Michelle Obama takes on childhood obesity- Washington Post/Postpartisan blog

Michelle Obama takes on childhood obesity- Washington Post/Postpartisan blog


I don’t like being outdoors, Smithers. For one thing, there are too many fat children.
-- Mr. Burns, “The Simpsons,” 1996

Famously, Henry Ford wanted his cars priced inexpensively enough so that his assembly line laborers could afford to buy one. Sadly, the only racket in which this philosophy seems to have been retained is the American fast food industry. At the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, it takes just under thirty minutes of work for an average burger-flipper to earn enough to buy a Big Mac (average American price, $3.58) on his lunch break.

Startlingly, it would still take that burger-flipper 29 minutes to earn enough to buy a head of organic romaine lettuce ($3.49/head). Add tomato ($4.99/pound), sweet onion ($1.49/pound), and carrots ($2.49/bunch); skim milk ($2.99/half gallon), hardboiled egg ($3.69/dozen), and whole wheat bread ($3.49/loaf), and to purchase his shopping basket, he’d need to clock over three hours of work, not to mention the unpaid labor he’d have to devote to preparing those groceries into a food-pyramid-friendly meal.

This is the situation in American eating that has led to our epidemic of childhood obesity. Over the last three decades, childhood obesity rates in the United States have tripled, as First Lady Michelle Obama rightly noted yesterday in her launch speech for Let’s Move, the White House’s new campaign to combat the epidemic. Today, one-third of all American children are overweight or obese. The rate is even higher among African Americans, and one-half of all minority children born in 2000 or later can expect to develop early-onset diabetes.

As the prices above indicate, this epidemic is not to be blamed on eating habits themselves -- or even on their families. It is simply far less expensive to feed a family from the Dollar Menu at McDonald’s than it is to prepare fresh, healthy choices. And in some locations -- “food deserts,” as the White House calls them -- it is impossible because the fresh food simply isn’t available for purchase. As Mrs. Obama explained in an interview with Jim Lehrer on NewsHour, “We have to start with [the] assumption that parents aren’t deliberately making bad choices; they’re making the choices that they can under the circumstances.”

In addition to the basic proposals of Let’s Move (better labeling, more nutritious school lunches, more exercise, to name three), then, it is also these “circumstances” under which families make their food decisions that need to change. The current system of farm subsidies needs to be rethought, a strike that would level the playing field in the pricing of unhealthy vs. healthy foods. Tax-breaks for purveyors of fast food and junk food also need to be eliminated, as Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has proposed. In response to the launch of Let’s Move, Kucinich issued a statement saying, “Most Americans don’t know that the government now subsidizes the marketing of junk food and fast food to kids in order to cement their brand and taste allegiances early in life.” In 2006, McDonald’s spent $1 million every day on advertising aimed at American children, legally a tax-deductible business expenditure and, in effect, a subsidy given to the golden arches by the American people.

Complementing the first lady, President Obama today announced the formation of a task force charged with solving the problem of childhood obesity “within a generation.” It is a challenging goal, indeed, but the percentage of American smokers dropped from 42 percent in 1964, when Surgeon General Luther Terry revealed the dangers of cigarette smoking to the American public, to less than 20 percent in 2007. Given appropriate executive action, smart legislation, savvy organization and education and effective private effort (and not necessarily, as Mrs. Obama put it to Lehrer, “major lifestyle overhauls”), Americans have shown a willingness to become healthier; on the issue of childhood obesity, we can do it again.