With Food, the System Is the Problem

A lot of public figures tell us that the way we eat is making us unhealthy, from Jamie Oliver to Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton. While these people put a strong and legitimate emphasis on personal choice and responsibility, it is important for us all to remember that our diet-related problems occur in a larger context.

A collection of forces — from increasing industrialization to the dominance of food science over common sense, with many more in between — have conspired in the last several decades to fundamentally change our approach to food and the nature of the food we're getting. It's the whole system that's bringing us down.

If you'd rather see the evidence yourself, you're in luck. Thanks to Marion Nestle for pointing us to a collection of academic papers on the connections between food systems and public health in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition.

The series of free-to-downlaod papers, published in the second half of 2009, is called "Food Systems and Public Health: Linkages to Achieve Healthier Diets and Healthier Communities," and includes titles such as "Today's Food System: How Healthy Is It?" and "Agriculture Policy Is Health Policy."

More than anything, these papers make clear that our problematic ways of eating are shaped by the types of food we have access to, which is entirely determined by the food system we depend on.

Jamie Oliver is insistent on the fact that it's the system that needs to change as much as the people's choices. "The problem that we have is that a burger's not a burger, a pizza's not a pizza, milk's not even milk anymore," he says in a video on CNN, referring to the fact that so much of our food is processed with corn fillers, preservatives, sugars, hormones and other nasty add-ins.

The good news, Oliver says, is that if consumers get fed up, business will have to listen. "The thing that is the real cult in America is business and commerce," he says. "The only thing that tells them what to do is the public."

So, public, let's get busy demanding something different.

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