Department of Good Ideas
Back before Christmas, The Washington Post had a story about how the “Obama Administration May Tie Improved Nutrition to Food Assistance Programs.” In other words, instead of just ensuring that people have food (i.e., calories) they’d be trying to give people assistance in acquiring healthy food.
That would definitely be a good thing to do. Fortunately, the contemporary United States doesn’t have a substantial starvation problem. But unfortunately, we do have substantial problems around malnutrition and obesity. Our food assistance programs were designed in an earlier era when that balance of considerations was different, and were conceived in large part as a bailout of sorts for food producers rather than designed to best serve the interests of the programs’ clients. Reforming the system to help target people’s genuine food-related needs for better nutrition rather than more calories could do a great deal of good.
26 Responses to “Department of Good Ideas”
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January 2nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
What is that a picture of? I want that for dinner. Why don’t you have captions?
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease are obviously not limited to low-income or the poor. While some behavior modification through pricing might result in different food choices those food choices might not be any better than the food choices of the financially better off majority where obesity, diabetes and cardiovascualr disease are not exactly on the decline. I wouldn’t pin too much hope on current mainstream nutritional science. Their recommendations over the past few decades don’t seem to panning out very well.
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:03 pm
> But unfortunately, we do have substantial
> problems around malnutrition and obesity.
Where on earth did this usage of the word “around” come from, and why do people use it? I recently re-entered the large corporate world after 12 years in small and medium-sized entities and no one talks about anything (particularly problems) – they talk about “the issues ‘around’ X”. Utterly useless bafflespeak.
Cranky
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Plus, “around” sounds too Norman for my taste.
But, seriously, during the Friday/Jan 2 lull, perhaps MattY could try a thought experiment and wonder what those who generally disagree with him would disagree with the article’s contents around.
If you’ve spent any time here, you know what that means: one or more snarky, strawman arguments.
But, instead of offering that, maybe MattY could sit quietly for some time and actually think up valid objections, and then do his best to try to provide answers to some of those.
Of course, that might result in Jennifer Palmieri coming in here complaining about MattY making the rest of CAP look bad, so perhaps his present course is the best.
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
What’s next, forced sterilization?
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Here we go. Now all you libruls are going to use your Messiah Obama X to impose on us a diet of vegan raw food and cruelty-free juices. You have always planned on making us all miserable, and thank god Rush Limbaugh kept warning me about you people.
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:17 pm
“around” = “in the area of”
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:22 pm
I’m not seeing any arugula in that dish. I’m afraid it is insufficiently liberal and must be discarded.
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:09 pm
It’s a mistake to think that even our fresh food is as nutritious as we are told it is. I would like to see the department of agriculture be as concerned with the health of soil as it is with yield. Nutritional charts are based on studies done in the forties. New studies covering a lot of different farms might be enlightening. The idea that spinach from one farm has as much iron as any other is ridiculous.
Produce is only as healthy as the soil it’s grown in, and cattle is only as healthy as the food that it is fed. I have long suspected that a lot of people who overeat are just trying to get all the nutrients they need. Less food with more nutrients might solve a lot of health problems, and that requires healthy soil.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:56 pm
To me the two more interesting issues are:
1. How to stop distorting people’s eating habits through massive agricultural subsidies (why are so many products contain high-fructose corn syrup? Because it’s cheap!).
2. How to listen to community-level feedback on the content for WIC and similar programs. I remember probably 10 years ago at least about activists in Louisiana who were struggling to make headway in getting something other than milk for the free lunch program at schools. Because so many kids there were black and Latino and because so many blacks and Latinos are lactose-intolerant, milk really WASN’T a “healthy” drink for them, regardless of all of the dairy industry marketing.
So before I’d even tackle this question of dictating people’s eating habits, I’d see if I could eliminate the unthealthy market distortions that already exist.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:06 am
If anyone is really interested in nutrition, look to the World Health Organization. They avoid fancy terms. The first requirement is calories. Next is protein balance. Only infants/children need to worry about the balance if they don’t get a small amount of animal derived protein.
But there is a huge lie we like to maintain in the western world. The lie is that poor nutrition leads to obesity. Nutrition is a global term which implies balance. Therefore poor nutrition could lead to many problems, most unrelated to calories or protein.
If you think I am blowing smoke, please direct us to a report of a person who was malnourished and over weight.
It simply does not happen. We are exposed to many stories of over weight people, but their problem is not surviving. Their problem is getting out of their house.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:29 am
I work for an organization that among other things operates a large food pantry. We receive funding from the New York State Department of Health, which demands various nutritional requirements of our food packages as a condition of funding.
This is not exactly a new idea.
I think for all food assistance programs, the number one priority needs to be distributing as much food as possible to as many people as possible. However, you want to be sure that organizations aren’t just handing out boxes of cheese or something. Nutritional requirements are important, but if they get too stringent, you risk not allowing organizations/gov’t agencies to use their best judgment in order to distribute as much food as possible.
February 10th, 2009 at 10:19 am
I find it very difficult to find good raw food recipes. Where should I look?
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