{"id":196,"date":"2018-04-13T23:59:02","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T23:59:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/?p=196"},"modified":"2018-04-13T23:59:02","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T23:59:02","slug":"health-awaits-those-who-can-pay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/2018\/04\/13\/health-awaits-those-who-can-pay\/","title":{"rendered":"Health Awaits Those Who Can Pay"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Pollan paints a comprehensive and convincing picture of the industrialized food system with his book \u201cIn Defense of Food\u201d. However, despite his references to economic determinism, \u201cThousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce…as industrial agriculture has focused its attention on…high yielding (and usually patented) varieties\u201d (116); he offers no tangible or actionable solutions to the problem of our deteriorating food system besides, effectively, \u201cvoting with your dollars\u2019. Economic factors\u00a0are not the sole explanations that\u00a0provide for our dietary woes but they are the ones for which he completely ignores the complexity of the potential solutions. \u00a0He says nary a word about food deserts or the very real price disparity between processed food and \u2018real food\u2019, the problems that preclude people from making change through consumerism.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The fact is that those ‘real foods’ cost more than processed foods(NPR)<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and if you want to reap all of the health benefits that Pollan suggests, then you have to eat organic because \u201cOrganically grown crops contain…between 10 and 50 percent more (phytochemicals) than conventionally grown plants\u201d (120).\u00a0<\/span>However, expect to spend between 24 and 59 percent more on those organics than “standard” ‘real foods’\u00a0(CR).\u00a0<\/a><\/span>Even if people can overcome the price disparity that makes eating whole foods attainable, nearly 2.3 million people in the United States don\u2019t even have access to fresh food of any kind(Tulane)<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>The country is rife with \u2018food deserts\u2019, where fresh food is unattainable for reasons of distance, lack of transportation, or both(USDA).<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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The knowledge that there are barriers to food choice makes it apparent that to actually solve our dietary problems a change in consumer behavior can only go so far.\u00a0 We must also engage in political action and demand resource equity; a point that Michael Pollan regrettably missed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Pollan paints a comprehensive and convincing picture of the industrialized food system with his book \u201cIn Defense of Food\u201d. However, despite his references to economic determinism, \u201cThousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce…as industrial agriculture has focused its attention on…high yielding (and usually patented) varieties\u201d (116); he offers no tangible or actionable solutions to the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industrialized-food","category-other"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/78"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":219,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions\/219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}