I learned this week about a Dentist in Bangor, Maine named Jonathan Shenkin who proposed that people should not be allowed to purchase soda with their taxpayer-funded foodstamps. The roars of indignation that followed his letter online at the Bangor Daily News were quite fascinating. Some people see the proposal as an effort to usurp free will when it comes to food. But author Raj Patel nailed this beast on the head when he said, “We choose at the end of the day between Coke or Pepsi and we’re told that this is free choice at work. But when you say to someone ‘Coke or Pepsi,’ it’s a synonym for saying you have no choice at all.“

In America, we currently have both a small amount of real choice and a huge, food-industry-created illusion of choice. Humans beings used to rely on hundreds or even thousands of species of foods to survive (and still do in parts of the world.) This was the reality even for our very recent ancestors, only a few of generations back. In the 1860s, there was a butcher/naturalist named Thomas DeVoe who catalogued the fare in a market in New York. (1) For instance, he described 119 varieties of wild birds, 66 types of fish that were found commonly (and 93 more that were found occasionally) and 82 types of vegetables. Chicken eggs were all different sizes and colors, making it difficult to distinguish them from the eggs of ducks, peafowl and guinea hen.  When is the last time you were able to buy a duck egg or a pigeon at the supermarket? Uniformity is the recent child of industrialization of the food supply and it has been commanded at the cost of diversity.

According to Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma, the hundreds of species we humans used to rely on has shrunken to just a handful since the advent of the industrial revolution. Especially corn. Mr Pollan said in a recent interview,

“I decided to do some detective work, tracing a handful of the most common foods in our diet back to their source in nature. I quickly realized there are several different food chains in America, but the biggest and most important food chain—the one that feeds most of us most of the time—is based on a remarkably small number of plants, most notably corn. This was a revelation to me: if you follow a Big Mac or a Coca-Cola or a Twinkie or a box of breakfast cereal or virtually any snack food or soft drink back to its ultimate source you will find yourself, as I did, in a cornfield somewhere in Iowa. Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the beef; is refined into the high fructose syrup that sweetens the soda; is shaped into the Fruity Pebbles or distilled into any one of the hundreds of food additives in our processed foods. Of the thirty-eight ingredients in the chicken nugget, no fewer than eighteen of them come from corn…. We’re even cornier than the Mexicans, who still sweeten their sodas with cane sugar and feed their cows on grass.”

Coke or Pepsi? It’s the exact same thing. It’s the same as twinkies and fast food burgers and breakfast cereal. It’s corn that has been spun into different shapes and colors. The only REAL choice is whether to eat industrial commodity food, or not to eat it.

Raj again;

“We are sold an illusion of choice when we go into a supermarket. We believe that we are living the American dream when we can choose between dozens of cereals or whatever it is that is on the shelves. The choices that we have in supermarkets are illusions.”

We are perched precariously on a long limb where we survive on a food supply consisting of very few species AND those few species are grown in vast monocultures that provide the uniformity and volume demanded by our industrial food system. But wait! It’s efficient, right? We have nearly 7 billion people on the planet that need to be fed. We need a model with this kind of output. Right?

Michael Pollan again;

“The Irish had a relationship with potatoes much like our relationship with corn—it was the mainstay of their agriculture and their diet. Monocultures are inherently precarious, which is why you don’t find them ordinarily in nature. When blight hit the Irish potato crop, it was decimated overnight, and a million Irishmen starved. We’re tempting fate by basing so much of our food supply on a single plant. A more diversified agriculture would be much more secure as well as healthier.”

We’re taking a big risk supplying food the way we supply it now. And it’s making people in the developed world quite fat (only 3 in 10 Americans have a healthy body weight.) AND a billion people are still starving around the world.

And it’s not sustainable. The planet is projected to have 9.3 billion people by 2050 and we simply don’t have enough fossil feuls left on the planet to continue our modern petrochemically-fertilized monocultures.  Coke or Pepsi? Please. Squabbling over having “free will” enough to choose one soda over the other is simply delaying the massive paradigm shift that we will have to make in the next decade. The one like the Irish had to make in the 10 years following the potato famine; one in which food security means more diversity, reliable local food sources and solar-based agriculture.

Of course taxpayers shouldn’t subsidize soda for low-income earners. But it’s a misperception to see that as removing any “free will,” because it never really was real choice to begin with. “Choice” in this regard is just another product that the food industry peddles; one with a marketing budget and team of spin doctors.

That said, you can’t observe a food (or non-food in this case) without looking at its social context. Raj Patel said,

“Our tastes in food are socially constructed…If you’re on a low income running from place to place, the amount of food choices that you have becomes narrow. You don’t have time to cook a good healthy meal, you don’t have income to make it to the Farmer’s market whenever the market is open and all of a sudden fast food becomes something that is palatable, and in fact necessary.”

Unfortunately, our current economic reality is that some people can only afford to eat processed, industrial-commodity food as it is artificially cheap because it is derived from subsidized commodity crops. Our government is subsidizing this food that is directly causing the obesity epidemic. Plus, 35.5 million Americans are food “insecure.” This means they went hungry at some point during 2007. But we no longer call them “the hungry” because most of them are now obese.

Raj Patel, again;

“In the past, we’ve been given to think that obesity is a sign of wealth… but more and more in the developed world, obesity is associated with poverty, is a sort of bodily indication of a lack of being able to control your food choices, because your food choices are so very narrow.”

By “narrow,” he means based on a handful of subsidized, commodity crops grown in monocultures. As I said, the only real free will is to choose NOT to eat this food. But this is indeed the rub. We live in the most prosperous country in the world and yet many people HAVE to rely on industrial commodity food that will eventually impair their health. They are trapped by it. Even the support systems in schools, eldercare, meals on wheels, hospitals and prisons support their charges with industrial-commodity food. It’s not at all surprising that food stamps support the food-insecure with non-foods like soda that actually delete some of the nutrition they might be getting if they happen to eat real food.

But it’s also not surprising that we are hearing calls to change this paradigm, because it’s insane. If we would like to create real choice for people, the first thing to do is to empower the social support systems to allow people to eat beyond the industrial commodity food system. Supply food vouchers for farmers markets and CSAs (where soda is not for sale anyway.) Fund farm-to-school programs and farm-to-table programs in hospitals, eldercare homes, Meals-on-Wheels and prisons. These are the programs that this taxpayer would happily fund.

Raj Patel recounts a story about a Meals-on-Wheels program in Oakland, CA that made the switch last year from providing industrial commodity meals for $1.65 per meal, to providing locally-sourced, seasonal, real-food meals for $1.70 per meal.

We will have to shed this industrial commodity paradigm one way or another, and soon. By exercising our free will now, we can avert a worldwide food catastrophe.

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