The New Guard

Three Reasons the GOP Should Have No Beef With Meatless Mondays

Jul 30, 2012Nick Santos

Cutting back on meat is healthier for us and for the environment, but Republicans are more concerned about the health of corporate profits.

Cutting back on meat is healthier for us and for the environment, but Republicans are more concerned about the health of corporate profits.

Not content to keep Congress from doing anything about climate change, the GOP showed last week that it will also go out of its way to keep anyone else from taking action. The USDA sent a tip to employees to take the Meatless Monday challenge, a one-day-a-week commitment to forgo meat. They explained that cutting back on meat is more healthy (true) and more environmentally friendly (also true) than the large quantities of meat Americans regularly eat. In no time at all, this newsletter was picked up by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which stated that the claims about cutting back on meat are false. And from there, the Republican spin machine kicked into high gear.

The NCBA release made it to Senator Jim Moran of Kansas and into a speech by Senator John Barasso of Wyoming. It even found its way into one of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley’s more comprehensible tweets, in which he pledges to eat more meat to make up for “stupid USDA recommendation abt (sic) a meatless Monday.” They all claim it’s an attack on the rancher’s way of life, and disappointingly, the USDA backpedaled. To their credit, they kept it simple and only said that “USDA does not endorse Meatless Monday.”

This is an absurd controvery over such a small issue, but it highlights a larger problem: Republicans are once again burying their heads in the sand on science and health. So let’s start with the facts.

 Fact #1: Meat production emits an outsize amount of greenhouse gases compared with crop production. In short, meat and dairy are, as a whole, a larger climate problem than other foods. Red meat in particular has a significant impact, followed by dairy. Switching a little bit of meat for a bit more grains, fruits, and vegetables will reduce the climate impact of anyone who participates.

(Graph from “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States” – Weber and Matthews, 2008.)

Fact #2: Meat in moderation is far more healthy than the amount of meat typically associated with the American diet. Research continually confirms this. Cutting back on meat provides numerous health benefits, including a longer lifespan and reduced risk of illnesses like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

Fact #3: Skipping meat is not an attack on rural America as Cattlemen’s Beef Association is claiming. People don’t just stop eating entirely if they skip meat. Is my home garden an attack on ranchers? No. If we’re going to talk about rural America, then let’s note that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, crop production generates more economic output than livestock production. And while we’re at it, we might also note that crop production creates more jobs than livestock production. It’s not that one is better than the other, but by skipping meat, people are only switching from one very significant economic sector to another.

This attack on the USDA and Meatless Monday is ridiculous on every level. The recommendation appeared in a relatively small, internal newsletter for employees – they weren’t exactly screaming it to the world through a megaphone. What’s especially disappointing is that Meatless Monday is an apolitical organization. They aren’t advocating policy or suggesting that any of their recommendations be legislated. They make sensible recommendations for people’s health. They are not extreme in the least bit; they’re the very definition of moderation and are now being attacked by groups with extreme agendas.

One last thing – the cherry on top of this little manufactured controversy. Four United States presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt and others from both parties, observed meatless Mondays and encouraged the rest of the country to do so as well. It was seen as a sign of patriotism for all Americans to do their part. So when and how did we lose our pride and unity in the name of excess and industry profit?

Nick Santos is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow working on climate change education. He runs Environmental Consumer, a nonprofit, and works with the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences.

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Millennial Pulse

While the House Deadlocks Over the Food Bill, Millennials Offer Up Ideas for Food and Farming

Jul 18, 2012Rajiv Narayan

Republicans are bickering over how much to cut from the program, while Millennials want to make food accessibility a right for every American.

Republicans are bickering over how much to cut from the program, while Millennials want to make food accessibility a right for every American.

Last week, House Republicans voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for the 33rd time. Yet it seems they can’t be bothered to take on a hugely important bill waiting for their attention. While the Senate voted a surprisingly bipartisan 64-35 in favor of the 2012 Food Bill on June 21st, it is unclear whether the House version will now make it to the floor.

When the House Agriculture Committee returned from recess to release the draft version of the nearly 600-page bill, its cuts predictably outshone the Senate version. Where the Senate voted to cut $23 billion over 10 years of the omnibus bill, the House version would slash $35 billion, nearly quadrupling the Senate's $4.5 billion cut to food stamps in the process. This is despite the fact that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is now helping more Americans than ever to put food on the table. Nearly one in seven Americans—over 46 million people—receive aid from SNAP. 

The House may be having trouble starting the conversation, but students at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network are already well underway. Millennials care deeply about our agriculture and nutrition systems and are taking measures to make their voices heard.

Since the beginning of June, we've been passing around a survey that elicits policy values and priorities from young people all over the country on this issue. We've gotten over a hundred responses, many of which strongly contrast with the likely platitudes from floor discussions on legislation worth nearly a trillion dollars. 

The current discourse is marked by legislative inertia. On food stamps, for example, legislators are stuck on the binary of cutting the program and keeping it intact. The respondents to our survey see things differently. They see food accessibility not as a privilege, but as one comment noted, a “caloric right.” Therefore, discussions about food accessibility move beyond keeping SNAP from getting cut, and instead focus on how to optimize the dollars we assign to the program for health and wellness. One frustrated millennial writes, “The nutrition title has nothing to do with real nutrition. It is about getting people calories. Big difference. That needs to be changed.”

