InBerkeley

We’re very spoiled in Berkeley when it comes to food. We have an abundance of food choices and greater food consciousness that perhaps anywhere else on earth.  Easy access to healthy foods, combined with a climate that encourages outdoor activity, results in a population that is relatively fit compared to the rest of the United States. Severely overweight people here tend to stand out like sore thumbs, but you don’t have to travel very far, especially almost anywhere between the coasts, to realize Berkeley is the exception rather than the rule.

In an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, concludes that success in controlling health care costs won’t come about until we are able to change the way people eat, and that, in turn will require us to reform the food system — agribusiness — itself.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

Pollan feels that reforming the food industry will be even more difficiult than reforming health care, but that if the health insurance industry is forced to cover all these unhealthy people, they will quickly realize where their interests lie, and “the relationship between the health insurance industry and the food industry will undergo a sea change”:

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before.

Mark Haas General