A kernel of truth? Nation's obese are corn-fed

WASHINGTON -- A year out of Yale, best pals Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney returned to their Midwestern roots to grow an acre of corn on a farm just across the Minnesota border in Iowa.

Out of the venture grew a documentary film linking America's abundance of major, subsidized crops to its obesity epidemic. The national weight problem is fed, in some part, by the prevalence of grain-fed beef, corn-sweetened soft drinks, and soybean-based cooking oils, they say.

Think soda pop, hamburgers and French fries.

Any other year, the film by Ellis and Cheney might have found a rapt audience among fringe public health advocates and then been promptly forgotten.

But this year, obesity has become a national obsession just as Congress is embarking on one of its periodic overhauls of the nation's farm policy.

"For the first time, the two sides in the farm bill -- the nutrition half and the commodity-subsidy half -- are talking to each other," Ellis said.

In response to growing concerns about health, particularly children's health, the new five-year farm bill going before the Senate now provides a record $2 billion for specialty crops, including money to buy fruits and vegetables for school lunches and to assist organic agriculture.

While still a small fraction of the money spent on direct payments to large-scale producers of corn, soybeans and wheat, the sum is almost five times the amount provided for specialty crops in the 2002 farm bill.

Some of the lobbying clout behind the move has come from fruit and vegetable growers outside the country's traditional Midwestern breadbasket. But much of it also has come from public health advocates in Minnesota and elsewhere, who have urged Congress to produce a farm bill that looks beyond the interests of farmers and food companies and seeks to improve what people eat.

"This is really a new force," said Mark Muller of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, which has been promoting a realignment of the U.S. food industry to promote a healthier consumer diet.

Influencing what we eat

While roughly half of the $286 billion total cost of the farm bill passed by the House this year goes to subsidies for traditional row crops such as corn and soybeans, reformers have sought to channel more federal money into programs for nutrition and promoting locally-grown produce.

The upshot: The Senate farm bill would increase spending on nutrition programs by $4.2 billion.

"Up until this year, everybody thought the farm bill was only about farms," said Fargo native Neal Barnard, a physician who heads an advocacy group called Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine that has run television ads in Minnesota criticizing the clout of agribusiness. "Now they realize it's about whether our kids are going to be eating at McDonald's because it's cheap."

Another ad, sponsored by the anti-poverty group Oxfam America, targets farm subsidies for favoring the nation's biggest producers of the major commodity crops that dominate the food industry.

The groups have targeted Minnesota audiences because of the clout of the state's congressional delegation on farm policy.

Minnesota Democrat Collin Peterson chairs the House Agriculture Committee, whose version of the farm bill leaves payments to farmers largely intact. Minnesota Sens. Norm Coleman, a Republican, and Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, both sit on the Senate Agriculture Committee, which approved a slightly more reform-minded measure.

Public health reformers say American agribusiness has come to rely too much on its two biggest and most heavily-subsidized cash crops, corn and soybeans, which take up nearly 60 percent of American's cropland. Not surprisingly, products made from these two commodities have become ubiquitous in the American diet.

Commercial baking and cooking is the largest single use for soy oil, while high-fructose corn syrup has surpassed cane and beet sugar as a sweetener in everything from sodas to baked goods.

Nutritionists can debate whether foods made from corn and soy are any less nutritious than foods made from other oils and sweeteners. But there is little dispute that their prevalence in the food industry has been increased by federal policies that boost the production of soybeans and corn.

"Because we've had such low-priced corn, we've found new uses for the corn, and that's the primary driver of the system," Muller said.

'Not corn's fault'

Food industry and farm groups say whatever the merits of the health overhaul agenda, it has nothing to do with overproduction on the farm.

"America is facing a corn shortage, not a corn surplus," said Scott Faber, vice president for federal affairs for an association that represents grocery manufacturers and food companies in Washington.

Driving that shortage, which has led to a price spike in the past year, is the nation's energy crunch and government policies, which have directed a larger portion of the nation's agricultural production into the service of biofuels such as ethanol.

The nation's corn growers make no apologies for their success. Nor are they inclined to accept blame for the nation's obesity problem.

"There's no difference between high-fructose corn syrup calories and sugar calories," said Ron Litterer, board president of the National Corn Growers Association.

Litterer's home town of Greene, Iowa, was the site for the King Corn documentary, for which he finds little use. Obesity is not about what farmers grow, but what, and how much, people eat, he says.

"It comes down to people's choices and what they consume," Litterer said. "It's their diet, their lifestyle. It's not corn's fault. It's just not."

In the end, it is consumer choice that will drive what farmers grow, according to Faber and other industry representatives.

The health reformers say they have only just begun.

"We are exactly where we were with tobacco in the 1970s," said Barnard. "The health community was just starting to get its hands around the problem. This is clearly a long battle. But people are starting to wake up."

Kevin Diaz • 202-408-2753

Kevin Diaz • kdiaz@startribune.com