Manure belongs on farms, not food policies
The world of food provides many delicious combinations. Bacon and eggs, peppermint and chocolate, pasta and cheese. Some foods just seem to go together.
Unfortunately, the world of food policy doesn’t follow a similar pattern. Judging from recent evidence, the most common item paired with food policy advice is best used as fertilizer.
Our first example comes from last month’s annual meeting of the American Medical Association, where the U.S. doctors’ organization demanded a ban on foods high in sugar and fat, as well as “processed meats,” from all restaurants, cafeterias and food kiosks on hospital properties. The goal is to serve “plant-based meals” to all hospital visitors.
Given an editorial in the Canadian Medical Journal several years ago also decried fried foods in hospital cafeterias, it seems reasonable this demand will eventually show up in Canada as well.
Locally, both St. Mary’s and Grand River hospitals host Tim Hortons and Subway franchises selling such deadly fare as ham sandwiches and doughnuts. All would be eliminated if doctors were given control over food choices in hospital lobbies: replaced with tofu wraps and bean sprout salads.
You can’t smoke at a hospital, why would we allow cookies?
Such a policy is objectionable on the simple premise of food liberty. Adults should have the right to eat whatever they choose, without Big Mother (as public health scolds deserve to be known) controlling our personal menus.
But there’s something more insidious here that deserves extra attention. It’s as if these doctors have never been outpatients, or understand what they go through.
Battling long-term illness often requires repeated trips to a hospital over many consecutive days or weeks. You become, in essence, a prisoner of the health care system.
This feeling of being trapped by institutional health care is also the reason why hospital parking fees can be such an emotional issue.
And sometimes the only way to make this grinding routine bearable is the promise of a treat along the way. A coffee and doughnut, pop or some other small indulgence becomes the means to re-assert a modest amount of control over your life.
And now doctors want to take these small pleasures away from outpatients and the selfless friends and family members who accompany them, by enforcing a ‘plantbased prison food’ edict in hospital lobbies? It seems a cruelty unbecoming of the health care profession.
Our second example arises closer to home.
In advance of a federal government conference last month on a national food policy, Wilfrid Laurier University professor Alison Blay-Palmer and two other Canadian academics recently released a report card claiming to measure the “sustainability of Canada’s food systems.”
Like most of what passes for sustainable food policy, however, it is a mess of contradictions, hypocrisies, quasi-religiosity and flagrant displays of ignorance.
“Food Counts: A Pan-Canadian Sustainable Food Systems Report Card” asserts that a national food policy must put “people’s need for food at the centre.” Fair enough.
And the first set of indicators seems reasonable enough — can Canadians afford to eat? This section totes up a variety of measures of household food consumption and cost: spending, inflation, poverty, hunger, food bank use etc.
Of course, if food affordability is a problem the obvious answer is cheaper food. Or higher incomes. Yet the authors seem opposed to both possible solutions. The rest of the document is actually dedicated to making food more expensive and keeping farm industry profits low.
In a convincing display of economic ignorance, Blay-Palmer and co-authors argue an observed increase in egg production is evidence things are “getting worse” for the Canadian food system. Larger, more efficient egg-laying farms now dominate the industry, and these ‘food experts’ think farm efficiency is bad. So that’s a low mark on the report card.
Conversely a decline in hog production is seen as a “positive trend.” A declining livestock industry gets high marks.
This upside-down report card repeatedly hands out low scores to any evidence showing farms are getting larger, more productive and more profitable. The preferred objective appears to be a nostalgic vision of a country filled with small, inefficient family farms — a moo, moo here and a cluck, cluck there.
The report is thus driven by the same loopy logic that sees affordable housing advocates demanding more and cheaper housing while simultaneously approving government policies that wall off vast swaths of land from new construction. Unfortunately, the laws of economics still apply in the real world. Limit supply and price goes up, regardless of what some ivory tower folks might prefer.
Even more disconcerting is the pseudoreligious tone to what’s supposed to be a piece of serious academic advice for Ottawa. “Food cannot be commodified,” BlayPalmer writes. “Food is sacred.” This is obvious and dangerous nonsense.
A public mandate that we alter farming techniques so as to worship every sacred radish without regard for efficiency or output would result in a catastrophic reduction in food availability and a massive spike in cost.
Without the commodification of food, many of us will go hungry. Full stop.
Some academics may think there’s numinous virtue in small, unprofitable and inefficient farms producing evermore expensive food. The rest of us just want a meal we can afford.