Really, it’s just the corn and processed shit.
Skedastic, thanks for the information about body weight correlations, good to know. At a general level, I find it more interesting we’re massively creating incentives to eat badly…
I think EITC counting as demographic income is a bit bizarre.
“demographic income?” Huh?
Sometimes, when I feel like giving 110%, I have 45% of my daily calorie intake at lunch and 65% at dinner (skipping breakfast, of course).
This may also be effective for coaches who want to get 110% from their players.
Err, the way I look at it is we’re making it cheap to eat pretty much whatever you want. OK, perhaps not filet mignon for everyone, but compared to 50 or 100 years ago, when people spent a substantial portion of their income for food, and for less desirable food at that, food is much cheaper all around now, and even the poor can pretty much eat what they want.
Given a nearly free, limitless buffet table, some choose to pull up a chair and settle in for while.
Remember, in 1928, Herbert Hoover used “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” as his campaign slogan, because so many Americans couldn’t afford frequent meat eating (or cars). My father-in-law (now ~71) grew up in rural North Dakota, eating lots of turnips and the like. Few people, rich or poor, will make turnips a staple of their diet given a choice of alternatives…
There’s the complication that fatness makes you unattractive. Physical attractiveness has a strong positive correlation with higher income.
Face it, ugly people seem dumber, unless they prove otherwise.
Availability of food is a factor. In New York City, for example, many people get the food at the local bodegas. The bodegas and local shops do have vegetables, thank god. When you go into the supermarkets (walmart, key food, etc) there is a huge difference in poor neighborhoods and well-off ones.
Did a BBQ quite a few years back in Bensonhurst somewhere. I sent the guys out to buy steaks. They came back with BROWN stuff. I sniffed it and darnit, stuff was spoiled. One of em attempted to argue that it really wasn’t spoiled (he’s now a lawyer) with gems such as “Isn’t beef supposed to be brown?” Yeah, when it’s COOKED. They only relented when I offered to marinate and cook it, but I wouldn’t eat any of it.
[1] Discount geekiness from this factor - in theory if you’re ugly you should at least work it by wearing pocket protectors and thick horn-rimmed glasses.
Varied, nutrient-rich food is the goal for our society. Fat and sugar taste good for biological reasons. We have few defenses against cardiovascular defenses and diabetes because historically it was much easier to die of starvation than overconsumption. “We’re eating mammoth steak AGAIN?”
Then again, there’s the Inuits’ resistance to heart attacks, and the higher incidence of diabetes for Asian, African, and American (native) heritage. Starvation genes!
I doubt corn on the cob is the root cause of all this obesity either. And there’s not a government farm subsidy for “processed shit.”
Yeah, I know that High Fructose Corn Syrup is in a lot of things, but people aren’t getting fat because of corn subsidies. Because see, they also make it cheaper to eat corn in a healthy way.
It’s just grousing about the government for its own sake, with no logic behind it.
IIRC the point of the subsidies isn’t to keep the price of food cheap. The problem is that American farms are so efficient they overproduce more than the country needs and if they sold at fair market value without subsidies, most wouldn’t be able to stay in business - supply & demand `n all. So farm subsidies are meant to prop up the farming industry, not make the food we buy cheaper.
[Furthermore, agricultural tariffs make foreign foodstuffs and textiles pricier, which would be even cheaper than American goods otherwise. Curiously enough, developing countries with primarily agrarian economies are none too pleased with American farm subsidies - and European trade tariffs - which make their goods more expensive in foreign markets.]
No, the political problem with ending farm subsidies is when you try to stop any expensive government entitlement program, those who benefit from it scream bloody murder and put their legions of supporters, lobbyists, and paid congresspeople to work protecting it.
My question is: if we can make unhealthy junk food so cheap, why can’t (or don’t) we make equally inexpensive healthy food? If the raw ingredients are generally cheap and plentiful (i.e., wheat, soybeans, etc.), then what’s the problem?
Phil, I think the lifestyle changes of today cancel out the food being cheaper. In the 1920s, people actually walked places and lifted things for a living; they didn’t spend all day either in the car or arguing about obesity causes at their desk.
Jason, the lifestyle changes you outline (that I tend to agree with) do not cancel, but rather, compound the effects of cheaper food.
Presumably…
People have less physical activity than 50+ years ago.
AND
People can more readily/cheaply buy large quantities and wide varieties of food. This makes us eat more on average.
Less exercise + more food = obesity.
And I say this as I’m eating a KitKat and taking a short break - sitting at my computer as I do for many hours a day…
Shelf life. The more processed and chemicalized something is, the longer it’s shelf life.
Want to make it far cheaper for everyone to eat healthily? There’s a simple, simple solution: Move to irradiated foods.
Good luck getting that one through on the public, though. :(
(I’d love to be able to buy sealed, irradiated meats and vegetables. There’s nothing inherent in meat, and very little in vegetables, that requires them to be refrigerated in and of themselves. Instead it’s all about fresh foods providing a great breeding ground for bacteria coupled with the fact that cold retards metabolic processes of bacteria and therefore slows the growth to preserve viable shelf life for these products. If we irradiate the bacteria so they’re simply not present, the potential for food preservation is immense. But people still get twitchy at the mention of radiation.)
Yeah, I’m on a crusade to ban this stuff from my family’s diet. It’s tough.
It’s easy enough to dodge the obvious stuff like soda, but then you walk into the hidden pitfalls like vanilla wafers, to which I am addicted.
It’s not the root of all dietary evil, but it’s certainly a contributing factor.
I admit that I have an immediate recoil at blaming the government for yet another issue: I’m more anti-government than most people here, but
poor people are fat because of the government just has an emotive “ah, not another let’s blame someone else” reaction for me. Not saying I’m right or wrong in that, just admitting my bias.
That said, when we were poor and had very little money, my wife and I bought cheap meat (typically chicken) and veggies and made them stretch. One meal was the next day’s soup or stew. We considered chips and Ding Dongs (my faves) luxuries, not because of price but because we didn’t consider them as substitutes for meat and real food, no matter what their price. We also planted some veggies in the back yard.
You can buy a pork roast for 0.99 a pound, and make several meals from it. I don’t think people buy potato chips instead of a chicken or pork roast because they can afford a pound of potato chips for dinner and not the meat or green beans.
All that said on this correlation - I DO believe that much of the government subsidies, such as the slimy deals they do with Florida sugar barons, are some of the lower levels of slime politics in Washington. There’s a reason so many of those were attached to the Iraq funding bill.
That’s an interesting argument, since farm subsidies exist to keep prices up high enough to support farmers. No subsidies = flood the market with food = price collapse = ol’ Jimmy Joe Bob loses the farm.
What they outta do is pay those subsidies on the requirement that the subsidized farmers grow carbon-sink plants like grass and hay, bundle that shit up, and just toss it into the ocean or something. But anyways…
Farm subsidies exist to keep the price farmers receive up, increasing production, and driving the price consumers pay down. Ending subsidies would reduce production, decrease the price farmers receive, and increase the price consumers pay.
If I recall correctly, the structure of farm subsidies was changed under Nixon. It used to be that farmers were paid to not plant crops, to keep supply tight and prop up prices, but it has been changed so that the government instead pays them to grow crops, giving farmers an incentive to grow as much food as possible. From Wikipedia:
You guys are both right. I mixed up the old and new “versions” of subsidies into one post. Shorry! The end result, in any case, is that they are designed to prop up farmers because we don’t want ol’ Jimmy Joe Bob to lost the farm. Of course, these days Jimmy Joe Bob is really Corn Conglomeration Inc. so government is really propping up shoddy businesses instead of actual people.