An Inconvenient Lunch - By Christopher Kimball

September, 2006

The casual observer might conclude that America is finally waking up to the looming crisis in our diet, especially the junk foods we package and promote as nutritious school lunches. Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me earned $30 million at the box office, conferences have been held, editorials written and a wealth of best-selling “junk food” books have landed in bookstores including Fast Food Nation, Food Politics, Fat Land, and The Omnivore’s Dilemna. Yet the wary consumer might have noticed the recent introduction of Burger King’s “Quad Stacker,” a four-cheeseburger high-rise that delivers 1,000 calories and 68 grams of fat. Clearly, the road to wholesome, nutritious school lunches is going to be a bumpy one.

Is this bleak outlook simply due to the $15 billion annual marketing outlay used to sell junk foods to kids? Is it no more than the power of profits, schools finding that their school lunch programs make more money selling chips and soda than real food? Or is it simply that American kids and their parents have become addicted to the highly processed smorgasbord of our fast food nation?

Let me offer an “inconvenient” theory. The enemy is not the school systems, the food companies, or government: it is ourselves. As Alexis de Tocqueville warned nearly two centuries ago, our national character is deeply tied to the pursuit of profit and comfort. We have become a nation, on average, of extremely wealthy consumers who have the means and opportunity to make choices based not on survival but on the satisfaction of desire. Industry, for its part, responds to this fruitful marketplace by offering proprietary products that offer maximum profit margin that promise immediate satisfaction of these desires. (Hence processed foods, SpongeBob Squarepants Cereal for example, are the ultimate vehicle for profits since they are more expensive, easily branded, and perfectly suited for packaging that appeals to children.)

Modern consumers want quick and easy pleasure. To satisfy our primal hardwiring in this regard that means foods rich in fat, sugar, and salt. (In a primitive culture, these foods were scarce and therefore highly desirable for survival.) In other words, the system is rigged against our long-term best interest, which, most of us would agree, would include health, happiness, and longevity. Obese individuals are clearly less likely to experience those three outcomes. It is a curious and sad fact that education is an excellent predictor of long-term health and that being overweight often results in lower compensation even for the same jobs.

The question, then, for any democracy is what is the role of government when personal choices turn out to be bad ones? Put another way, what does a democracy do when the vast majority of citizens have the resources and time to pursue personal pleasure and the commercial sector has the skill to endlessly indulge them and that behavior degrades the quality of life and increases the financial burdens for society at large?

Conservatives would say do nothing – this is a matter of personal choice. But there are a host of reasonable historic precedents including effective regulations regarding seat belts, drunk driving, speed limits, minimum age requirements for purchasing tobacco and alcohol, guns in school – the list goes on. And in the arena of public advocacy, we are constantly aware of warnings, regarding unprotected sex, the evils of alcohol, tobacco, and the need for conservation or the perils of drug use.

Is this problem really a national crisis, one on a level with the ill effects of smoking for example? No, it is much worse. Within two years, more people will die from bad diets than smoking and, even today, obesity-related diseases account for more than 300,000 deaths. However, the most shocking statistic is this. The Center for Disease Control predicted that, if trends continue, one third of the children born in 2000 will contract diabetes. In other words, the next generation of Americas will live shorter, less healthy lives than the current one. School lunch, then, is ultimately about taxes, deficits, and health.

So here is a simple five-part plan. First and foremost, fire the USDA. This is a bureaucracy that, for the most part, represents the interests of our largest food producers. Second, let’s create a separate food agency -- headed by a food tsar if you will -- that is charged with investigating the relationship between food and health, assessing the long-term cost of our current diet, protecting our youngest citizens by curtailing advertising of junk foods, administering a school lunch program that provides sufficient financial underwriting (here in U.S., we spend about $2 for a school lunch versus $8 in France and about $5 in Italy where 70% of the ingredients are organic) and enforcing strict guidelines as to what can be on the menu. Third, let’s attack the cost, human and financial, of junk foods as we dealt with smoking. Use all media, including the internet, to make the case for school lunch reform. This will require funding, much of it from government resources. Fourth, government ought to support our small farms, in particular those folks who can provide locally grown, wholesome foods that can be used for school lunches. Already, Senator Harkin has initiated a pilot program to provide free fruits and vegetables as snack foods to public schools. Fifth, let’s create a nationwide school curriculum that revamps the old “home economics” courses to include basic cooking instruction and defines what it means to create a wholesome diet. Our kids need to know how to boil an egg and to tell the difference between good food and junk food.

Of course, all of this would be unnecessary if we, as an enlightened populace, decided to prove de Tocqueville wrong. We all know, at some level, that real pleasure is not easy to come by, that the enormous effort that goes into Thanksgiving dinner is somehow integral to its enjoyment. Cheap eats are no more satisfying than a cheap suit.

Hoping for better government may seem a vain hope but leaving these choices entirely to our children has yielded a population that is headed for an economic and health crisis that will, in comparison, make smoking seem about as threatening as the common cold. The problem of school lunches is a bit like global warming. Experts agree that the current American diet has huge personal and economic consequences but we still do nothing. (The direct annual cost of obesity-related disease is already $100 billion and some put the grand total at $250 billion if one counts lost productivity.) Maybe we can’t significantly affect the long-term climate of the planet but we certainly can change the climate in our school lunchrooms. But let’s get moving – the storm clouds are gathering.

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