Michael Pollan, the Knight professor of journalism at the Cal-Berkeley and the author of ìThe Omnivoreís Dilemmaî (earlier post here), has been writing a series of op-eds for the New York Times in which he is addressing in an abbreviated manner various nutritional issues that he covers in his book. In this recent piece, Pollan examines why calorie-intensive processed foods have such a relatively cheap price at the supermarket in comparison to fresh fruits and vegetables:

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system ó indeed, to a considerable extent, for the worldís food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat ó three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades ó indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning ó U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.
Thatís because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a/k/a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Read the entire piece.