In his State of the Union address last Wednesday, President Obama covered a lot of ground. His primary goal was to focus on job creation, but he left out one important occupation–in a nation where the average farmer is 57 years old, we need farmers. He mentioned the obesity crisis, noting that the First Lady would be dedicating her efforts there, and then made this comment about doubling our trade in goods and commodity crops in the next five years:

To help meet this goal, we’re launching a National Export Initiative that will help farmers and small businesses increase their exports, and reform export controls consistent with national security. We have to seek new markets aggressively, just as our competitors are.  If America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores. But realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules. And that’s why we’ll continue to shape a Doha trade agreement that opens global markets, and why we will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea and Panama and Colombia.

He has thus far stuck to his word. According to the USDA, $234.5 million is being given to 70 U.S. trade organizations to help promote American food and agricultural products abroad (you can see who this money is going to, from the Cotton Council International, which received a whopping $20 million, to trade reps for perishables like the California Prune Board, which received nearly $3 million). The Farm Bureau is thrilled that this administration is poised to aggressively pursue trade agreement negotiations with other countries as it clearly benefits big producers. So is Republican senator and erstwhile Bush Jr. Secretary of Agriculture nominee Mike Johanns from Nebraska, who had this to say:

With unemployment at 10 percent, we should be pursuing every possible avenue to promote good opportunities for job growth and business investment. Our businesses, farmers, and ranchers produce the highest quality products in the world and deserve an opportunity to compete on a level playing field.

The problem is that places like South Korea have expressed that they don’t want our goods if they contain hormones, antibiotics or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Worse, though, is that our products are not traded on a “level playing field,” but instead are sold at an unfairly low prices in developing countries, made falsely cheap by our subsidy system. Developed world subsidies have been the prime barrier to negotiations at the Doha Development Round trade talks, which began in 2001 and continue to this day with no agreement–which many consider a victory for developing nations. And while Obama seeks to cut subsidies in his budget, it will be an uphill battle, especially without a stricter definition for who is a farmer.

Ben Lilliston, Communications Director for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy had this to say about the administration’s plan for increasing trade:

The goal of doubling commodity trade is not feasible or wise. This emphasis on export markets is odd given that it runs directly counter to a lot of the Administration’s work to support local food systems. And expanding exports would definitely come at the expense of local food systems. The reality is that we’ve tried to expand agriculture exports for the last 50 years. That goal represents a lot of what is wrong in U.S. farm policy: a push to lower commodity prices–to make us more competitive internationally; an emphasis on just a few commodity crops; and support for large-scale operations over smaller, more diversified farms. An emphasis on exports has benefited multinational agribusiness firms, but not farmers either in the U.S., or in other countries. U.S. agribusiness companies have a several decade record of exporting commodity crops like corn, soybeans, rice and wheat at prices below the cost of production–a practice known as dumping. The result has been devastating to poor countries trying to develop their own food production. The loss of food production in many poor countries is a major contributor to growing hunger around the world. What makes the proposal so strange is that the Administration has to know this is not possible. Even agribusiness companies–who I’m sure love the proposal–know it’s not possible to reach.

Here is what trade agreements looks like in action: as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), U.S. corn sold cheaper than it could be produced, putting millions of Mexican farmers out of business–simultaneously quashing the diversity of the corn varieties and genetically contaminating locally grown corn with GMOs. As a result, these jobless farmers have made their way across the border to pick fruits and vegetables in America (often in slave-like conditions), or work mind-numbing jobs in slaughterhouses. But NAFTA’s destructive legacy runs deeper still. Last October, Mexico was ordered to pay the corn-processing giant Cargill a $77 million dollar fine for imposing a tax on high fructose corn syrup in an attempt to protect their domestic sugar farmers.

Vilsack’s op-ed focused on rebuilding rural America. However, when dollars leave the farm community headed to corporate multinationals for seed, chemicals and equipment, and the products produced on the farm are not food but commodities that then leave the community too, how can broadband and increased trade be anything more than band-aids for rural America? In the face of facts like climate change, to which agriculture contributes at least 30% of carbon emissions, decreased water availability and uncertain oil resources, trade veils the real problems facing the food system. What we need is balance: balanced opportunities in rural areas, a balanced ecosystem with diversified crops that feed local populations, and a balanced number of farmers to knit that community together. More farmers means more jobs, more stewardship of the land, and better quality food–and as a result, a thriving rural economy.

Up next, watch for the administration to start pressuring Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) to release his hold on Islam Siddiqui, Obama’s nominee for Chief Agricultural Negotiator, who’s pesticide lobbying past is not behind the pause. Indeed, who else but a Big Ag lobbyist could they get to take on such a mission seemingly bound for disaster?

