the political economy of our dinner plates

David Sirota observes in "why Americans can't afford to eat healthy" that Americans' worsening eating habits (as in the Gallup poll showing that we're eating fewer servings of fruits and vegetables) is due less to epicureanism than economics. The Right's "carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification," writes Sirota, "dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own:"

...the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism -- the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.

In this chapter of that larger tragicomedy, lawmakers whose campaigns are underwritten by agribusinesses have used billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize those agribusinesses' specific commodities (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) that are the key ingredients of unhealthy food. Not surprisingly, the subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that recession-battered consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to "choose" the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support. [...]

The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry, notes Time [from NYT], is "that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit."

Subsisting on poor-quality foods with high caloric contents will doubtlessly cause even more problems as the Great Recession continues.