Writing on other issues, a student from Williams College calls for “diversifying food production to help include more regions of the United States and utilize land better suited to particular crops.” Another student from Appalachian State wants to invest in “food literacy.” A recent alumni of Linfield College ties together the disaster preparedness title of the bill to its subsidies title, arguing that it's important to "maintain a safety net so that our farmers feel secure and supported, but also train them so they can avoid loss to as great a degree as possible." We want your input next.

The responses we’re receiving reflect the range of experiences with food and farming in this country. Some have no background in farming; they come from urban or suburban areas removed from the realities of food production. Many of their responses move toward closing the gap by way of local food sourcing, amplified farmers markets, and food as a pillar of health education. Other respondents are steeped deeply in agriculture, many of them hailing from farming communities, some even desiring to go into farming themselves. These responses signal a sober pragmatism for the future of farming for a country of massive population and salvaging arable land from decades of agribusiness.

With ideas like these, how can our representatives manage to be so tongue-tied?

Rajiv Narayan is the Senior Fellow for Health Care Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

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Bloomberg's Soda Ban Recalls New Deal-era Nutrition Programs

Jun 1, 2012David Woolner

Despite conservatives' recoiling at food and nutrition standards set by the government, they have a long and important history.

Despite conservatives' recoiling at food and nutrition standards set by the government, they have a long and important history.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent announcement that his administration plans to ban the sale of large size sugary drinks to combat the growing problem of obesity has once again brought the question of the government’s role in nutrition and public health to the forefront of the nation’s discourse. In a similar move earlier this year, the Obama administration announced that it was issuing new rules for the nation’s subsidized school meal program, which would add more fruit and green vegetables to school breakfasts and lunches, also as a means of combatting the growing problem of obesity among our nation’s youth.

Most Americans are highly supportive of these moves and regard the school meal program—formally the National School Lunch Program—with favor. But like so many of the social programs that we now take for granted, few Americans probably realize that its history and its relationship to concerns over the nourishment of the nation’s children is rooted in the New Deal.

Prior to the New Deal, at the beginning of the 20th century, it had become more and more obvious that millions of Americans were suffering from malnutrition. This fact was confirmed by the initiation of the military draft in World War I, where it was determined that a shocking number of young men across the country were ineligible for military service due to their poor physical condition. Equally important was the simultaneous realization that widespread malnutrition among the nation’s school children was having an enormous negative effect on the ability of millions of young people to achieve basic academic standards. Armed with this alarming information, an emerging class of experts trained in the science of nutrition began to argue that it was time to instigate programs aimed at alleviating this critical problem.

One of the suggested reforms was the initiation of a national school lunch program designed to help lessen the problem of hunger among the nation’s youth. The idea of serving hot lunches to hungry students in the nation’s public schools was in fact not new, as many progressive-minded reformers had been advocating for it for some time. One result of these early efforts was the establishment of privately funded school lunch programs in a number of American cities, including New York and Chicago, which by the early 1920s had been partially embraced by their local school boards. However, it would not be until the onset of the Great Depression and the subsequent arrival of the New Deal that we would see direct federal involvement in the issue.

Like many of the locally based public or private relief programs that were in place by the early 1930s, most establshed local and state school lunch programs found it impossible to continue in the face of the crisis that now confronted the nation. The devastating drop in local revenue due to the drastic downturn in the economy was one reason; a second was the inability of the millions of impoverished students to pay even the meager “at cost” fees that many districts charged in exchange for school lunches.

The economic collapse also meant that a good share of the nation’s farm production went begging for a market. Moreover, as surpluses of farm products continued to mount, their prices declined to a point where farm income provided only a meager subsistence. It soon became apparent that one way to tackle the growing problem of malnutrition among Depression-era young people was to link it to agricultural aid through the school lunch program. In 1935, therefore, under the auspices of an Amendment to Agricultural Adjustment Act, Congress passed Public Law 320, which created the Commodity Donation Program. Under its terms, the Secretary of Agriculture was provided the funds and charged with the responsibility for removing “price-depressing surplus foods from the market through government purchase” and disposing of this surplus “through exports and domestic donations to consumers in such a way as not to interfere with normal sales."

Needy families and school lunch programs became constructive outlets for the commodities purchased by the Department of Agriculture under the terms of this legislation. And as the food used for school lunches would not otherwise be purchased in the marketplace, farmers benefitted by obtaining an outlet for their products at a reasonable price. The purchase and distribution of the food was assigned to the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation, which had been established in 1933 as the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation to distribute surplus dairy products, pork, and wheat to the needy. By March 1937, nearly 4,000 schools were receiving food and serving 342,031 children daily. Two years later, the number of schools participating had grown to just over 14,000 and the number of children being served had climbed to 892,259.

As was the case with many New Deal programs, the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation employed special representatives in each state to work with state and local school authorities, parent teacher associations, and similar organizations in an effort to expand the school lunch program. These efforts were enormously successful, and by 1942 the number of schools participating increased by over 75,000 and the number of pupils participating exceeded 6 million.

