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Farm Bill Should Focus on Healthful Foods 7/15/07 Sacramento Bee Op-Ed by Alice Waters
Published  Sunday, July 15, 2007
Story appeared in FORUM section, Page E4
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/272049.html

BERKELEY -- For every kid who eats lunch in a school cafeteria, there's a parent somewhere wishing the cafeteria would serve more fresh fruits and vegetables. But not many parents know about one of the most important pieces of legislation in Congress that influences what types of food farmers will grow and our families will eat. It's called the farm bill.
BERKELEY -- For every kid who eats lunch in a school
cafeteria, there's a parent somewhere wishing the
cafeteria would serve more fresh fruits and
vegetables. But not many parents know about one of the
most important pieces of legislation in Congress that
influences what types of food farmers will grow and
our families will eat. It's called the farm bill.
Michael Pollan, a University of California, Berkeley,
professor and author, says we should call it the "food
bill" because it sets the direction of the American
food system by singling out which crops the U.S.
government will subsidize with billions of taxpayers'
dollars. Every five to seven years Congress
reauthorizes the farm bill, and luckily for us, this
is one of those years. We have a rare opportunity to
rethink what foods our tax dollars should support, and
therefore which crops are cheap and superabundant, by
standing up as food citizens and voting with our
forks.

The farm bill emerged originally to support farmers
during the Great Depression. But over time, it has
turned into a system of subsidies heavily favoring
five crops: corn, cotton, rice, soybeans and wheat.
Between 1995 and 2003, farmers who grew these
commodity crops received an average of $14.5 billion
in subsidies each year, half of which goes to a
handful of states. By contrast, the farm bill offers
little, if any, support to the California farmers who
produce nearly half of our nation's fruits, nuts and
vegetables, despite the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's nutritional guidelines calling for a
diet rich in all three. The subsidies result in a
constant market glut of cheap corn and soybeans in
their most highly processed forms: high-fructose corn
syrup and hydrogenated fats. A more obvious result is
the unnaturally low prices we see on the calorie-dense
and nutritionally deficient foods that these
ingredients make so cheap to produce.

Between 1985 and 2000, the price of sugary and
high-fat foods declined by nearly 25 percent, while
the cost of fruits and vegetables grew by almost 40
percent, according to the Institute for Agriculture
and Trade Policy. Many public school districts operate
on a shoestring budget, and the cheaper, unhealthful
foods laden with sugar and hydrogenated fats have
become staples of school lunch programs. For many
low-income children school lunches offer the only meal
some kids eat all day. As we know, a diet heavy with
saturated fats and refined sugars has helped create a
national pandemic of childhood obesity and diabetes.
If previous farm bills had been healthful food bills,
we would have subsidized nutritious foods instead of
junk foods, and made nutritious foods more affordable
and more available in schools.

Healthful food can find its way into public school
districts. In Berkeley, the Edible Schoolyard, a
school-based cooking and gardening project supported
by the Chez Panisse Foundation, has been thriving for
10 years. The project teaches children healthy habits
by showing them how to grow and prepare nourishing
food, and how to share healthful meals with their
classmates and families. Two years ago, with the help
of another Chez Panisse Foundation grant, the Berkeley
Unified School District was able to hire Ann Cooper as
its food service director to transition all 16 of its
school cafeterias toward a new system. Cooper relies
on healthful, locally produced foods, and on
integrated cooking and gardening programs. Most of the
school food is made from scratch, and fresh fruits and
vegetables are available at every meal.

There is a groundswell of support across California,
and across the country, for funding to create and
significantly expand programs like these, which would
make local and healthful foods more widely available
in our schools and in low-income communities. Earlier
this month, half of California's Congressional
delegation joined together to urge the House
Agricultural Committee for major reforms in the farm
bill that increase access to high-quality, fresh foods
for all Americans, support family farms, promote local
food systems and protect our environment. The mayors
of 12 cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Des
Moines, Miami and New York City, also called for
investment in these priorities in a resolution
unanimously adopted at the U.S. Conference of Mayors
recently. In addition, several bills under
consideration as part of the overall farm bill, most
notably those introduced by Rep. Earl Blumenauer,
D-Ore., and by Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and
Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., support nutrition
education and expand the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable and
Farm-to-School Cafeteria programs, which provide local
produce as part of school meals.

While many key farm groups, legislators and the White
House have called for serious reprioritization of farm
bill funding to support these efforts, unfortunately
the House Agriculture Subcommittee recently voted to
extend current commodity crop subsidies. We now have a
short and critical window of opportunity to make our
voices heard before the full House Agriculture
Committee convenes this week and sets our farm and
food policy for the next five years. If the full panel
does not enact substantive commodity reform and fund
programs that could make a real difference in what we
eat, we will continue down this unfortunate path.

We must demand a seismic shift in priorities away from
commodity crops that contribute to childhood
health-related diseases by asking that our tax dollars
be used to increase the availability of healthful and
fresh foods, while promoting markets for local and
sustainable farmers. Now more than ever, we have the
opportunity to create urban-rural partnerships that
support sustainable agriculture and link California's
specialty crop growers with the need for more
nutritious food in our schools and communities. But
this will only happen if we urge our legislators to
stand up for a new and very different "Food and Farm
Bill."

About the writer:
Alice Waters is the founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant
and Cafe, and the president and founder of the Chez
Panisse Foundation.
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/272049.html
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