A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post served up, um, a “Whopper” of an article titled “How a national food policy could save millions of American lives,” an article so big that it required four authors, to wit: Mark Bittman, an opinion columnist and food writer for the New York Times; Michael Pollan, who teaches journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Ricardo Salvador is a senior scientist and director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists; and Olivier De Schutter, a professor of international human rights law at the Catholic University of Louvain.
Affecting a tone that could uncharitably described as “full rant,” our four tell us the following: “The food system and the diet [the U.S. food industry has] created have caused incalculable damage to the health of our people and our land, water and air. If a foreign power were to do such harm, we’d regard it as a threat to national security, if not an act of war, and the government would formulate a comprehensive plan and marshal resources to combat it.”
The first link takes you to an article in The Lancet about the worldwide impact of obesity on health, while the second links to an article on “External costs of agricultural production in the United States.” I will be pissy enough to point out that both articles actually do calculate the costs of the ills they describe (that’s the whole point, after all), so calling this damage “incalculable” is a bit of a stretch. According to The Lancet, “In 2010, overweight and obesity were estimated to cause 3 to 4 million deaths, 3 to 9% of years of life lost, and 3 to 8% of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) worldwide.” So if everyone in the U.S. were fit, millions of people would live a couple of years longer. Well, good. As for external costs of agricultural production, they’re estimated to range from $5.7 to $16.9 billion. Since the gross output of U.S. agriculture in 2011 was around $374 billion, those costs don’t look all that huge, and certainly not “incalculable.”
A few paragraphs down, the authors tell us “Because of unhealthy diets, 100 years of progress in improving public health and extending lifespan has been reversed. Today’s children are expected to live shorter lives than their parents.” Except that the article they link to, “A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century,” in the New England Journal of Medicine, doesn’t say that. Instead, the article says that while most experts predict a continuing increase in the average lifespan, they argue that increasing rates of obesity could reverse the trend. Not quite the same thing.
If Mark, Mike, Ricardo, and Olivier had only called their piece “If Americans wouldn’t eat so damn much, they’d live longer” I’d totally be down with it. It’s totally wrong to, say, eat a one-pound bag of cocoanut chocolate chip cookies during an evening and wash them down with a quart of milk, or eat a quart of mint chocolate chip ice cream for “dinner”, or eat an entire Sarah Lee German chocolate cake for “dessert”, to pull a few examples out of thin air, but it’s also totally ridiculous to believe that you can stop people from doing such things. What we have is another example of “doomsday science,” where data are misrepresented, where worst-case scenarios are transformed into certainties, and where inhumanly virtuous self-restraint can be summoned from an all-too-human population by a few suitably severe waves of a sufficiently stern magic wand. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wanted to force people to be free. MMRO want to force people to be thin. Neither strikes me as either palatable or possible.
Afterwords
I ate the quart of ice cream after being fired. Later, I worked for a company where people were often fired. Whenever someone was fired, I would tell them that story, which seemed to go over pretty well, until one woman said “If it had been a half gallon, it would be a good story.” Frankly, I never thought to eat a half gallon of ice cream at one sitting.