As a further benefit to the economy, many of the individuals involved in preparing and distributing the school lunches were employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The Community Service Division of the WPA employed thousands of needy women in nearly every city, town, and rural community of the country. The supervisory staff chosen to spearhead the effort to prepare and distribute the lunches was most often chosen from people who had special knowledge in the preparation of food. In addition, manuals were developed at the state and district supervisory levels, which did much to improve the quality of the meals served as well as to set standards for equipment, sanitation, and safety in the lunch program. A further benefit of the WPA’s involvement in the program was that much of the labor was provided without cost to a school district. As such, lunch prices were held to a minimum and more children were able to participate, with the result that the program expanded rapidly throughout the nation.

Not surprisingly, the onset of World War II had a significant effect on the school lunch program. The rise of defense industries, for example, resulted in a sharp drop in the number of people employed by the WPA, and in early 1943 the agency's activities came to a close. In the meantime, the enormous amount of food required to support the U.S. Armed Forces and the Allied war effort soon depleted farm surpluses, and the quantities of food available for the school lunch programs declined sharply. But by this point federal government support for the school lunch program had gained enormous popularity, both among the public and in Congress, and in 1943 the latter voted to authorize the funding needed to continue the program for another year. Similar laws were enacted in 1944 and 1945, so that the school lunch program continued in spite of the demands of the war.

Congress finally decided to make the program permanent with the passage of the National School Lunch Act of 1946, which among other things declared that “as a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation's children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities” the federal government would provide assistance to the States to provide “an adequate supply of food and other facilities for the establishment, maintenance, operation and expansion of nonprofit school lunch programs.”

The national school lunch program that emerged from the New Deal is just one more example of how the sensible use of nation’s national resources—including government revenue—may be used to improve our nation’s economic and physical well-being. In the years since the New Deal, however, the school lunch program has often come under assault from conservatives as too expensive. One result was an effort to privatize much of the program in the 1970s and '80s. As a result, many districts adopted “kid friendly” fast foods menus of pizza and fries while allowing vending machines – which dispensed the very sugary drinks Mayor Bloomberg is now limiting – to be placed within school buildings. Most experts now agree that this was a mistake and that, as was the case in the 1930s, it is critical for those in a position of responsibility to ensure that the food served to our young people meets basic nutritional standards.

Given all of this, it would appear that attacks on government nutrition programs follow the same pattern of our abandonment of the Glass-Steagall Act, our move away from proper regulation of the banking and financial sector, and our refusal to recognize the short- and long-term benefits of a massive infrastructure building program. We turn away from the common-sense ideas of the New Deal at our peril.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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The New Guard

How Our Government Incentivizes the Overproduction of Junk Food

May 30, 2012Lauren Servin

Americans need their tax dollars spent on providing food that will make us healthy, not food that's tied to the obesity epidemic.

Americans need their tax dollars spent on providing food that will make us healthy, not food that's tied to the obesity epidemic.

While Michelle Obama has been working hard to reduce childhood obesity through her "Let’s Move" campaign, she has done little to advocate for change in the Farm Bill, which is set to expire on September 30th. This is the main piece of agricultural legislation, and some believe it is the root cause of the obesity problem. Our country spends far too much of taxpayer money subsidizing the very foods that may be making us unhealthy.

Over the past five years, the Farm Bill has distributed $42 billion of our tax dollars to farmers, mainly in the form of direct payments or subsidized crop insurance. Those that qualify for these payments are mostly big commodity firms that grow such crops as corn, wheat, soy, and cotton, and they are paid regardless of crop prices. A majority of these firms are large enough that with the recent rise in commodity prices and without a regulatory limit on how much they can produce, much of the government subsidy gets banked as extra profits. The subsidies not only add to the national debt, but incentivize the overproduction of crops that are the major ingredients in unhealthy foods.

The Environmental Working Group reported that from 1995 to 2010, 75 percent of farm subsidies went to firms with incomes in the top 10 percent. Such payments are also further concentrated in the states that grow the largest amounts of corn and soy. In the same period, $167.3 billion was spent on commodity crops, of which $77.1 billion went to corn subsidies, with $14.2 billion spent in Iowa alone. All 50 states engage in some sort of agriculture, yet 8.5 percent of subsidies are concentrated in Iowa, spent mostly on corn that is inedible to humans. This corn is either fed to animals, used as fuel in the form of ethanol, or undergoes heavy processing to become an ingredient in sodas, candy, and other food.

And these food items have been linked to high rates of obesity. The real cost of foods containing unhealthy, commodity-related ingredients has consistently declined since 1985, while the consumption of such unhealthy foods has gone up correspondingly. From 1986 to 2000, the prevalence of obesity quadrupled from one in 200 Americans to one in 50.

