D.STI-related chronic disease is the leading perennial cause of death in the United States, responsible for more deaths than covid-19, even at the peak of the pandemic. However, we cannot come to define this as a “crisis”. In fact, our response is unconvincing: for decades we’ve been telling people to “eat better,” a strategy that hasn’t worked and never will.
It can’t, as long as most of the calories we produce are unhealthy. It is the availability of and access to types of food that determine our diets, and those, in turn, are factors in agricultural policy. For a healthy population, we must require or at least incentivize the cultivation of real food for nutrition, not cheap meat, corn and soybeans as junk food.
As omnivores, humans have options, but most of the options available to Americans are bad. Literally: 60% of the calories in the food supply are in the form of ultra-processed foods (UPF or junk food), which are the leading cause of diet-related illnesses. That means almost no one can make a “good” choice every time, and many of us can barely make good choices ever.
And it’s not enough to say “eat plant-based,” because most junk food is made from plants; The future of food, especially when you add environmental factors, centers on plants but minimally processed: plants in almost their natural form, in diets that resemble those traditionally consumed by almost everyone in the world until the 20th century. For that to happen, we need to address the workings of the entire food system.
Government mandates around public health, environmental protection, and even literacy can produce desirable results: laws or regulations about seat belts, tobacco, light bulbs, recycling, public education, have improved public welfare. However, such efforts have not been made in the diet, where the mantra of “behavior change” represents good policy.
Both junk food and meat are harmful, but they must be considered separately: the case for reducing junk food consumption rests largely on the fact that UPFs dominate the calorie supply of industrialized nations and that diseases Diet-related diseases (diabetes, heart disease, a dozen cancers) kill an estimated 600,000 Americans a year. (By contrast, at the current rate, Covid-19 will kill 100,000 people in the US next year.) Increasingly, studies show that it is not simply “sugar”, “inflammation” or “saturated fat” that causes these diseases, but rather a yet to be determined combination of factors inherent to UPF.
We can reduce junk food consumption quickly with better labeling laws, taxes on the most egregious offenders (especially sugary drinks), and limits on the sale of junk food on lower government property. All of these are being explored in various municipalities across the US and even in countries abroad.
While eating meat itself is not necessarily unhealthy, producing 10 billion animals per year, in the US alone, for consumption has devastating effects on our health and the environment. Negative effects abound: the astronomical use of land and resources, the generation of greenhouse gases, exposure and resistance to antibiotics, and the environmental damage and carcinogenic impact of factory farms themselves. Unprocessed foods from the plant kingdom are less expensive, less harmful, and in countless ways healthier than industrially produced meat.
Although few are in favor of banning meat, it is important to move beyond the fetishization of “animal protein” as critical to human health (it is not), and to recognize that meat consumption must be reduced in industrialized nations. . We can start to do this by making production less harmful (Recent Industrial by Senator Cory Booker). Agriculture Accountability Act would do this), which would reduce both performance and consumption.
Good moves here include restricting the loosely regulated use of antibiotics in animal production; reduce monopolistic practices and support small farms, as well as local and regional production and consumption; limit emissions (currently almost unregulated) produced by factory farms; and define and penalize the type of animal cruelty accepted as “routine” in factory farms.
Of course, meat production would also be curbed by encouraging the cultivation and consumption of what the US Department of Agriculture calls (without irony) “special products”: fruits and vegetables. The more land that produces crops other than corn and soybeans (mainly used to produce UPF and animal feed), the less meat and junk we will eat. This could be accomplished by first emphasizing subsidies to encourage the growing and sale of real food, and by making sure that food programs that receive federal dollars promote truly plant-based eating.
Rectifying the grave historical injustices in the distribution of land in the US, which have historically disadvantaged or excluded farmers of color, women, and queer farmers, and encouraging new farmers to farm well good food is also a fundamental step.
None of this is, as critics argue, a return to more primitive farming methods, but rather a recognition that a combination of modern technology and good policy would support agriculture that serves the world’s citizens, not their corporations.
The “nudges” and behavioral incentives so popular among economists a decade ago are largely impotent. What would work are rules around production and consumption, and the sooner we start to implement them, the sooner we will address critical public welfare issues related to food.
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Mark Bittman is a faculty member at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and the Author Animal, Vegetable, Garbage