The United States is the only high-income industrialized country not using some form of a single-payer healthcare system. Single-payer could be an expanded form of Medicare, and actually ensures under the Civil Rights Act that no one will be denied care. Conversely, privatized insurance companies can and do deny care with near-impunity. The administrative simplicity of the single-payer system would save on overhead costs, while the costs of care would go down because the profit margins private insurers would be cut out of the equation.

Despite what anyone tells you, single-payer is not socialized medicine, and no ominous government bureaucracy would step in and deny or “ration” care. The critics of single-payer are either paid to tell you this, or are brainwashed by the multi-million dollar lobbying and advertising paid for by insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. It is in these two industries’ interest of continued uber-profitability for our broken system to stay as is; sickness, to these corporations, is an opportunity.

Parallels can be drawn in agribusiness, which also profits from feeding us cheap calories, and doesn’t want any changes coming out of Washington. Indeed, the healthcare debate is intimately intertwined with our food system. We spend twice as much per capita as Canada does on healthcare, and not because Canadians are “waiting in a line,” and getting denied care; denied care has become our specialty. ‘Pre-existing condition’ could quite possibly be the scariest phrase in our language for the 46 million uninsured.

In fact, we spend more on healthcare because of what we eat. And what we eat is related to the choices our politicians make on national, state and city-wide policies concerning what we feed our kids in school; what we allow advertisers to tell us about what to eat; food labeling; food accessibility in rural and urban areas; what crops we subsidize; whether or not the people who grow our food have access to healthcare (many don’t) and more.

In these debates we don’t ask: is healthcare a right or an option? Higher education is so expensive now that workers are bound to their workplace because of massive debt, feeling compelled to overwork in order to keep their health insurance, and therefore are too exhausted to cook. It’s all related. It has been proven time and time again that what we eat correlates to our future incidences of preventable diseases, all on the rise, like diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Even the Centers for Disease Control released a study giving recommendations for changes in our communities that could lower the current rates of obesity — these are great, but they put the impetus on the local level changes instead of nudging policy-makers. And still to bring all this up in the healthcare debate, it seems, would be political suicide.

Its possible that “the public option” that Obama is promoting is a necessary first step to an overhaul of the healthcare system. The good news is that this new plan seeks to better regulate insurance companies, and seeks to lower costs through competition (Paul Krugman said this in his column in yesterday’s Times, “Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.”). Mandates require the uninsured to buy into an insurance program or pay a penalty. Medicaid would be expanded, and subsidies would be extended to cover some of the costs. These subsidies are said to be canceled out by other cost-cutting measures. So why are the insurance and pharmaceutical industries so happy? They have brought Harry and Louise back to throw their weight behind the plan, indicating that perhaps the competition fostered by the public option might not be enough. So how do we get from here to “real change that we can believe in?”

On Bill Moyers Journal this past Friday, Moyers spoke with Trudy Lieberman and Marcia Angell, two experts on health care reform, in continuation of his excellent recent coverage on the subject. (Hear him speaking with Dr. David Himmelstein and Dr. Sidney Wolfe on May 22 about the ins and outs of a single-payer healthcare system; with Robert Reich about the entrenched interests in Washington and the healthcare debate on June 12; with Wendell Potter, who spent 20 years in the insurance industry and give that perspective, from July 10th). Both of the experts on Moyer’s program on Friday felt this system would not be a significant enough change, and might cost more than we think due to concessions to insurance companies. Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that she was worried that the insurance lobby would, “use their clout in Congress to hobble the public option in some way. And have it become a dumping ground for the sickest patients, and then cream off the profitable ones for themselves. And then what people would decide is that the public option was no good.”

She continued:

“I think we have to start all over on this. I really do. I think we have to go for a single payer system. You could institute that gradually. You could do it state by state. You could do it decade by decade. You could improve Medicare. That is, make it nonprofit. But extend it down to age 55 and age 45 and age 35. It would give the private insurance industry a chance to go into hurricanes, earthquakes or something. To get out of the health business. It could be done gradually. I think that has to be done. And it’s the only thing that can be done.”

The question, then, is how to do what Obama promised but has not yet delivered: get the lobbying interests out of Washington once and for all. It seems that this is the root of many of the problems we face (Reich gives an engaging insider perspective on this with Moyers, linked above). It is specifically the cause for preventing single-payer, something Obama supported before becoming President, from even being on the table for discussion. If we are ever to get anything done in the public’s interest in this country, the necessary first step must involve campaign finance reform. Without the influence of industry buying off our politicians through campaign donations, it could be possible to implement the best option for reforming healthcare and to admit that sustainable agriculture is the only way to feed people as water and oil resources become scarce. Until then, we will keep pulling our teeth out with pliers and gorging on high fructose corn syrup, while the agribusiness, insurance and pharmaceutical industries profit on our suffering.