Why did our government initially subsidize these commodity crops? Subsidies were a way to manage surplus food resulting from increased production needed to fuel WWII and to feed Europe, whose agricultural land had been destroyed. They offset and controlled the overproduction of these crops so as to prevent them from flooding the market. The government began paying farmers not to grow commodities, and they purchased surpluses to be placed in large government stores. By controlling production, they helped keep commodity prices stable. In the 1980s and 1990s, big food processers lobbied to get rid of these regulatory subsidies to maximize the amount of crops produced. Increased production was believed to promote economic growth through expansion into foreign markets. The overproduction caused prices to fall dramatically, yet farmers continued to produce more and more to try to make up for their losses.

Instead of trying to fix this issue through regulating commodity production, the 1996 farm bill, otherwise known as the “Freedom to Farm” bill, got rid of all subsidy programs that incentivized farmers to control their production and let the market provide payment to farmers. However, farmers became incredibly vulnerable to market fluctuation and many went bankrupt. To avoid an all-out disaster, the government enacted emergency subsidy payments to farmers, which were then made permanent by congress in 2002. This toxic combination of deregulation and perpetual subsidy has led to the overproduction and overuse of crops that we find in junk food.

But some of these payments may change in the near future. In a rush to impact the deficit, the “super committee” attempted to slash the Farm Bill by $23 billion over the next 10 years. A majority of these cuts, about $15 billion, will come from these direct payments to commodity farmers. But $6.5 billion will come from conservation programs and $4 billion from food stamps. While the commodity cuts look big, structurally the bill remains the same, with incentives still in place for farmers to grow large quantities of commodity crops. Programs that tend to promote healthier food under conservation, such as converting conventional farms to organics and capital for new farmers, will likely be cut. During the final hearings, some senators did voice concern over crop diversity, opportunities for new farmers, and conserving soil and water resources. However, there was no comprehensive proposal offered to address these issues, meaning they will likely be forgotten.

While some researchers deny the relation between subsides and obesity, there is no question that there are more cheap junk foods on supermarket shelves than ever before and that obesity rates are at a record high. It is also hard to ignore that the main ingredients in these cheap, unhealthy foods are the subsidized commodity crops that have flourished due to policies enacted during the ‘80s and ‘90s. While some subsidies for commodity crops are likely to be cut, the government needs to once again play a regulatory role in agricultural markets. Because of the unpredictability of agricultural production, farmers will continue to lean on the side of planting more as they take advantage of high commodity prices. Until there is regulation of such crops and incentives for the production of healthier options, the cheap price of unhealthy foods will continue to win out over healthier options that are less appealing to some both in taste and in price. We need our tax dollars or our debt invested in food that we actually eat, that will keep us healthy, and that is accessible to Americans of all income levels. 

Lauren Servin is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow focusing on agriculture policy and food security.

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Millennial Pulse

Growing a Better Farm Bill From the Roots Up

May 17, 2012Rajiv Narayan

A project that will fight the power of special interests and craft a truly democratic Farm Bill.

Dear Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell,

A project that will fight the power of special interests and craft a truly democratic Farm Bill.

Dear Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell,

Nearly half the Senate delivered a letter to you both on Tuesday urging you to bring the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012 to floor consideration "as soon as possible." Better known as the Farm Bill, and what really ought to be known as the Food Bill, this legislation is projected to cost a half trillion dollars over five years. With the current iteration of the bill set to expire in September, this letter heralds itself as a model for action, a "bipartisan way to craft meaningful, yet fiscally responsible, policy."

But the bipartisan way is no substitute for the democratic way.

While this letter says the Senate can consider the bill in a "fair and open manner," it is unclear that anything about this process has been so. A handful of legislators have sent members of their staff to constituent listening sessions, and many of these sessions are currently underway. But because the Senate Agriculture Committee has already released its version of the bill, the best the public can hope for (should their opinions be heeded at these sessions) is tinkering with a nearly finished product.

Furthermore, public comment is generally only sought from particular groups. While the letter points out that the bill impacts more than just farmers and farming communities, it still devotes most of its attention to the legislation's impact on agricultural jobs. Less than a third of the bill's budget directly impacts this sector. The lion's share of the funding (about 70 percent) is allocated in precisely the place where the larger public would have the most to say: nutrition.

This is not to say that farmers and what the letter calls "other stakeholders" are at odds. Limited listening sessions and strategic framing that targets one group over others are tactics to reduce overall discussion and debate, tactics of expediency rather than good governance. There's great benefit in having all the parties at the table so that they can learn from each other.

Students at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network are trying to craft this bill the right way. We're on a mission to build a Food Bill from the ground up instead of through closed-door sessions that only invite a select few. We'll be talking to students and young people across the country, asking them to share their values and priorities in an initial survey, and inviting them to participate in work groups with professionals and policy experts to draft a better plan for spending hundreds of billions of dollars over five years. Through this process we'll be searching for students from all regional, socioeconomic, professional, and educational backgrounds. Once we have their responses, our workgroups will outline a series of recommendations ready for discussion. Then we'll take it to farmers, policy experts, and budget analysts. Because our political leadership has not come to us, we're going to create our own seat at the table and bring youth policy priorities to them.

A legislative package so large that it will impact the food process from sowed seed to second serving deserves better than both sides of the aisle.

