Is Fat a Socialist Issue?
I was recently looking at the excellent web site AfterNow which examines issues of population health and their relationship to the type of society we live in.
In one of the videos there Prof. Phil Hanlon describes the human species as obeseogentic, having an innate tendency to consume available food even if it makes us obese.
He argues that those of our ancestors who failed to eat what was available would not have survived to produce descendants, so on classic Darwinian grounds we are adapted to eat as much as we can.
This was fine until the technology of food production reached its current development. In rich countries today substantially more food than is necessary is readily produced. Under these circumstances what had at one time been a survival trait becomes a source of pathology.
This is a very telling point, it undermines the idea that over-eating is almost a moral failure, the ideology that healthy eating is a matter of personal responsibility. If eating what is available is programmed into our genes, preaching dietary responsibility is as futile as the centuries of religious strictures against fornication.
At the same time it hits at the belief that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds if production is guided by consumer preferences expressed in the market.
Our preferences express survival traits that are no longer appropriate.
How then can we respond politically to the growing health problems posed by obesity?
If we reject moral lectures, what is left?
Planned food production. It is possible determine with a high degree of precision how much food is required to maintain the population at a healthy nutritional level. Produce in excess of this and there will be health problems due to obesity, diabetes etc. Produce less and there will be health problems due to malnutrition.
Agriculture in the EU has long been the subject of political intervention, but these interventions have not been directed towards optimising population nutrition. To move that way would require the Commission to set quotas for the production and import of carbohydrates, sugars, proteins, saturated and unsaturated fats, set by the dietary needs of the EU population.
It would require planning in kind of the sort that was carried out in wartime, but without the need for rationing.
Rationing was only necessary because total wartime production was short of optimal health requirements.
Today it would be unnecessary to interfere directly with personal consumer choice in that way. So long as the total flow from farm to factory was controlled, there would be no need to intervene in the detailed flows from factory to consumer via the super markets.
Failure to do this, continuation down the line of market led food production means condemning the rising generations to a future of ill health.
Did this get held over from last Thursday by accident?
But the world still doesn’t produce enough food. Or, put more accurately, the food produced, although it possibly could feed everyone, does not.
In a world where such a huge number of people remain hungry I don’t think food production is what needs to be focussed on, its distribution that the issue.
No, nothing was held over: Dr. Cockshott can now post his articles whenever he likes.
As for a focus on distribution vs. a focus on production, obviously the whole distribution chain is created by the market. The UK, for example, produces 60% of the foods consumed here – the rest are imported, a chain only sustained because of the wealth of the UK and thus our ability to pay importers and foreign farmers (however badly).
There are also complicating factors like unseasonality. Across the world, we grow resource-intensive foods well out of their natural season, to import them to Western nations (and other nations? I don’t know). This sort of thing would have to stop – and the market has only exacerbated it. In theory, I suppose, it could be corrected by government-imposed externalities, but companies may just hike the price, solving nothing.
No, it was a new one
On a world basis you are correct, but politics can only proceed on the basis of where there are political institutions. The only political institutions relevant to food production are the WTO and there is no plausible way that the WTO can be used to remedy the mal distribution of food on a world scale. Within Europe however there is a well established political structure relating to food production in the CAP, which allows the question to be addressed politically.
How, then, is it the case that the obese remain a minority? Plenty of people seem to manage to eat reasonably healthily. Is the obesity of a minority a justification for changing the rules for the entire society?
This presumes that we know what’s good for people when in fact there is still considerable debate about this. Nutrition is still a relatively young field, with considerable disputes amongst its practitioners. Some argue that high carbohydrate and low fat diets are optimal, others argue the opposite. Some argue that certain kinds of fat are healthy, others argue that all are bad. Still more people argue that optimal diet varies depending on the genetics of the individual and their lifestyle. A weightlifter has different requirements to an office worker who has different requirements to a teenager and so forth. What’s more, lifestyle can vary over time. The notion that the EU can determine optimal diet without any knowledge of the personal circumstances of the individuals in question seems rather optimistic.
Food is not fuel and is not a fungible commodity. It’s not a case of putting a certain mix of resources into a population and getting a healthy population out on the other side.
So if I eat rather ascetically, avoiding sugar-heavy foods, I create a sugar surplus that can be consumed by someone else? Might my counterpart not become just as obese under this scheme as they would now?