Then, last week, a study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Health found detectable levels of mercury, a known neurotoxin, in nine of 20 samples of HFCS. A second study by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy found that mercury appeared as a secret ingredient in nearly a third of 55 brand-name foods, most commonly in products that also contained HFCS.

But the CRA hasn’t taken any of this bad news lying down. They were quick to fire back a press release calling the mercury study “outdated,” and for months they have been bankrolling a $20-30 million dollar publicity campaign called “Sweet Surprise,” which cheerily informs us that, “Like table sugar, high fructose corn syrup is fine in moderation.”

We are familiar with “moderation” as the long-time mantra of the self-help set, but it has also become a red flag in the press releases and talking points of corporations hawking toxicity. Tobacco was once okay in moderation, too, as was exposure to DDT, the notorious antagonist of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. To this day, as it turns out, DDT is classified as “moderately toxic” by the US National Toxicological Program and “moderately hazardous” by the World Health Organization.

The mercury found in the HFCS study was measured in parts per trillion––that’s a modest dose, even for a toxin known to be unsafe in any quantity. It’s the unfortunate truth that we’re exposed to environmental mercury from many sources just by walking out our front door. But it’s also true that the mercury found in the HFCS samples didn’t need to be there at all. It likely originated from an outdated process for manufacturing caustic soda (bet you didn’t know you were consuming that in your favorite drink), one of the components used in processing HFCS.

The reminder that America’s food and beverage manufacturers keep caustic soda, acids, and genetically modified enzymes in their cupboards brought back the experience of attempting to make our own home-brewed HFCS when filming the documentary King Corn. The experiment turned out okay––no one got hurt, and we managed to produce a few ounces of a surprisingly sweet liquid.

But we were left with the sad realization that so much of what we eat in the industrialized food economy was designed and produced in something much more like a laboratory than a kitchen. There’s something distinctly unappetizing about food ingredients whose labels advise you to wear goggles and gloves when you handle them.

Unless, of course, you enjoy them in moderation.

Hannah Major-Monfried is a writer in New York City. She most recently served as head speechwriter for Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Recently, the American public was issued a challenge by the folks at KFC (formerly “Kentucky Fried Chicken,” but “fried” just didn’t sound healthy). The fast-food joint argues in its latest commercial that you cannot “create a family meal for less than $10.” Their example is the “seven-piece meal deal,” which includes seven pieces of fried chicken, four biscuits, and a side dish — in this case, mashed potatoes with gravy. This is meant to serve a family of four.

I’m not really a competitive soul, but this was one challenge I could not resist. When it comes to food, America has been sold a bill of goods. We’ve been flimflammed, bamboozled, hoodwinked. We’ve been tricked into thinking that cooking is a chore, like washing windows, to be avoided if at all possible, and then done only grudgingly and when absolutely necessary. On the contrary, cooking is a vital, spiritual act that should be performed with a certain reverence. After all, we are providing sustenance to the ones we love — can anything be more important?

And don’t get me started on advertising. It never ceases to amaze me that, with the exception of political ads, people don’t focus on the falsehoods. Commercial advertising washes over people without the slightest analysis; we truly need a FactCheck.org for business advertising.

In the KFC commercial, a mother and two kids hit a grocery store for the necessary ingredients. When they fail to get them for under $10, Mom cheerfully announces, to the kids’ delight, that they are going to KFC. In these hard economic times, Colonel Sanders wants you to think that giving him your money is the cheaper way to go. I respectfully disagree.

The ingredients shown or mentioned in the ad include seven pieces of chicken, a five-pound bag of flour, and — in an oh-so-adorable scene featuring the son and a clueless store clerk — “seven secret herbs and spices.” The rest of the ingredients are presumably edited out for time.

The grocery store itself has the look of a somewhat higher-end place (read: more like a Whole Foods than a Wal-Mart). Since we don’t have a Whole Foods in Iowa, and I can’t get myself to give Wal-Mart money, I compromised and shopped at a local independent grocery called the Bread Garden Market. They do a nice job of splitting the difference between organic and everyday; in other words, they carry both Kashi and corn flakes, tofu and ground beef.

The recipes I used are available to anyone with access to The Joy of Cooking (mine’s the May 1985 edition).

I compared commodity products and organic ones, and calculated for each. The market had only one kind of chicken. It was far from the free-range, organic, local chicken I would normally use, but it was hormone-free from a network of family farms and faced nowhere near the cruel conditions suffered by KFC’s chickens. One of the latter would have been even cheaper than the $4.76 I paid for this one. In fairness I should note that the little girl in KFC’s ad asks the butcher for seven pieces, already cut up, but I have faith that a home cook can cut up a whole chicken. I should also note that KFC cuts chicken breasts in half, so there are 10 pieces in a whole bird (four breast halves, two legs, two thighs, two wings).