Sincerely,

Rajiv Narayan 

 

Rajiv Narayan is the Senior Fellow for Health Care Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a graduating senior at the University of California, Davis.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Using Community to Grow Low-income Communities Out of Food Deserts

Apr 4, 2012Emily Apple

money-justice-scalesAs part of the 10 Ideas: Social Innovation to End Discrimination series, a proposal to put food stamps to work supporting community gardens and giving low-income famil

money-justice-scalesAs part of the 10 Ideas: Social Innovation to End Discrimination series, a proposal to put food stamps to work supporting community gardens and giving low-income families access to fresh produce.

March 20th marked the third anniversary of the planting of the White House vegetable garden, the first functioning garden since Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden. The garden is an essential part of Michelle Obama's Let's Move! initiative that aims to help raise a generation of healthy, active kids. But while it provides an excellent jumping off point for discussing the importance of nutrition, it does not get to the root cause of the lack of nutrition across the country. Not everyone can have an organic garden in his backyard or, on an even more basic level, a supermarket that sells quality fruits and vegetables. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, more than 23 million Americans live in "food deserts": areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, particularly ones composed of predominantly lower income neighborhoods and communities. Before we begin to talk about the problem of nutrition in our country, we must first improve access to food for millions of Americans. And Michelle Obama is on the right path -- community gardens can be a powerful tool for improving access to produce for people across the country.

The problem of access and affordability is especially relevant in New York City. A study conducted in 2008 by the mayor's food policy task force concluded that more than 3 million New Yorkers lack adequate fresh food retailers in their neighborhood. Furthermore, according to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, there are an estimated 1.4 million New Yorkers that are unable to afford a full supply of food, forcing many to choose more cost efficient, unhealthy options. What all of these numbers amount to is that there are far too many New Yorkers without the ability to access or afford nutritious foods.

Recognizing these problems, Daniel Bowman Simon, who helped spearhead the White House vegetable garden, has now has moved on to helping low-income individuals and families access healthy foods through his organization SNAP Gardens. As of March 2012, over 46 million Americans were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often referred to as food stamps. Simon encourages SNAP beneficiaries to "grow" their benefits by utilizing a 1973 amendment to the Food Stamp Act that allows food stamp recipients to use their benefits to buy seeds.

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Simon's SNAP Gardens model is a great way to incorporate food stamps into the conversation on food accessibility. In New York City alone there are more than 1.8 million SNAP beneficiaries. However, many New Yorkers do not have the time to plant and care for their own food. Community gardens provide the space and infrastructure for growing food. All that is needed is someone to grow it. Most community gardens already have volunteers and staff, so it would just take a transition out of growing plants and into agriculture to grow food. There are over 500 community gardens across all five boroughs. Converting at least some to agricultural gardens would greatly expand access to fresh, locally grown produce for thousands of New Yorkers.

To accommodate SNAP beneficiaries, each community garden should be given a credit card machine with the capability to accept Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. EBT machines are given to eligible retailers free of charge by the state. This would essentially convert the SNAP Garden model from using benefits to buy the seeds to using them to buy the actual produce from gardens.

There is ample precedent for SNAP benefits being used for purchasing fruits and vegetables at non-supermarket locations. GrowNYC, a New York City nonprofit, runs 43 greenmarkets that accept EBT cards. In 2010, EBT sales exceeded $500,000 across the city, with some farmers reporting that EBT sales comprised as much as 25 to 50 percent of their business. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene also has a farmers' market Health Bucks program that provides a $2 voucher for fruits and vegetables for every $2 spent at farmers' markets, increasing the amount of money an individual receiving SNAP benefits can spend on nutritious foods.

Based on the success of GrowNYC's and the city's own EBT initiatives, it is very difficult to make the argument that those on food stamps simply do not want nutritious food. It is not a problem of demand. It is a problem of access and affordability to nutritious foods, including fresh produce. Instead of strategies focused on changing demand, the priority should be expanding access and finding ways to make nutritious foods more affordable.

There is no one answer to expanding access and making produce affordable, but community gardens can be a vital part of the solution, and it is one that is often overlooked. By using the existing community garden infrastructure we can grow a better future for all Americans.

Emily Apple is a sophomore at CUNY-Hunter College and the Northeast Policy Coordinator for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

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The New Guard

Six Issues That Should Make Progressives Care About Agriculture Policy

Jan 5, 2012Lauren Servin

At the heart of our food policy lie core issues such as national security, energy and the environment, and public health. We should pay attention.

At the heart of our food policy lie core issues such as national security, energy and the environment, and public health. We should pay attention.

Agriculture is possibly the most critical issue of our time. Our food system is increasingly vulnerable to complications created by risky farming practices, climate change, and instability in international markets. While the media covers sensational food stories such as Congress declaring pizza a vegetable or Michele Obama planting an 'organic' vegetable garden at the White House, the everyday American public does not typically scrutinize agriculture policy.  Rarely are issues of agriculture featured in political debates, nor do politicians use it as an issue to court voters. While politicians and the media may not find it as spicy an issue as abortion or gay marriage, progressives need to make this our issue. We need to push our representatives to ensure that our tax dollars are spent on the foods that keep our kids healthy, promote practices that do not harm the environment, and enact policies that contribute to our long-term food security. Because sound agriculture policy leads to a safer country, a better environment, less energy use, a diminished role for big money, improved foreign policy, and a healthier citizenry.

