Monday, February 7, 2011
The Obama's and the Nation's Nutrition
I am pleased to see that the First Lady is working with the National Restaurant Association to encourage "restaurants to adopt her goals of smaller portions and children's meals that include healthy offerings." But, it seems to me that her efforts merely chip around the edges of our nation's vast nutrition and health problems. Would her efforts be better spent targeting her husband and his administration for continuing the federal government's cozy relationship with and subsidy of major agribusiness? If Michael Poulan and the folks who produced Food, Inc. are correct, the federal government and how it subsidizes agriculature has a large role to play in our obese society, in environmentally unsound farming practices, and in putting local farmers out of business.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/02/the-obamas-and-the-nations-nutrition.html
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Michael,
I mentioned to Jeffrey Rosen at the recent Fed-Soc National Lawyer's Conference when we were discussing the libertarian / conservative alliance that one of the places of breakdown and splintering (and not always in expected places) is agriculture. For some, agriculture has the romantic associations of mom and pop farms, our agrarian heritage, gentlemen farmers, etc., and so any support for that image, no matter how loose (mom and pop rarely get the huge subsidies, for instance) is politically untouchable. For others, agribusiness is their life style, and subsidies are needed simply to line their own pockets. Hence, the difficulty of cutting subsidies to agribusiness, and the strange alliances one gets to support their continuation.