Is corn making us fat? Michael Pollan argues that U.S. farm policy promoting overproduction of corn has made America overweight--and made big food companies very happy.

• Author: Pollan, Michael
• Position: National

Sometimes even complicated social problems turn out to be simpler than they look. Take America's obesity problem, perhaps the most serious public health issue facing the country. Three of every five Americans are now overweight, and some researchers predict that today's children will be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The culprits, they say, are the health problems associated with obesity.

You hear several explanations: Big food companies are pushing supersize portions of unhealthful foods on us; we have become a sluggish nation of couch potatoes; and families eat too much fast food.

All these explanations are true, as far as they go. But it pays to look for the cause behind the causes. Which, very simply, is this: When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat. Since 1977, an American's average daily intake of calories has jumped more than 10 percent. The interesting question is: Where, exactly, did all those extra calories come from in the first place? And the answer takes us back to the source of 'all calories: the farm.

Our underlying problem is agricultural overproduction, and that problem is almost as old as agriculture itself. Even in the Bible, there's talk about how to deal not only with the lean times but also with the fat: The Old Testament advises creation of a grain reserve to smooth out the swings of the market in food. The unpredictable nature of farming has always made it difficult to synchronize the supply of food available and the public demand for it. Farmers can decide how many acres they will plant, but precisely how much food they produce in any year is largely beyond their control due to weather and other factors.

According to the economic law of supply and demand, when prices fall, farmers should cut back on the amount of food they produce, which would shrink the supply of food and drive up its price. But in reality, farmers plant and harvest more food to keep their total income from falling. That drives prices down even lower. Add to this the constant improvements in agricultural technology, and you have a sure-fire recipe for over production--another word for way too much food.

Making the situation worse, the government now pays farmers to produce even more unneeded food. So while the federal government is fighting obesity, it's also indirectly encouraging it, by writing farmers a check for every bushel of corn they grow.

This hasn't always been the case. In fact, government farm programs in America were originally created as a way to shrink the total amount of grain. The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt established the nation's first program of farm support during the Depression, but not, as many people think, to feed a hungry nation. Then, as now, the problem was too much food, not too little.

FDR'S FARM PROGRAM

Roosevelt's New Deal farm policy was designed to help farmers reeling from a farm depression caused by collapsing prices due to overproduction. Under that policy, when market prices dropped, farmers could take out loans from the...