1. National security: Agriculture plays a large role in our national security. More people than ever depend on fewer farmers for their food. As of 2009, the 285 million people living in the U.S. were fed by 960,000 farmers, meaning that well under 1 percent of the population supports the other 99.6 percent, while they also export their harvests around the globe. Our most basic necessity is concentrated in the hands of a few and entangled in international trade, leaving U.S. citizens and the world's ability to feed itself vulnerable to oscillations in the global marketplace, fluctuations in climate, and large-scale crop disease.

2. Environment: Agriculture, specifically industrial agriculture, has an immensely damaging impact on our environment and is one of the world's largest polluters, contaminating both air and water. Toxic pesticides and fertilizers leach into our waterways, destroying river ecosystems and contaminating our drinking water. Animal farms are major producers of green house gases such as methane, and animal waste products are also a major source of runoff that creates dead zones in rivers by providing algae with abundant nutrients, causing it to grow out of control and deplete the water of oxygen, killing fish and other organisms that we depend on for food.

3. Energy: Energy usage and creation is also a major aspect of the agriculture sector, particularly in industrial agriculture. Such agriculture is a very heavy user of fossil fuels both as fuel for its machinery and in the production of fertilizers and pesticides. A study by the University of Michigan in 2000 estimated that 10 percent of U.S. energy consumption is used by the food industry and 40 percent of that is used in creating fertilizers and pesticides alone. Agriculture also affects energy usage through the production of corn for ethanol. President Bush saw corn ethanol as a way to get off of foreign fuel, but the sad reality is that for every gallon of fossil fuel we use to make corn ethanol, we get a gallon or so of product, making it not worth the effort.

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4. Big money: The inputs necessary for industrial agriculture require financing from big money, giving large corporations an upper hand and enabling them to harness large portions of the market. Monsanto, the big seed giant, is known for capitalizing on patented seeds and suing farmers whose fields have accidently been contaminated by their product. The other top two seed companies, Pioneer Hybrid (Dupont) and Syngenta, together with Monsanto, garner almost 50 percent of the market. Last month, farmers marched on Wall Street. "[F]ood has become a commodity that enriches a few at the expense of the many," wrote Kerry Trueman in her article about the protest. Large agriculture companies continue to control more and more of the market as they file lawsuits against small farmers, putting many out of business. Agriculture policy has greatly benefited such companies, as they have lobbied the government for subsidies and against regulating their risky patented and genetically altered seeds. They are pushing "the 99%" out of the farming business and ruining the livelihoods of family farmers across America and the world.

5. Foreign policy: Foreign aid also plays a huge role in global agricultural markets and in systems of farming around the globe. Our food aid program began when surpluses in the U.S. were high. President Eisenhower explained that program's aim was to "lay the basis for a permanent expansion of our exports of agricultural products with lasting benefits to ourselves and peoples of other lands." While food aid has saved many lives during emergencies, it has also flooded rural areas in poor countries with cheap or free food, which has undercut local farmers, thus creating a dependency on such aid. Now USAID is trying to rebuild the agriculture sector in many developing countries with the aim of making them self-sufficient. However, the practices USAID is trying to instill in farmers make them even more dependent on outside sources for their sustenance, as they are providing small farmers with costly inputs such as "improved seed," fertilizers, and pesticides. Farmers will eventually have to purchase all of these inputs every year without many government subsidies. Our farmers are able to afford these inputs as our government provides them with subsidies. Most governments in developing countries do not have the capacity to provide agricultural subsidies, especially to individual smallholder farmers, whom the USAID programs target. If such farmers have one bad season, they are left with no seeds, as the "improved" variety produces sterile seeds. The soil is left in poor condition, as the pesticides and fertilizers have killed many of the vital microbes that build soil nutrition. Many farmers, particularly in India, have committed suicide due to their lack of ability to feed their families.

6. Health: We are increasingly seeing public health issues in the U.S. involving obesity. Agriculture policy has played a huge role in creating this epidemic, as it influences which crops are grown. The food that receives subsidies has led to the abundance of cheap sugary and fatty foods, while fruits and vegetables receive few to no subsidies and as a result are more expensive. As of 2008, 34 percent of adults and 17 percent of children in the United States were considered overweight or obese, leading to an estimated health care cost of $147 billion annually. If Congress shifted some subsidies to fruits and vegetables, healthy foods might be more readily available and affordable for all Americans. Now that Michelle Obama has planted her garden, she should push for these changes in agriculture policy so that the rest of America can experience healthy food, like her and her family.

Those are just a few of the issues affected by agriculture policy. Progressives must care about the issues that involve our food system and look deeper into its incredible complexities.

Lauren Servin is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow focusing on agriculture policy and food security.

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Super Committee Can Reclaim Farm Bill as a Good Food Bill

Oct 21, 2011Rajiv Narayan

vegetables-150Why should a multibillion dollar bill work against good nutrition for Americans?

vegetables-150Why should a multibillion dollar bill work against good nutrition for Americans?

