An obesity researcher decided to investigate just how many calories one could buy with a dollar in the grocery store. As he discovered, the highly processed foods contained many more calories for the dollar. It seems a little perplexing that the more processing, marketing, and packaging involved the cheaper the cost of the food. But that's the trend of farm subsidies.
The carrot vs. the Twinkie:
Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.
The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. ...
The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.
When applied to school lunches, a lunch with more calories will be favored over a lunch with fewer and this translates back to processed foods.
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