{"id":171,"date":"2017-07-01T17:02:12","date_gmt":"2017-07-01T17:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/?p=171"},"modified":"2017-08-16T15:58:49","modified_gmt":"2017-08-16T15:58:49","slug":"the-economics-of-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/the-economics-of-food\/","title":{"rendered":"The Economics Of Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cApparently it\u2019s easier, or at least a lot more profitable<\/span><\/i>,<\/i><\/b> to change a disease of a civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.\u201d <\/span><\/i>Michael Pollan<\/span><\/i> – <\/span>In Defense Of Food<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\"High<\/a>

High Fructose Corn Syrup – The arch nemesis of good health according to Michael Pollan.<\/p><\/div>\n

More than anything else the connections between bad food, declining health and corporate profits stands out from our survey of the industrialization of food. Positioning Pollan\u2019s \u201cEater\u2019s Manifesto\u201d in the larger context of the consumer driven mentality that pervades Western ways of living reveals yet another unmitigated intrusion of a market, ostensibly devoid of moral reasoning, into areas of life where it doesn\u2019t belong. Profit has apparently crossed the blood brain barrier, as any addictive drug does, to instill a dependency <\/span>in <\/span><\/i>humanity more detrimental <\/span>to <\/span><\/i>humanity than any other. One needs to look no further for proof than the near sociopathic ways in which Big Food corporate executives and their savvy marketing teams have manipulated a trusting public into eating their way to poor health, or to the ensuing phenomenon of a pharmaceutical industry on steroids, that generates unconscionable profits as a result. What\u2019s more, our democratic government has gone off the rails to such an extent that public health and welfare has become more of a commodity than a basic human right.<\/span><\/p>\n

On a personal level, I count myself lucky to have been raised by parents who valued a close connection to their food sources although at the time I didn\u2019t appreciate it. I remember the mild embarrassment I felt as a boy dropping off boxes of fresh surplus from our garden to neighbors, and the occasional thrill of illicit foods like Twinkies and Oreo\u2019s or Capt\u2019n Crunch cereal when I would visit a friend. I had it good, whether I knew it or not, and I learned early that I felt infinitely better on a diet of whole fresh foods than I did after just a few bites of any food-like product. But unfortunately, as Pollan points out, whether because of financial constraints, lack of knowledge, or lack of time, a huge segment of the population shops the dreaded middle aisles of the grocery store, opting for quick, cheap, and sweet. And the industry induced confusion about what to eat or drink fosters generations that get further and further from that simple knowledge that I was so lucky to gain as a child and closer to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This morning I thought about the world food system as a system when I picked up a tangerine adorned with a sticker that read: \u201cProduct of Chile\u201d. How a tangerine from Chile ends up on my breakfast menu is a political ecology topic of it\u2019s own, but I wondered about the Chilean worker who picked it from the tree, and about the Chilean truck driver who delivered the boxes of tangerines to the Chilean processor who in turn had them delivered to the port docks where Chilean longshoremen loaded them onto ships bound for US markets. I then thought of the US workers who received the fruit and distributed it, and about the people working in the local market where I bought it. Then I wondered who made the most money from that piece of fruit. Surely it wasn\u2019t the Chilean farm worker who first plucked it from the tree. History suggests that it was a corporation whose profits derive from cheap labor and questionable, if not irresponsible, environmental practices. The prevailing profit driven dynamics that enable these and other asymmetries to exist have to be addressed if real food – or a sustainable future – is to have a chance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Image source: “The Dangers Of High Fructose Corn Syrup” Daily Infographic, website<\/a>, accessed 6\/28\/2017, graphic.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u201cApparently it\u2019s easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of a civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.\u201d Michael Pollan – In Defense Of Food More than anything else the connections between bad food, declining health and corporate profits stands out from our survey of the industrialization of… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8,21,3,26,1],"tags":[43,48,61,60,33,81],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-citizenship","category-climate-change","category-consumption","category-economics","category-trade","category-uncategorized","tag-farmlife-eatinginheritance-whatisfood-food-nutrition-nutritionism","tag-commodification","tag-consumption","tag-foodlike-substances","tag-industrial-food-system","tag-political-ecology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}