Every five to seven years, the most important cluster of legislation concerning food in this country is debated and reauthorized in Congress. For the past three decades, this omnibus package has been referred to as the Farm Bill. Containing 12 titles ranging from funding and regulation for conservation programs to commodity futures markets, the Farm Bill was last reauthorized in 2008 at the cost of $283.9 billion. Slated for reauthorization in 2012, the Farm Bill is now fast tracked due to the mounting pressure of the debt talks and the Super Committee. Most recently, agriculture appropriation committee members have been working on compiling recommendations for submission to the Super Committee by the October 14th deadline.

In August, Senator Chuck Grassley warned of the "possibility [of] people who don't know anything about agricultural policy being on this 'super-committee.'" House Agriculture Committee Chair Frank Lucas similarly calls on the Super Committee to "remember the farm bill is comprehensive and intertwined." Let's take a step back for a moment to consider the contents of the Farm Bill that committee members are vying to keep intact through the appropriation process. Of the $289.3 billion appropriated in 2008, $188.3 billion went to just one of the 12 titles, Nutrition. This title, which accounted then for two-thirds of the bill and is now estimated to occupy a 70 percent share, consists largely of funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as Food Stamps), food and nutrition guidelines under the purview of the FDA and USDA, and school meal programs.

For all its focus on establishing a food safety net, this bill is hardly as "comprehensive and intertwined" as Rep. Lucas would have us believe. For example, the USDA's golden rule for personal nutrition, MyPlate, suggests a relatively balanced share of fruits, vegetables, grains, proteins and dairy. But the commodities title of the Farm Bill, which provides direct payments in the form of subsidies to farmers, draws 15 percent of the bill's funds. There are many problems with direct payments, but the most paradoxical issue is that these payments actively thwart the nutritional goals set forth by the USDA. That's because the eligibility criteria for receiving these payments includes a provision to support staple crops, which include "wheat, corn, grain sorghum, barley, oats, upland cotton, rice, soybeans, other oilseeds, and peanuts." Further, this criteria places express "limitations on planting fruits, vegetables, and wild rice."

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Staple crops are not inherently unhealthy; they begin as healthy vegetables grown from the ground. But the overproduction of staple crops encourages their unhealthy use. Food policy critic Michael Pollan noted in The Omnivore's Dilemma that corn can be found in a quarter of all products at the grocery store and soybeans are found in 60 percent of all processed food. In these foods, corn and soybeans are reincarnated into their less healthier forms of high-fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated soybean oil, respectively.

Not only are these crops used frequently to buffer unhealthy products, those products cost less than their healthier alternatives. In a frequently cited study done by Adam Drewnowski of the University of  Washington, energy-dense foods (what you and I would call junk foods) composed of sugars, added fats, and refined grains were found to be cheaper than healthier foods. This study confirms our intuition about purchasing foods -- it's too expensive to eat well. If you need to consume a certain amount of calories to live, of course you'll prefer to buy the calorie-laden bag of chips for less than half the cost of a calorically-barren head of cabbage or salad mix.

While the farm bill allocates resources to funding food stamps on the one hand, it also incentivizes the purchase of unhealthy foods on the other. It now appears as though the back room appropriations are moving in the favor of subsidies. While both direct payment programs and nutrition programs are looking at cuts, a mechanism for replacing subsidy cuts with a new funding regime has already surfaced. Unfortunately for the food side of the farm bill, it's become increasingly difficult to advocate for change. In the past, the bill has been traditionally held to industry interests. Now the Super Committee process may shut out democratic input altogether if the bill is written in the coming weeks by a handful of legislators for the purpose of bypassing floor debate.

Because the farm bill is so rarely written, it's important to reclaim its status as a food bill. Even if parts of the package are at odds with the part of the bill that works to create a healthy food system, the latter still comprises 70 percent of the legislation. It remains to be seen whether the Super Committee process will allow some food for thought.

Rajiv Narayan is the Senior Fellow for Health Care Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a graduating senior at the University of California, Davis.

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Celebrate the 4th: Launch Seed Bombs for a Victory Garden

Jul 4, 2011Lynn Parramore

victory-garden-posterDig this: we can grow our way to a brighter future.

The Fourth of July is a time for fireworks, love of country, and, hopefully, fresh summer produce piled on our plates.

victory-garden-posterDig this: we can grow our way to a brighter future.

The Fourth of July is a time for fireworks, love of country, and, hopefully, fresh summer produce piled on our plates.

Gotta yard? A roof? A balcony? Hell, even a kitchen window will do. To celebrate America's birthday, why not take a hint from Eleanor Roosevelt and plant your own Victory Garden? During WWII, the First Lady urged Americans to grow vegetables and fruits as a means of safeguarding against possible food scarcity and also to boost moral -- she understood the Power of Positive Planting and knew that tending a garden is both uplifting and empowering. She had foes in the Department of Agriculture, who worried that Americans growing their own food would hurt the industry, put she pressed on. Result? Twenty million such gardens popped up during World War II, and they produced 40 percent of America's vegetables! They helped, oh, win the war and end the Great Depression.

