Next up: We need the Nanny State to control your food production and intake from taco to turd!
Because yes, you idiot rubes (who we love so very much and fight, fight, FIGHT for every day!) can’t be trusted with what you put in your pie holes either.
No, Prozis are not at ALL totalitarian! Why do you ask, you racist?
How we produce and consume food has a bigger impact on Americans’ well-being than any other human activity.
True dat. The more we produce, the cheaper it is. The cheaper it is, the more delicious food we can afford. The more delicious food we can afford, the more we get to eat. And the more we eat, the weller we be!
Oh, that’s not what you mean? Of course it isn’t.
The food industry is the largest sector of our economy;
All the more reason for a True Believing Prozi to target it for destruction!
food touches everything from our health to the environment, climate change, economic inequality and the federal budget.
Not entirely sure how food touches economic inequality, but as long as it doesn’t touch us inappropriately, we’re fine with it.
Yet we have no food policy — no plan or agreed-upon principles — for managing American agriculture or the food system as a whole.
That must change.
Jawohl, Volksgenosse! Natürlich! Because as long as there remains as much as a smidgen of activity not being managed down to the micro level by our beloved, all-knowing, wise, benevolent government, Das Volk can never truly be free! You can’t trust liberty to individuals! Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!
The food system and the diet it’s 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.
We’re trying to summon a mental image of a foreign power bombing us with juicy beef ribs slathered in BBQ sauce, BLT sandwiches, rivers of beer and mountains of apple pies, but we find ourselves drooling too much to concentrate. Please, unnamed foreign power, unleash the hounds of war!
(The administration even named an Ebola czar to respond to a disease that threatens few Americans.)
No. Our Führer, Obola, named an Ebola czar to address the massive display of incompetence, lies and non-measures that their previous response had created. Actually doing something to address the disease couldn’t possibly be further from his mind, or Obola might have appointed somebody with a medical degree as opposed to a barely sentient political hack.
So when hundreds of thousands of annual deaths are preventable — as the deaths from the chronic diseases linked to the modern American way of eating surely are — preventing those needless deaths is a national priority.
See? Our Führer, the once and future king, our beloved Obola, will not merely make the ice cease to melt, the waters recede and the sun shine brighter. He will prevent Death itself!
Why are you so ungrateful, you BASTARDS!
A national food policy would do that, by investing resources to guarantee that:
? All Americans have access to healthful food;
As opposed to now, where the only healthful food is locked away in a secret Koch brother bunker in Arizona. We think.
? Farm policies are designed to support our public health and environmental objectives;
And absolutely not designed to support efficient, affordable production of food, much less the farmers’ ability to make a living. Bloody selfish, counter-revolutionary kulaks.
? Our food supply is free of toxic bacteria, chemicals and drugs;
Bacteria will be banned by the Politburo (why didn’t medical science think of that? Stupid capitalist running dog lackey swine), vegetables will be eaten by pests and fungi, and farm animals will be skinny, diseased and mangy. Just imagine what a FEAST we’ll have!
? Production and marketing of our food are done transparently;
As transparent as the Obola administration? Besides, are you sure that your Prozi hipster urban neckbeards really want to see how pastrami and cheese is made? Really sure?
? The food industry pays a fair wage to those it employs;
Which they can then use to not be able to buy the food that suddenly went up in price by a factor of ten. But maybe they can stuff their mattresses with it?
? Food marketing sets children up for healthful lives by instilling in them a habit of eating real food;
Oh yes. We just can’t wait for endless barrages of PBS infomercials about the benefits of eating real beet soup and real gruel for the benefit of the Common Good™.
? Animals are treated with compassion and attention to their well-being;
Just promise us: No kissing, m’kay? In return we’ll promise to kill them while paying the utmost attention to their well-being.
? The food system’s carbon footprint is reduced, and the amount of carbon sequestered on farmland is increased;
First, we’ll teach the animals not to breathe, so’s not to have them emit carbon footprints in the form of CO2. With attention to their well-being, of course. Breathing is so bourgeois, anyways. And we’ll “sequester” more carbon on farmland by outlawing harvesting their crops. Or something. We’ll get there, we swear!
? The food system is sufficiently resilient to withstand the effects of climate change.
Which, given the climate’s current 17 year track record of change, would best be done by teaching plants how to grow under a thick layer of snow and ice.
Only those with a vested interest in the status quo would argue against creating public policies with these goals.
Meaning everybody, since the status quo would mean “surviving” as opposed to dying of starvation in the cold under your plan.
Now weigh them against the reality that our current policies and public investments have given us:
Because of unhealthy diets, 100 years of progress in improving public health and extending lifespan has been reversed.
