As someone who likes cheese, but dislikes diabetes, I sure have been quite conflicted about the role of big gov recently.
The New York Times featured an article recently about the government’s role in urging Domino’s Pizza to add more cheese to their pizza to increase sales. At the same time, as the United States’ rates of obesity have skyrocketed, other branches of the government (and within the USDA, which is where the alliance with Domino’s is found) are struggling to find ways to regulate food and promote healthy eating.
The New York Times article, besides making me think twice before I order pizza, raises interesting questions about the role of the government in deciding what we eat. We’re not just talking about regulation, but also about subsidies, and the relationship between agribusiness lobbies and Washington D.C. For example, as the documentary, Food, Inc. reveals, US government subsidies favor the mass harvesting of corn, for the production of corn syrup (which isn’t very good for you) and corn meal to feed cows (not very good for the cows).
Meanwhile, the city of San Fransisco has banned happy meals, in a law that passed last Tuesday and will take effect next year. Now we can argue about whether or not this law is too extreme, or whether it denies our basic civil right to get, in one package, toys, cheese fat, genetically modified and antibiotic loaded cow meat and corn syrup, which by the way, agribusiness wants us to call “corn sugar.” But we might also think about this law as a counterbalance to federal policy that makes happy meals cheap and abundant, particularly in lower class neighborhoods, and healthy food inconvenient and relatively more expensive.
So what if we got rid of the USDA, as advocates of deregulation or "small government" would prefer? Dominos might not be selling so many pizzas. But agribusiness would still be receiving subsidies from taxpayer money. Unless we really shrank the government. Perhaps the most ironic part of the pro-business right’s argument for smaller, less intrusive government is that what they think of as free market capitalism -- that is, everything that accounts for particular businesses’ successes in the eyes of their respective shareholders and CEOs -- is that these successes are often due to the government acting against the interests of the people.
Let’s think about that: the government acts to benefit businesses. Even “Keynesian” policies are meant to act in ways that “grow the economy” or “increase the GDP”, or in this case, help Domino’s sell more pizzas, or help McDonalds with a steady supply of cheap corn products. But the discourse on the economy is so dominated by talk of “growth” that issues of well-being, health, or standard of living go unheard. (See last night’s Daily Show interview with Texas Governor Rick Perry for a good example - Perry touts Texas’s pro-business tax policies and dismisses New Deal reforms as having failed to grow the economy.) The reason that the government lets people be poor, obese, and diabetic, is also the same reason that Republicans can complain about unemployment and the lack of “job creation,” while at the same time denying benefits for those who are looking for work. And its the same reason that people can oppose the Happy Meal Ban without understanding how everything about the way they eat is subject to government policies which favor big business.
To be clear, this is not an argument for smaller government, but a way to point out the inconsistencies in ideologies that favor small government and less regulation. It’s a way to think about government as federated and heterogenous, while arguing overall for smarter, more socially responsible and democratic government that is less invested in “economic” ends and more invested in humanistic ones.
Just found this, if you still want to read more about cheese: http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/11/q-and-a-with-marion-nestle-the-usdas-plot-to-feed-us-cheese/66266/
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