You say that plenty of people manage to eat healthily — yes that is true, but in all epidemiology one is dealing with probabilities. Plenty of people smoke and do not develop lung cancer, but smoking increases the prevalence of lung cancer. Food surpluses increase the prevalence of obesity and diabetes.
There may be disputes about some aspects of nutrition, but there is a general agreement in the medical profession that excess calorie consumption, high intake of sugar, and high intakes of saturated fats are detrimental to health.
You are right that different people have different requirements which is why it would be a mistake to have a rationing system. But if the total output of sugars and saturated fats were restricted the population incidence of obesity and diabetes would certainly fall.
You are absolutely wrong that food is not fuel. It is first and foremost fuel, and secondarily a source of other nutriments, a cursory reading of the history of food production and rationing during the war would soon convince you of the essential role of food as an energy source. Back in the 40s nutrition was less developed than now, but under the leadership of a good nutritionist and socialist Boyd Orr, a remarkable job was done in maintaining health in the face of limted resources.
Food is not fuel in the sense that oil or gas is fuel. For a certain unit of fuel going in, we expect to get a certain amount of energy out. The same is sort-of true of food in the sense that calories represent energy, but the human body processes food in a much more complex way than an engine uses fuel. For example, it’s possible to live on a nearly-zero carbohydrate “ketogenic” diet (as Inuit people do), or on a nearly-zero fat diet if one lives largely on bread, vegetables and protein of some kind. The body can adapt and change its metabolism, gut fauna, insulin sensitivity and so forth. This is before we consider the energy usage pattern, which changes with time and with both voluntary and involuntary lifestyle changes.
Food is also pleasurable to consume. Cake may not be ‘good’ for me, but I like eating it. Your system takes no account of the pleasure people can have from food.
Patterns of food consumption matter, too. Type 2 diabetes can be caused by insulin ‘spikes’ that are caused by ingesting lots of sugar (or simple carbohydrates that are easily processed into sugar) in a short space of time, even if overall sugar consumption is unremarkable.
I still go back to my earlier point that human variability is too great to predict food requirements. If I start going to the gym more often, my food requirements will go up. Elite athletes often consume 5-6000 calories per day, which is 2-3 times the average, and there’s obviously a sliding scale between average sedentary people and those who exercise lots. People who are naturally small in stature consume less food than those who are very tall.
There’s also the fact that any constriction of supply will cause prices to rise. This has always, throughout history, worked against the interests of the poor. That’s why the poor were rioting against the Corn Laws in the 19th century.
I’m just not sure that you’ve thought this through. I enjoy reading this blog largely because although I don’t always agree with it, the ideas expressed are usually well thought-out and logical. This just feels like a dilletantish application of the idea of planning to a subject that the author has no particular understanding of, with no attempt to think past the initial questions and consider the complexity of the issues. The simple “hey, if we change the inputs we’ll get desirable outputs even without thinking about how this will work on a micro level” approach is naive to the point that I can’t believe a serious person would advocate it.
“Today it would be unnecessary to interfere directly with personal consumer choice in that way. So long as the total flow from farm to factory was controlled, there would be no need to intervene in the detailed flows from factory to consumer via the super markets.”
Yes, there would. Otherwise, how do you stop people buying more than their nutritionally optimum amount of bacon, chocolate, ice cream and red wine? Or, if they arrive late, buying it off the internet from a supermarket warehouse in somebody else’s area, thus depriving them in turn? At the moment, this is just a bit of a bind. Under your system, if some people are over-eating that means other people are forced to undereat. it would actually be dangerous.
I don’t know if this is the right place to make mention of Vertical Farming (publicly owned along sovkhoz lines) as a key component of the solution to the food problem.
[Vertical farming isn’t the be-all-and-end-all, though: http://www.revleft.com/vb/urban-workers-onlyi-t123187/index.html?p=1613967
On the basis that Rob isn’t dead of starvation I think we can presume he knows food is a rather key source of energy. I think his point was probably that fats, sugars, carbs etc aren’t fungible – they all do different things for the body. He has got a point that the abstenious behaviour of some could leave sugar surpluses for others (or, conversely, that gluttonous behaviour by some could lead to shortages for others.) This problem isn’t necessarily insurmountable, but it needs addressing.
