Seriously, how did we even get here? We seemed to be doing pretty okay for ourselves, at least as okay as we could for our respective eras given the limited resources and technology. Where did it all go wrong? This may be a contentious statement (it is) — but we can attribute this nutritional downfall to a time period that actually ruined a lot of things by making it all harder, better, faster, stronger — the 1980's. (I'm sorry.)
Why do we still care about the 80's? At least to the extent that we're still letting a past era of perms, neon, and disco dictate what we're putting on our plates? We certainly can't be feeling that nostalgic. Then again, maybe.
The thing that we already know but have a weirdly hard time accepting is that marketing has an uncomfortably powerful hold over us. I know I'm not telling you anything new. How and why do we even let this happen? It's actually pretty simple — back in the 1980s, when Regan was elected, a little something called deregulation of food marketing occurred. This meant there was less monitoring of really important shit like health claims and dietary supplements; then things really went downhill with the erosion of FDA funding and authority. Society actually changed in ways most people didn't even notice. So let's backtrack, shall we?
According to Marion Nestle, PhD. MPH., it all comes down to personal responsibility vs. social responsibility. We need to understand our food systems — from production to consumption.
The trajectory goes: Agriculture --> Food --> Nutrition --> Public Health
We can't even begin to explain the difficulty with managing weight without understanding how agriculture works in this country, as well as the social environment.
So back to ~deregulation~. In the 1970s, we actually paid farmers not to grow more food, to keep fields fallow, and conserve lands. Then at the brink of the '80s, that all changed. Farmers were then told that their subsidies would depend on the amount of food they grew. And you know what? Farmers are goddamn smart. They started growing more food to take advantage (I mean can you blame them?), and the result was mountains of corn and soy beans, which led to an increase of calories in the food supply. And if you've been following this very disjointed economics lesson, great surplus makes the food industry very competitive in an environment of too many calories.
Prior to the early 1980s, Wall Street valued corporations for their ability to produce long-term, but slow returns on investments. But then the shareholder value movement that began in the 1980s put pressure on corporations to increase returns to investors — immediate returns, even. This forced corporations to grow, so now not only did they have to make a profit, but they had to grow that profit.
As a result, food became incredibly cheap and there was so much more of it — everywhere. People just started eating more and eating out more. And as became apparent, what ended up being cheaper were the less healthy foods — after all, it's about what the government supports and doesn't support. Now this didn't happen deliberately; it occurred as collateral damage. The way our food system works is that it encourages people to eat more than is good for them and more than they need.
Finally, after some of our MVP health advocates made a big enough fuss to make just the tiniest dent in public policy, companies realized that they needed to change their products. But they weren't interested in making their products healthier. Oh no. Who has the time or money for that in a capitalist society? What they needed to do was find ways to advertise the healthiness of their products whilst fighting back against public health measures. In comes advertising to sell some of these products!
We're at a point now in which every company wants a health claim on its food package. Regarding weight loss and calorie-counting, one of the biggest misconceptions people continuously feed into (pun unintended) is that any healthy claim signifies that the calories are low. I mean they could be. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. (Though more on calorie controversy in another post.) All this said, it's always important to note that the goals of the industry and the goals of public health are not the same.
A quick point — climate change, energy policy, and agriculture are all food issues. Changing one topic will always affect the other. And the folks most actively in control of that narrative and how our society responds — the government. This is especially why we need official help defining a food vs. a non-food.
As food journalist Mark Bittman points out, limiting our right to purchase soda, for example, is a good slippery slope. One that will lead to defining which foods are nutritious and which aren't, and with that, which ones government funds should be used to subsidize and which ones shouldn't.
We need to remember that it's the job of corporations to maximize profits. For example, companies are continuously making it harder for farmers to buy non-genetically engineered seeds because that's just what's cheaper. Some companies even went so far as to prevent Congress from passing a law that would require genetically engineered crops to be approved by the FDA. Established lobbies can easily just pay politicians not to increase subsidies for healthier food. There's your sweet, sweet deregulation.
As much as we may want to think of these important elements in our lives as separate, things like food and politics are unfortunately completely dependent on one another. It's our job to take a little extra time, and go a little out of our way to bypass the flashing, sparkly, downright offensive trash the government tries to pass off as nutritious food or something we think we want and need. We're better than that and we owe it to ourselves to pay a little more attention.
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