“But the job of government is not to encourage profitable businesses at the cost of public health; it\u2019s to regulate them so that the public is served. Who is this country for, anyway?”<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/01\/15\/opinion\/bittman-tobacco-firearms-and-food.html<\/a><\/p>\n Mark Bittman\u00a0Jan 14, 2014<\/p>\n Let\u2019s say your beliefs include the notion that hard work will bring good things to you, that the golden rule is a nice idea though it may occasionally have limits, and that it\u2019s more or less every person for him or herself. Your overall guiding force is not altruism, but you\u2019re not immoral; you\u2019re a good citizen, and you don\u2019t break any major laws. This could describe many of us; most, maybe.<\/p>\n Now suppose you\u2019re in the business of producing, marketing or selling tobacco or firearms \u2014 products known to sometimes kill others. You need not be a corporate executive or a criminal arms dealer; you might be a retailer of cigarettes, a person who sells them along with magazines, a marketer, a gun shop owner. In any case, your conscience is clear: you\u2019re selling regulated legal products and, as long as you\u2019re obeying the regulations, you\u2019re doing nothing illegal. (\u201cWrong\u201d is a judgment call.)<\/p>\n You sleep well, believing that the government would further regulate your product if it were necessary. And if regulations were to change, you\u2019d change with them. But to act otherwise \u2014 to hold back your energy from production or sales just because of moral or social pressure \u2014 would be foolish, and put you at a competitive disadvantage.<\/p>\n For many years after knowing about the lethal nature of tobacco, our government did little or nothing to limit its consumption. That\u2019s changed gradually in the last 50 years, and\u00a0more dramatically since 1998<\/a>, because of successful lawsuits and because the Food and Drug Administration often tries to pursue its mission. (For a variety of reasons not worth going into, firearms are more challenging to regulate. Let\u2019s leave it at that for now.)<\/p>\n O.K., so suppose we pass legislation that discourages you from producing or selling tobacco or firearms while at the same time actively encouraging you \u2014 supporting you \u2014 to change to producing apples or cotton or washing machines or screwdrivers; as long as you could see a way to increase profit, you\u2019d probably look at the new opportunity. After all, it\u2019s not as if you\u00a0want<\/em>to produce agents of death. You want to make the best living you can selling stuff that\u2019s legal and that people want. Markets change, and flexibility is important, and the government can and does affect your business, even if it\u2019s by inaction.<\/p>\n Now let\u2019s apply this same way of thinking to the major food categories \u2014 and for the purposes of this discussion there are only three \u2014 and what it\u2019s like to be a farmer or producer, or a manufacturer, processor, distributor, retailer of this stuff. Again, you\u2019re agnostic about what you sell, but you\u2019re profit-conscious. And the government can and does affect your business; it can help your business (\u201cyou didn\u2019t build it yourself\u201d) or hurt it, as it should if your business is harming others.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s call the first food group industrially produced animal products. Producing and selling as much as possible is the way to go here, since the penalties for damage your product does to human and animal health and to the environment (including climate) are virtually nonexistent. You can treat the animals as you like and damn the consequences, from salmonella contamination to antibiotic resistance to water contamination to, of course, cruelty. There are even incentives, in the form of subsidized prices for animal feed.<\/p>\n The next group is most easily labeled junk food; you might call it \u201chyperprocessed.\u201d This comprises aisles and aisles of \u201cedibles\u201d sold in supermarkets and restaurants, and is often \u201cfood\u201d that\u2019s unrecognizable as such, ranging from soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages to things like chicken nuggets and Pringles and tens of thousands of other examples. These are mostly made from commodity crops, especially corn, soybeans and wheat. Federal subsidies abound in many forms here, from direct payments (in theory,\u00a0these are ending<\/a>, to be replaced by a bizarre form of crop insurance) to\u00a0the ethanol mandate<\/a>\u00a0to virtually unregulated land use that permits toxic overapplication of fertilizers and other chemicals. There is also that same failure to recognize the public health and environmental costs of what is probably the least healthy diet a wealthy nation could devise. You could even say that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, usually called food stamps) acts as a subsidy to junk food, since nothing limits using food stamps for food that promotes disease. It\u2019s worth noting that for the past century the bulk of university research, much of it paid for with tax dollars, has gone into figuring out how to increase the yield of the crops and processes that turn out this junk that sickens.<\/p>\n Then, in the third group, there\u2019s everything else, from fruits and vegetables \u2014 absurdly called \u201cspecialty crops\u201d by the Department of Agriculture \u2014 to animals raised in sustainable and even humane ways. But here, disincentives abound: farmers may be encouraged to allow some land to go fallow, but not to be planted in specialty crops, and research money, subsidies, insurance, market promotion and access to credit are directed toward industrial food production, distribution and sales. These inefficiencies make most of this real food, which is health-promoting and closer to environmentally neutral, appear to be more expensive. (Only \u201cappear,\u201d though. If you account for the costs of environmental and public health damage, industrially produced junk food and animal products actually cost more.)<\/p>\nThe Opinion Pages
\n<\/a>Tobacco, Firearms and Food<\/h3>\n