There is also a second problem. Is it not likely that food prices would skyrocket, as people’s evolutionary instincts led them on a sugar crazed charge to stock up on the fats for the long hard winter?
Well there would be price effects, no doubt about that, the relative price of sugary food would rise, the relative price of healthier food would fall.
Rich fatties would take a disproportionate share of sugar, but if that meant that children bought less sweets out of pocket money, so much the better for the population’s dental health.
That would be true if the quota for the agricultural level were shrunk to wartime levels, but the surpluses are so significant now that one could reduce overall production levels of sugars and fats per capita to those of say 30 years ago without danger.
Er, why would the price of healthy food fall?
I take it you are aware that fat and sugar are actually quite important parts of the diet – everyone who eats a balanced diet would face rising prices for these parts of their diet.
That and the resulting trade wars.
All this just to stop a few fatties getting fat. Shame we haven’t discovered the ability of learned behaviours to overcome genetic impulses.
I said that the relative price of more healthy food would fall. If people make choices based on relative prices, then they would buy more of the healthy and less of the unhealthy foods.
Fat is a necessary part of the human diet, sugar is not, and was not a significant part of diet until the mass production of cane sugar in the 18th century.
There would be an increase in average food prices, rises in junk food prices pushing up overall averages. This potentially creates rent revenues for the producers of such products. These could be recouped partly by a reduction in subsidies to the production of dairy fats and sugars. If production was still excessive in the absence of subsidies then quotas for production or imports could be auctioned and the resulting revenues used as pension or school meal subsidies.
It is a little cavalier of you to dismiss what is now one of the major causes of ill health in rich countries as ‘a few fatties’. The major infectious diseases have been controlled, the health problems that are growing are those associated with the rise of modern consumer society.
Yes this is true, but the adaptations in insulin sensitivity generated by the type of high fat and high sugar diets produced by our food industry, are pathological, which is a key issue.
The approach I am putting forward on this issue is part of an overall view of how to combine socialist planning with price flexibility in the consumer goods market that Allin Cottrell and I first put forward some 18 years ago in our book ‘Towards a New Socialism’.
The idea is that it was fundamentally a mistake for socialist governments in Eastern Europe to allow consumer goods prices to deviate from market clearing levels. Our position was that in general consumer goods prices should be used as a guide to levels of production as well, except where there are over-riding social or political reasons otherwise. Health considerations are an example of such an over-riding reason. I favour the prices of tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy foods being maintained above what would be justified by the cost of production.
There is no doubt that pleasure can be obtained from eating cream cakes. Pleasure can be obtained from drinking spirits or smoking cigarettes too, but it it now accepted that it would be irresponsible to allow the latter to be sold at normal production costs. I favour for example, the SNP ( and BMA ) proposals for minimum alcohol prices in Scotland.
Personal freedom to decide whether to buy a bottle of Vodka remains, but by taxing it the state influences that decision and can control the level of alcohol induced disease. The situation with excess consumption of sugars and saturated fats is, in principle, no different.
Of course there are individual variations in dietary requirements, but these are variations around a mean. All that matters from the standpoint of aggregate production is the mean.
True in the 19th century the workers movement opposed tariffs on foods, but the supply situation now and the the 19th century are very different.
I don’t like the idea of sales taxes on even “sin” items. However, how about deliberate shortages?
I wrote elsewhere that there should be very limited production of “sin” items, but that these items should be sold with price ceilings. The result would be analogous to both Soviet bread queues and Boxing Day clearance madness (Dec. 26 every year).
You are quite right. I beg your pardon – I misread your post whilst dashing off a quick reply on my way out the house.
On sugar – we were talking cross purposes – I meant sugar in terms of the food group rather than the item.
Yes I was being cavalier, deliberately so. I suppose my point was that the policy results in higher food prices for all due to the inability of some to overcome their genetic urges. If you are happy with that then fair enough, and of course there is a good point that I will pay more in food and less in taxes for the treatment of fat people.
Bear in mind that only some food items would have to go up in price. Grains, vegetables, fruit etc would not. Indeed if farmers unable to get EC quotas for sugar beet production shifted to other crops, some of these prices might actually fall slightly.
There would be a problem with dairy production generally since cream is a joint product with milk. It might be necessary to dioivert some butterfat or lard into non food uses — biofuel being the obvious one.