Hasbro’s game Monopoly is my least favorite childhood game. Not only did I not have the attention span to play this sometimes four hour game, but I also didn’t enjoy the possibility of having to go to jail, take risks on buying properties, and just the overall capitalist feel of monopolizing my friends and family. Like most games there is one winner, or else people don’t see the point. Needless to say I have never won that game and now that I am older I’m starting to wonder what other life games I may or may not be able to win.
When I look at policies like the farm bill, I can’t help but think that food is the key to monopolizing the world. Just like Monopoly, the farm bill is long, hard to understand, and your chance of winning entirely before eventually giving up is high. In Marion Nestle’s article Utopian Dream: A New Farm Bill, she discusses what is socially and politically wrong with the current farm bill, including the current health of our nation, as well as practical solutions in fixing it.
Nestle’s concern with the farm bill is it’s lack of aligning agricultural policy with nutrition, health, and environmental policy. What we do understand about the bill is that it favors Big Agriculture and allows farms to be exempt from having to comply with environmental and employment standards. She goes as far to say the bill is undemocratic, and I agree. The fact that the bill is so long and confusing makes it nearly impossible for people contest because no one knows where to start in on fixing it. Maybe that was their point, making rules hard to follow for an average citizen so that we all end up loosing without knowing where to put blame, so we blame ourselves.
Today the price of food is relatively cheap and that was essentially the goal of the Reagan administration where our current “eat more” food crisis can be traced. This was the first time where food was taken outside of the home and into public places as a way to allow food to be eaten more frequently. “Congress passed laws reversing long-standing farm policies aimed at protecting prices by limiting production. Companies were forced to find innovative ways to sell food products in an overabundant food economy (Nestle, 17).” Thus began marketing food products to children, which led to an increase in snacking, calorie intake, and an overall changed society. Foods may be cheap but only because the system has found a way to put the external costs on the backs and in the bellies of the consumer.
When we look at society as a whole, we are sick. In our “eat more” environment we are seeing an increase in obesity in our youth as a reflection of our broken system. Media had made it well known that “thin is in,” but how does our youth respond when over one third of them are overweight? Cue organic and local food industry. While these industries can be a solution, until the government starts to back these programs we will continue to see the health of our nation decrease. It’s a vicious cycle. People don’t have adequate education or resources to healthy foods, which affects their physical, mental, and spiritual well being, which leads people to consume more to fill that “happiness” void, which in turn makes them and the environment around them sick, making them dependant on the government to take care of them, when in reality it is the government that has allowed this process to spiral out of control. Hopefully the sooner our society realizes that the rules of the game are not fair, more people will stop playing and change the name of the game entirely.
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/foodsystems/files/2013/09/59.2.nestle-11hesnk.pdf