spending $50 to $100 a month on television and cellphones. I'm not saying people shouldn't have cellphones or pay television, but that it's finally a decision about what you value. And the elitism charge is often used simply to defend bad practices. I'm dubious about any situation where McDonald's can occupy the moral high ground.

But it's more than an issue of money, isn't it? I know plenty of people who would love to buy and prepare fresh, local food more often but don't feel that they have the leisure time.

It's true. That is an issue. It does take more time to eat well. People have to spend more time choosing what they buy and they have to reacquaint themselves with the kitchen. It's odd, to judge by the Food Network and the fame of chefs and the popularity of Viking stoves, we're obsessed with cooking in this society, yet we don't really cook anymore. Cooking has become more of a ritual than a habit -- a high ritual that happens once a month. But it's true that to get off of processed food, you might have to join a CSA [community-supported agriculture program], where you get a box of produce every week and you have to figure out what to do with all that chard or butternut squash. And a lot of people don't feel they have time for that, partly because of the $50 to $100 they're paying for cable television and the Internet. Again, it's a matter of priorities. The good news is that there's a great deal of interest in eating whole foods. Farmers markets are appearing and thriving all over the country. And there's a movement taking shape to source school food and other institutional food locally, which could make a huge difference given that we eat half of our meals away from home. The one upside to having a monopolized food system is that a single company can make a dramatic difference. When McDonald's got out of selling genetically modified French fries, that product disappeared in a year. I was once told -- though I couldn't confirm this -- that if McDonald's gets just 25 unorganized calls or letters on a particular customer concern, the matter will get on the agenda at a board meeting. And I think that that's exactly what happened with genetically modified potatoes.

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