Fast food nation: How would YOU change it?

As part of Neil Kramer's awesome Great Interview Experiment, I found myself answering this excellent question from Slouchy: " If President Obama were to approach you for advice as to how to convert the United States to something other than a “fast food nation,” what would you suggest to him?"

After much thought, I came up with the following several-pronged approach, which I believe should begin with the way we feed our children. I wonder: what would you tell President Obama? Maybe we can send our ideas along to the White House. It certainly can't hurt.

My answer: It wouldn't be popular, but I'd suggest that he immediately fund major studies about how processed sugar and white flour affect the health of our population, with the ultimate goal of developing entirely new guidelines about what could be served in schools, prisons and other state-funded cafeterias and what foods are permitted to be purchased with government-funded food assistance.

In my opinion, it's cheap, nutrient-bereft sweet "white" foods that are doing the most damage. Only by eliminating most sugar and white flour from our cafeterias and pantries can we begin to reverse the damage we've caused. Many, many children wake up each morning to a breakfast of cold cereal, toaster pastries, and/or yogurt which contains twice the American Heart Association's recommendation for added sugar in a day. Most nutritionists and pediatricians recommend that children don't drink fruit juice at all, as the nutrients in fruit are more sensible, but most kids drink juice with breakfast (or, worse, soda or sweetened juice drinks).

And then they go to school where, by snack time, they've consumed another measure of the maximum daily recommendation of sugar. And then they drink chocolate milk with their lunch, which has in one eight-ounce carton more than the maximum daily recommendation. You see where I'm going with this. It shouldn't be any wonder kids don't eat enough vegetables and fruits when they've filled their tummies with sweet white sugar. At the very least we shouldn't use government funds to feed children so much sugar. At best, we'd educate all citizens on how much it harms us, and introduce bans on advertising for foods with added sugar equivalent to those on alcohol and tobacco products.

I'd ask him to outlaw concentrated animal feeding operations, CAFOs, which make cheap, nutritionally-bereft meat available at great harm to our nation's health and environmental future. We should rethink how we raise our meat food entirely, not just to be kind to animals, but to be sensible and to stop paying the enormous cost of these operations on a variety of aspects of our health crisis, from obesity to heart disease to the rise of "superbugs" due to prophylactic antibiotic use and the presence of concentrated animal waste in our groundwater. It would force us to eat way less meat. I believe we'd all be better, happier and healthier for it.

I'd also beg him to upset the monoculture applecart through immediate suspension of agricultural subsidies on farms that grow only one or two crops, and to create USDA limitations on the way modern agriculture works. We are growing food in a way that proves we never learn the lessons of the past; in fact, we repeat the mistakes we've made before with ever-greater obsession. There is one variety of potato grown for french fries and potato chips, for instance; this very crop was destroyed by a passing fungus in Ireland in the 1840s, beginning a famine that killed over a million people. Our outcomes will not be as startling but will be no less deadly, to human and environmental health. The systematic way banana growers are raping and pillaging the tropics, leaving extinct banana varieties, plundered land, and desperate poverty in their wake, is another example. Can we continue to grow crops with this shocking lack of variety for more than a decade or two, without suffering a great reduction in arable farmland, as well as many more extinct species? I doubt it.

The administration can only change this by creating incentives for old-fashioned, "sustainable" polyculture farming operations, and removing those that result in, for instance, 85% of all canned pumpkin being produced with one variety of pumpkin in the space of a few thousand acres. We need more diversity; we need vastly more consumption of fresh, locally-grown produce.

We need to cook more. One thing I'd encourage Obama to do would be to increase incentives for one parent to stay at home with young children, both through paid maternity and paternity leave and new standards for livable wages. If we had less pressure for two parents to be working, we'd have far more ability for one parent to cook food at home, to grow food in their own garden, and greatly slow down our fast food culture.