Will Cheaper Fruits and Veggies Fix America's Obesity Epidemic?
- Food Policy ·
- Grocers ·
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It's hard to ignore the numbers on those shiny, plastic tags: Fresh fruits and veggies carry conspicuously higher price tags than the processed foods that fill grocery stores' middle aisles. But are higher costs what keeps folks from purchasing produce?
Lawmakers think so. In a 15-month experiment, a new federal initiative will offer some Massachusetts food stamps recipients a discount on fresh fruits and vegetables. Organizers hope to learn whether cost operates as a powerful disincentive (or incentive) to choose healthy foods over boxed, processed meals and snacks. But while well-intentioned and maybe even helpful, this plan is just another program that addresses an effect rather than the cause of America's biggest food problems.
Beginning next fall, several thousand participants in the food stamp program, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), living in Western Massachusetts will receive 30 cents off each dollar spent on fresh produce. The plan is part of a $20 million initiative outlined in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) 2008 Farm Bill.
Researchers will track shoppers' habits, controlling for other factors including income, race, and age, according to the Boston Globe. Federal lawmakers will closely examine the results to figure out how similar incentives might work down the line for the entire SNAP program. Program coordinators and agriculture officials say they'd like the program to reduce obesity rates, operating on the idea that a large proportion of people cannot afford healthy foods (largely fruits and vegetables), so they buy foods with more calories, fat, and sugar, including processed and fried foods, snacks, frozen dinners, and more. High-calories goods often carry low, low prices. Leveling the playing field, lawmakers reason, might push more shopping carts in the direction of the nutritious food aisles.
But while the program puts forth an innovative idea, it fails to address the reason for the price gap between processed goods and healthy produce. Junk foods aren't actually cheap; our government just pays for them at the growing end in the form of enormous subsidies to large farms. The USDA spent $15 billion in subsidies to peanut, cotton, wheat, rice and corn farmers last year alone and spent less than one percent on produce farmers (the USDA recently announced it will stop reporting its subsidy data.) While this new plan would subsidize healthier food at the consumer end, I doubt it could catch up to junk food's history of subsidies.
The whole system is really pretty goofy: Through the USDA, we pay billions in agricultural subsidies for certain foods to be cheap and unhealthy, encouraging low-income people to eat that food since it's so cheap. Then to fight resulting obesity, we pay the unsubsidized supermarket price for unsubsidized produce for every food stamp recipient? Does this plan strike anyone else as a total misuse of money?
Julia Kehoe, state commissioner of the USDA department that administers SNAP benefits, told the Globe, “What this is doing is leveling the playing field for low-income folks, so that a healthier diet is within their reach.’’ But we must level the playing the field where it matters — at the root of the food system. As New York Times reporter Natasha Singer wrote yesterday, "...Despite individual efforts by some states to tax soda pop, promote farm stands, require healthier school lunches, or mandate calorie information in chain restaurants, obesity rates in the United States are growing...Unfortunately, behavior changes won’t work on their own without seismic societal shifts." She quotes Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: "We have made it more expensive to eat healthy in a very big way."
Singer and others suggest cutting or reducing subsidies in order to combat obesity. Others visualize a radical new system where local farms feed their nearby communities, use environmental growing practices, and pay their workers fair, living wages. These are the type of structural changes that will actually fix the country's wounded food system — not just stick a Band-Aid on top of the gaping problem. While price cuts for carrots, kiwis, and cucumbers might help in the interim, we need a better, long-term deal.
Photo credit: quinn.anya via Flickr
Jean Stevens
is a freelance journalist based in New York whose work focuses on issues relating to sustainable food.
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