As the health care debate rises to a feverish pitch, we need to consider the connection between the health care crisis, the energy crisis and climate change.
Over the last 50 years, health care costs have risen drastically at the same time food prices have fallen, according to Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 12, 2008. Cheap supermarket food, derived almost entirely from the four commodity crops, corn, soy beans, wheat and rice, has resulted in an obese citizenry subject to the killer diseases such as heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. This puts a strain on the health care system. Producing these four commodity crops is responsible for 37 percent of the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, more than anything else we do, and consumes the second largest percentage of fossil fuels, next to cars. In 1940, we could produce 2.3 food calories with one calorie of fossil-fuel energy. It now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one food calorie, which means the real cost of our food is hidden. We pay for this food with tax subsidies to huge corporations, rather than by choice at the grocery store.
Read Michael Pollan's entire letter on the Internet under nytimes.com, which offers interesting and practical solutions to this dilemma and also addresses the food connection to problems of homeland security and the job market.
If we keep doing what we have been doing, we can hardly expect different results. We need real solutions, not damage control to get out of the mess we are in.
Elizabeth S. Sweeten
Ogden
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