In our era, popular interest in local produce and sustainable agriculture, plus economic uncertainty and concerns about food and fuel security have revived interest in Victory Gardens. The Obamas planted their own Victory Garden (the first since Eleanor's) at the White House shortly after moving in response to an organized campaign to turn high-profile plots of soil into edible landscapes.

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While the traditional image of a garden might seem out of reach in most urban locales, with a little creativity you can grow your own eats whether you live in Iowa or Manhattan. My studio apartment in Chelsea is sans balcony, so I can't exactly yield watermelons, but I'm headed to the Union Square Greenmarket today to find out what kinds of herbs and other small items I can grow on my windowsill.

And you don't even really need your own soil. There's yard-sharing, community gardening, and -- if you're feeling a little rebellious -- guerilla gardening or pirate gardening, in which you simply find a neglected piece of ground and (shocker!) plant something on it.

Growing your own food represents a victory over our out-of-control agricultural-industrial complex. It's victory over economic uncertainty and the feeling of paralysis that sets in when it seems like our political system has forgotten about ordinary people and our needs. The audacious act of placing seeds in the earth represents a commitment to Freedom from Want, one of the Four Freedoms FDR outlined as basic to human dignity.

So go ahead. Fight back with forks. Happy 4th, people!

Lynn Parramore is the editor of New Deal 2.0, Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, co-founder of Recessionwire, and the author of Reading the Sphinx.

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When Faced with Floods, FDR Fought Back with Jobs

May 12, 2011David Woolner

FDR chose action to combat flooding and soil erosion that did much more than conserve land.

FDR chose action to combat flooding and soil erosion that did much more than conserve land.

The massive flooding that struck the Midwest in recent days has led a number of climatologists to argue that this event -- along with the occurrence of similar floods in Australia, Pakistan and elsewhere -- is further indication of the impact of the increase in greenhouse gasses in the earth's atmosphere. The warmer air associated with the increase holds more moisture, and the greater the moisture content, the greater the level of precipitation. Hence the record snowfalls for the upper Midwest this season and the extraordinary amounts of rain that much of the region received in April (Paducah Kentucky, for example, received 22 inches of rain in April, as compared to the average 5.4 inches it usually receives).

For the vast majority of scientists -- and for an increasing number of individuals and institutions in other parts of the world -- the potential impact of climate change is being viewed with growing alarm. But in Washington, just the opposite is true. The US House of Representatives recently rejected an amendment that would have put the House on record as acknowledging that global warming is occurring and that human activity is the major cause. In this milieu, and in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there is almost no chance that we will see any significant climate legislation emerge from the current Congress.

Interestingly, 75 years ago the United States faced a very similar natural disaster in the form of the Great Flood of 1936. Unlike today, however, the death and destruction that struck much of the eastern United States as a result of the flood spurred Congress into action. It passed of one of the most significant -- though lesser-known -- pieces of legislation to come out of the New Deal: the Flood Control Act of 1936.

Recognizing for the first time "that destructive floods upon the rivers of the United States constitute a menace to national welfare" and that "flood control on navigable waters or their tributaries is a proper activity of the Federal Government in cooperation with States," the Roosevelt administration worked with members of Congress to pass the first piece of legislation to provide for national flood relief. The hundreds of reservoir, levee, and channelization projects that resulted from the 1936 act protected millions of acres of farmland, saved countless lives, and literally changed the face of the nation. Taken together, the projects that came about as a consequence of the act constitute one of the largest additions to our nation's economic infrastructure, on par with the development of the nation's highway system. Moreover, in keeping with the spirit of the New Deal, the construction of many of these flood control projects (which usually took place under the auspices of the US Army Corps of Engineers) also spurred local and regional economic growth and helped conserve one of our nation's most precious resources -- our soil.

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It was perhaps soil erosion, in fact, more than any other issue that drove President Roosevelt to support the passage of the flood control act. Having seen the dire consequences of the Dust Bowl, and as a great lover and believer in the restorative power of the land, FDR was deeply concerned about the long-term productivity of American topsoil. To combat erosion, he not only passed the Flood Control Act of 1936, but also established the Soil Conservation Service, which encouraged farmers to adopt more environmentally friendly practices; the Civilian Conservation Corps, which helped restore our nation's forests; and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which not only helped control erosion in the Tennessee River Valley, but also provided inexpensive hydroelectric power to an entire region of the country.

Most importantly, all of these programs helped create jobs and spur economic activity. And while today many environmentalists might take issue with certain aspects of the flood control work that came about as a consequence of the act (such as the channelization of rivers and streams), few would take issue with the spirit of conservation that inspired it.

The Flood Control Act of 1936 is but one example of the remarkable record of legislative achievements that came about in the 74th Congress. In response to the needs of a people in the midst of both environmental and economic crisis, members of Congress worked with the Roosevelt administration to pass not only this landmark piece of legislation, but also the Social Security Act, National Labor Relations Act, Banking Act of 1935, Soil Conservation Act, and the $4.8 billion Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, out of which came the WPA, among other programs.

It is perhaps the best testament to our current era that this Congress, facing a remarkably similar set of circumstances, has chosen not "action and action now," as FDR would put it, but rather to do nothing.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute.

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