Interesting article in the New York Times caught my eye recently. Entitled "You Are What You Grow", the article seeks to explore why the most reliable predictor of a person's obesity in America today is that it is inversely proportional to a person's wealth, which doesn't make sense, intuitively. Why do poor people get fat which rich people stay thin?

The answer lies in the number of calories available per dollar in American supermarkets. Cheap processed foods and snacks lack vast amounts of calories, whereas fresh produce is more expensive and has far fewer calories. So for example, 1 dollar can buy you 1,200 calories of coolies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots; 875 of soda but only 170 calories of fresh orange juice. So the rational economic strategy if you are eating on a restricted budget is to eat cheap processed foods, from which you can get all your necessary calories but which make you fat.

This perverse situation is due largely to America's Farm Bill, a relic of the 1930s which heavily subsidises five crops- corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice. As a result, it is far cheaper to make and sell a heavily processed food or drink item out of these products, even with all the necessary industrial inputs and energy costs, then it is to grow and sell produce. Thus, the price differential in the supermarket.

What really interested me is how this Farm Bill not just dictates the American food system, but has a massive impact on the global food system. This system has impacts on the environment, on poverty, and even on immigration. Most directly, it impacts our own food systems and diets all over the world. By depressing the price of basic crops, it enables many of these unhealthy products to invade foreign dining tables all over the world and push aside healthier local varieties of food.

It's not just America, either: Europe has lived with the Common Agricultural Policy for much too long. But I believe with the growth of the organic movement (which seems to have taken a very firm hold here in Britain) will come increasing awareness that legislation like the Farm Bill and the CAP artificially distorts the market and increases the cost of eating healthily, hitting our waistlines. Perhaps this will convince voters in the first world to act: It's one thing to be concerned about the plight of African farmers in an abstract way, but it's a much more effective tool to change peoples' minds by telling them that their food is artificially expensive and their health and waistlines are suffering as a result.