Forget about exploding airbags. America’s exploding waistlines have us on a collision course, literally, with food-induced fatalities. Our crash test dummies just gained 106 pounds overnight, after studies found that most cars’ safety features don’t properly fit larger Americans, putting them at much greater risk of dying in car crashes.

Stories like this presumably lend new urgency to conferences like the one the James Beard Foundation hosted in New York City this week. Entitled “Health and Food: Is Better Food The Prescription For A Healthier America?,” the gathering brought all the usual suspects together to “make us think deeply about our values and the decisions we make about food.”

What comes after the deep thinking? After a day and a half of striving to connect the dots between health, nutrition, commerce, culture, politics, policy, inequality, and ecology, the conference unwittingly wandered into the murky terrain of Donald Rumsfeld’s “known knowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns.”

These are the things that we know that we know:

1. Nutritional wisdom hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years, as both New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle and New York Times columnist and author Mark Bittman (one of this year’s leadership honorees) pointed out. What has changed is the proliferation of processed food, the Paul Bunyon-esque portions, the loss of culinary know-how, and the shameful targeting of children and low-income communities by marketers.

As Bittman pointed out, food is supposed to be nutritious by definition. “A big chunk of what is called food could more accurately be called poison,” he told the crowd. “Real food does not make you sick.”

2. We’re eating too much of the bad stuff and not getting enough of our three agricultural amigos: fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Most of us don’t get enough exercise, either. As Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel observed in his keynote speech, inertia has its own kind of momentum. Habits are hard to change.

3. Food manufacturers intentionally formulate their unhealthy foods and beverages to make us crave and over-consume them. Factor that in and “personal responsibility” starts to sound like a sick joke. “Our palates have been destroyed,” Laurie David, the executive producer of “Fed Up,” noted. David fumed over the food industry’s willingness to knowingly undermine the health of the nation’s kids, saying “It’s not fair, it’s not a level playing field.”

In low-income communities inundated with cheap junk food, it’s more like a minefield. The young poets from the Bay Area-based Bigger Picture Campaign, a collaboration between the non-profit group Youth Speaks and the UCSF Department of Medicine’s Center for Vulnerable Populations, received a standing ovation from the crowd with their vivid, eloquent condemnations of a food chain that preys on inner-city residents.

At the James Beard Foundation leadership awards dinner held in conjunction with the conference, Oakland-based food justice activist and honoree Navina Khanna noted that while her city has a reputation for being plagued by violent crime, diet-related chronic disease remains the leading cause of death in low-income neighborhoods.

If there was a consensus among the “thought leaders spanning the culinary, medical, agriculture, and arts communities” in attendance, it could best be summed up by the words of another honoree, Ben Burkett, president of The National Family Farm Coalition. “Every human being on the face of the earth is entitled to clean food, fresh air, and fresh water.”