I rounded up everything I needed for chicken, biscuits, and mashed potatoes with gravy and totaled my costs, accounting for ingredients that were a fraction of a cent (small amounts of spices, for example) by rounding up to $0.01. I must admit I don’t know the seven secret herbs and spices, but as a professional chef, I know you can do an awful lot with salt and pepper. The bottom line? The KFC meal, including Iowa state sales tax of 6 percent, is $10.58. I made the same meal (chicken, four biscuits, mashed potatoes, and gravy) for $7.94 — and I got three extra pieces of chicken and a carcass to use for soup.

Even allowing for the whole batch of 24 biscuits, the meal still comes in at $8.45. In fact, using organic or other high-end items where the market carried them (flour, grapeseed oil, butter, milk), my total bill for the meal came to $10.62. Here’s a GoogleDocs spreadsheet of my prices in case you want to check my math or compare your own recipe.

I can already hear folks saying, “Sure, but how long did it take you?” Yes, it took a little longer than the drive-thru, but it is important to recognize the value of spending time preparing a good home-cooked meal. How is it, after all, that with all the modern conveniences afforded us in the 21st century, we still don’t think we have the time to do something everyone had time for until the middle of the 20th century?

In America, if we are what we eat, most of us are fast, cheap, and easy. We should aspire to be more, and gathering the family around the table is the best way I know how. Bring your family together around a home-cooked meal. Get them involved in the preparation. Do it so often that it’s no longer an unusual thing in your house. It’ll beat the drive-thru every time because it has the most important ingredient: love.

Photo: American family dinner, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1942 by John Collier, Jr.

[Cross-posted from Grist]

Gary Paul Nabhan, PhD., is an Arab-American writer, lecturer, food and farming advocate, rural lifeways folklorist, and conservationist whose work has long been rooted in the U.S./Mexico borderlands region he affectionately calls “the stinkin’ hot desert.” This poem was written for Slow Food Nation and will be read at Changemakers Day.

The Earth has grown tired of making fossilized food
Tired of having to pump fossil fuel as well as
Ancient groundwater up from her very innards
To let them spill onto our fields & orchards
Where frantic crops are forced to suck it all up.
What oozed out of the aquifer and oil well
Now bleeds with additives, fertilizers & pesticides
So that we might eat.

We too have grown tired
Tired of all those so-called “fast” foodstuffs
That are all actually frozen in time
While being freed from their attachments to place
So that they might be flung
Half way across the hemisphere
To fly into our mouths
Like so many stones shot from a catapult.

Our bodies are tired of taking in
Anything in need of thawing out, that is,
Anything micro-waved in a frigid plastic sack
Anything cloistered in a rigid sealed box
Anything taken off the range & locked in a feedlot
Anything with a patented genetic modification
Anything once wild that has been captured & broken.

Instead, your bodies are desperately searching for
Any food brought to you live
Plucked straight from the vine
As the golden crookneck squash blossom has been
The one that had been sunning among
The twining tendrils just moments before
Or like those plucked from the teeming tidepool
As the athletic octopus has been, limbs all akimbo
Shifting its shape and its colors
Even as it dives into ever warmer water.

There are many among us who want to be sure
That food makes it out of this century alive
Alive like the vinegar mother looming in the shadows
An amorphous banshee waiting to transform
One more glass of spoiled wine or mug of dubious cider
Into something sour, but sharper and finer.

Our bodies want our distracted minds to remember this:
It is those slow foods,
The ones which have moved the least
      From field to feast
That move us most deeply
For they have remained dynamic & delectable
So as to dance in our dreams forever.

Our dirt-tired Earth Mother is asking us to step outside
For she is angry that some of us can barely see or smell
Just what it is that is growing in our own backyards.

She is asking us to stop—stop—
Before we drill and pump another drop
Of that greasy petrel that has settled
Way down deep in her bowels
Since way, WAY back in the Pennsylvanian,
When tons of marsh plants fell, then died & fermented
For she is tired of burping & farting up gas for us
As if countable kilocalories
Are all that we know how to eat.

Every morning of your life
You can choose to break fast
With the dead, or slowly browse among the living.
Every sundown from now on
You can commune with the fresh & local
Or do rarified dining with the distant & the fossilized.
Watch out, you had better get ready:
Some sassy, salt-of-the-earth waitress is lurching
Toward your table: she wants to know whether
You have finally decided what you really want to eat.