In his recent op-ed in the New York Times, Mark Bittman wrote,
“The budget for food education in the United States pales compared with the marketing budget for junk food, and much of that education is either unconvincing or ignored in the face of the barrage of “fun to eat” ads for the food that is worst for us. (These three charts, gathered in one place by Tom Philpott, pretty much tell the story.) There is, as I’ve complained before, no concerted effort to teach people how to cook, which cannot happen without simultaneously teaching people how to shop for real food.
. . .
In the long run, what’s needed is not a Farm Bill — that tangled mess that’s been stalled in Congress since its expiration in 2012 — but a national food and health policy, one that sets goals first for healthful eating and only then determines how best to produce the food that will allow us to meet those goals. It doesn’t make sense to tell people to eat vegetables and then produce junk; that leads only to bad health in the face of evident abundance. What’s so great about that?”
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Photo credit: KateMonkey. CC License.