The average lifespan hasn’t increased over the past 100 years? News to us. You’ve already finished rewriting all of those mountains of statistics? Impressive. Your Soviet Airbrushing Division have really been putting in some overtime, haven’t they?
Today’s children are expected to live shorter lives than their parents.
Let’s check that when today’s children have died, shall we? Reality has a way of messing up you Prozis’ projections. Just ask Paul Ehrlich et al. Unless your projections are based on you Prozis’ wet dreams of being at the beginning of a Thousand Year Prozi Reich, of course, in which case lower life spans are pretty much a guaranteed outcome. Just check the stats of every single nation in the history of mankind where your diseased pathology has been tried.
In large part, this is because a third of these children will develop Type 2 diabetes, formerly rare in children and a preventable disease that reduces life expectancy by several years. At the same time, our fossil-fuel-dependent food and agriculture system is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other sector of the economy but energy. And the exploitative labor practices of the farming and fast-food industries are responsible for much of the rise in income inequality in America.
So we’re all going to die of diabetes unless we starve ourselves, the AGW that has so far been utterly absent will suddenly come back and, and what exactly?, and we’ll all die of income inequality?
It really takes a very determined approach of willful ignorance to make any sense of anything that you Prozis say.
We find ourselves in this situation because government policy in these areas is made piecemeal. Diet-related chronic disease, food safety, marketing to children, labor conditions, wages for farm and food-chain workers, immigration, water and air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and support for farmers: These issues are all connected to the food system. Yet they are overseen by eight federal agencies. Amid this incoherence, special interests thrive and the public good suffers.
It should all be overseen by ONE all-powerful federal agency, ALL of it, with NONE of that counter-revolutionary interference from kulak individuals because…
LIBERTY!
In the early days of the Obama administration,
When mankind lived for hundreds of years, the sun shone brighter, the brooks babbled more merrily, lions laid down with lambs and bicyclists had tailwinds going in both directions…
there were encouraging signs that the new president recognized the problems of our food system and wanted to do something about them. He spoke about the importance of safety, transparency and competition in the food industry.
Since then, the first lady has made childhood obesity her signature issue, elevating food on the national agenda.
Not pictured: starving child trying to concentrate with stomach growling
Elevating food only so she could more easily slide it down into that gargantuan maw of hers.
But as Michelle Obama raises awareness of healthy eating and tries to reform school lunch,
Reform pictured above. Somali school kids eat better than that.
she is struggling to undo the damage caused by outmoded agricultural policies that her husband has left largely undisturbed. The result is the spectacle of Michelle Obama warning Americans to avoid high-fructose corn syrup at the same time the president is signing farm bills that subsidize its production.
…and she’s shoving fries and lobsters into her face at a frantic pace as her voluminous arse gets its own gravitational field.
When it came to regulating methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed stringent rules for the energy industry — and another voluntary program for agriculture, the single biggest emitter of the gas.
“Voluntary”
Mheh.
So what was the program about? Shoving corks up the arses of their cows? Surely not. The First Wookie would never dare go near a farm again for fear she’d never be able to sit on a chair after that.
These policies and the diet they sponsor threaten to undermine President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Not that it needs any help.
But there is something the president can do now, on his own, to break that deadlock, much as he has done with climate change.
See? It really IS thanks to Der Fubar that the planet hasn’t warmed for 17 years! He is so powerful, in fact, that it stopped warming in shivering anticipation of his coming 11 years in advance!
In the next State of the Union address, he should announce an executive order establishing a national policy for food, health and well-being.
Because that’s what democracy is all about! Imperial Executive Orders or, in the original German, Führerdiktat! Why not go all the way? Forbid cancer as well!
Why hasn’t anybody thought of that before?
By officially acknowledging the problem and by setting forth a few simple principles on which most Americans agree,
By “most Americans”, you mean the 2/3 that didn’t vote.
the introduction of such a policy would create momentum for reform. By elevating food and farming to a matter of public concern rather than a parochial interest, the president can make it much more difficult for the interests of agribusiness to prevail over those of public and environmental health.
The national food policy could be developed and implemented by a new White House council, which would coordinate among, say, the Department of Health and Human Services and the USDA to align agricultural policies with public health objectives, and the EPA and the USDA to make sure food production doesn’t undermine environmental goals.
Not included: Input from the American people and Congress.
Really now. The Washington Compost should just go ahead and change its name to “Volkischer Beobachter” already.
Or, given the sign of the times, perhaps they should start helping Obola digging a hole for his bunker.
He’ll be needing it soon.
Thatisall.