Where's the presidential food fight?

Published online on Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008

Something is missing from this presidential election: food.

Food should be an issue but it's absent from the political dialogue. The public doesn't seem to care, even with skyrocketing food prices. This especially affects lower-income communities, yet very few will call for action.

Food, for the most part, remains distant, grown someplace else (accentuating the urban and rural divide), disconnected from our daily lives, fragmented in our collective memory. Food continues to be politically marginalized and invisible.

The result: There is no public dialogue about food. Without little public interest, politicians need not care. In this election year, I want candidates to get into a food fight.

Why? In the past, what was there to debate? It was always a given food will be on the dinner plate (at least of voters). The public felt confident their meal ticket was secure. Other than an occasional food recall, most of us felt relatively safe. Some have noticed prices have increased, others have changed their eating habits by eating out less, but generally, we go to the store and expect to find plenty of cheap food.

For example, a farm bill was finally passed in the spring after a year-long debate in Congress, but ask most people and they'll respond, "Who cares?" Mention that the majority of funding in the farm bill includes nutrition and food stamp programs, assistance for those most in need, and still, a glazed look will appear on people's faces. In the United States, we have no comprehensive food policy. We have segregated issues and agendas.

Farming legislation is often discussed only with a farm audience. Environmental policy many times excludes input from agriculture or is perceived as an attack on agriculture. Food safety programs are divided between the Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and more recently, Homeland Security. Nutrition for women, infants and children, such as the WIC program that supports low-income women and children by providing food, is part of the USDA, not the Department of Health and Human Services.

What would food policy look like? Or a simpler question in the election year: What are Sen. Barack Obama's or Sen. John McCain's favorite foods? Their answers may well reveal their food platform.

I call for an end to segregation: Food policy and programs must be integrated. Good food needs to be healthy and productive, green and environmentally responsible, and fair and affordable for all, including producers. This demands complex answers, ironically, solutions not suitable for an election year.

Immigration reform must be brought to the table and back into the equation, empowering field and processing workers and acknowledging their roles in growing our foods.

We need a unified food-safety policy, under a single agency. This coordinated approach can focus on establishing the necessarily protocols and scientifically based procedures that focus on risk assessment and management, as well as communications. I hope this can ensure confidence by creating a rapid-response plan to a food-safety crisis, avoiding media-driven, knee-jerk responses calling for "quick fixes" and a race to identify the culprits. (Ask tomato farmers about the price of false accusations and being labeled guilty until proven innocent.)

We can actively plan for the future by rethinking the farm bill as a food bill. In the recently adopted 2008 Farm Bill, for the first time, specialty crops earned a place at the table along with a public interest in how crop subsidies were allocated. But in the future, as part of the beginning farmer program, are the faces of the ethnically diverse farmers welcomed to a new farm bill table? Is this the role urban ethnic communities can play in farm bill politics: helping to ensure "their foods" are part of a new American diet with diversity welcomed? The 2012 Farm Bill debate begins now.