This morning on DemocracyNow!, I got to talk a little about Newt Gingrich’s poisonous comments on Obama being the food stamp president. First, the facts. Under George Bush, the number of people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (what food stamps are more properly called in the US) rose by 14.7 million. Under Obama, the number rose by 14.2 million. It’s true, however, that much more money is being spent by Obama. As part of the stimulus bill, entitlements rose to a whopping average of $134.
The entitlements help, to some extent, to dampen in the impact of poverty. And in the teeth of the recession, it’s hard to argue against strengthening the safety net when so many Americans were falling into it.

Which brings us to Gingrich’s racial coding of ‘food stamp president’. Larry Wilmore deconstructs this nicely on The Daily Show.

While Gingrich’s comments are vile and reprehensible, the abandonment of the poor is wholly bipartisan. The fiasco over last year’s Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act demonstrates this amply. I wrote about this in 2010, arguing that, given the 100+billion dollar annual cost of hunger, a watered down $8 billion-dollar-over-ten-years bill to feed children was a bargain. The total amount that the government authorized: $4.5 billion, paid for by raiding the SNAP entitlement funds. Taking money from adults to feed their children is craven, but as Gingrich’s comments, and the rhetoric of deserving and undeserving poor suggests, our politicians are becoming increasingly Victorian.

Beneath this, the conversation that isn’t happening is, of course, about why poverty flourishes, and how to end it. As the documentary ‘Finding North’ – slug line: One Nation, Underfed – points out, that many hundreds of thousands more people want to be on assistance but can’t qualify. One in four children are food insecure in the US, and – I was shocked to learn – half of children in the US will be on assistance at some point in their lives. Hence the documentary’s title. The beautiful title track, written by The Civil Wars tells of a country that has lost its compass, and is having trouble finding north.

I’ve been working away on a big academic article on the “Green Revolution”, which I hope will be finished soon. Meantime, here’s a lecture based on the research so far, courtesy of the good folk at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Listen here.

It’s Martin Luther King day in the US today, and I managed to catch King’s “Birth of A New Nation” speech on KPFA’s Africa Today show this evening. The full speech is here but if you’ve a few minutes, it’s always heartstopping to hear Dr King preach.

[Click herefor the KPFA player's own page]

It’ll give you goosebumps no matter how much you hear but, for the rushed, jump on in at 39:30, which is where he says:

Ghana has something to say to us. It says to us first that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have to work for it….If there had not been an Nkrumah and his followers in Ghana, Ghana would still be a British colony. If there had not been abolitionists in America, both Negro and white, we might still stand today in the dungeons of slavery. And then because there have been, in every period, there are always those people in every period of human history who don’t mind getting their necks cut off, who don’t mind being persecuted and discriminated and kicked about, because they know that freedom is never given out, but it comes through the persistent and the continual agitation and revolt on the part of those who are caught in the system. Ghana teaches us that.

(A shorter version of this piece appeared on Marketplace today)

Bigger isn’t always better. By 2030, half of Americans won’t just be overweight, but obese. By then, nearly a fifth of our healthcare dollars will be spent treating the diseases that come with being bigger. Our lifestyles, rich in fat, sugar and inactivity, are creating a debt that’ll become the planet’s most expensive public health issue.

So what to do? One battle centers on how to make us better eaters and, especially, drinkers. Half of the sugar in US diets comes from sweetened beverages. Advocates of what gets called a soda-tax look like they’ve a strong case. Tax the sugar in the drink and the consumption goes down, right? Well yes, but a study from Northwestern University recently found that overweight people prefer diet drinks. You can almost hear the soda industry snickering.

But this oughtn’t to make us give up on the idea of taxation in the name of public health. Think about tobacco. A dollar tax on a pack of cigarettes makes some people smoke less, but that’s not the only thing we’ve done to curb smoking. We have changed regulation to target not just cigarettes but anything containing tobacco. We limited marketing to children. We’ve confronted the companies who profit from tobacco with a coherent public health push, and made them pay for their ill-gotten profits.

So why can’t taxes together with other ideas work with sugar? One in three kids born in America today will develop some form of diabetes, one in two kids of color. A meaningful soda tax – say a penny per ounce on sugary drinks – is an important part of a bigger policy strategy. We can, for example, take back the billions we spend subsidizing commodity and processed food production, and gives it to those most harmed by these products.

The food industry has responded by trundling out its experts – most notably Derek Yach, formerly an anti-tobacco hero at the World Health Organization, now a pro-Pepsi pundit at Pepsi – but also running adverts castigating soda taxes as a toll on the poor. “I can choose what to buy without help from the government”, offers TVs hapless and put-upon mother. That obesity is the result exclusively of a personal failing is a perception widely shared. As I argued in Stuffed and Starved, if the perception were true, you’d have a hard time explaining why Mexican teens are more overweight the closer you get to the US border.

So let’s just say that the individual interpretation of obesity is only part of the story. Advocates of a comprehensive public health strategy around obesity have to answer another charge -that they’re mongers of class war. This looks harder to evade – taxing food is always going to affect the poor disproportionately because poor people spend a greater proportion of household budgets on food than the rich. With poverty, energy dense foods become a rational way to “provide daily calories at an affordable cost”. As one researcher argues, “obesity is the toxic consequence of economic insecurity and a failing economic environment.”

But if that’s true, a soda tax sounds like it’s blaming the victim, part of a culture war between the rich who can afford not to drink Coke, and the poor who can’t afford anything else. And, certainly, if the move to tax soft drinks were an end in itself, then I’d want nothing to do with it. There’s far too long a history of culture war around food, with everything from white bread to Coca-Cola conscripted into a great battle over class and identity.

That said, if a soda tax can work as part of a bigger programme to rein in food companies and provide real choices to everyone across the food system, I’m all for it. That a tax falls disproportionately on the poor is reason to worry, of course. But tobacco taxes are like that too. What’ll make the difference is whether the tax is part of a bigger project to make the food industry pay for the health costs that will fall disproportionately on poor people. Ultimately, what we need an end to is not soda, but poverty. That’s a conversation long overdue.

In the meantime, though, don’t hate the soda tax. Local and regional governments are already experimenting with it, and the sky has yet to fall. This isn’t the nanny state as much as it is a response to the wild excess of Daddy Market. It’s just leveling the playing field back away from big food, so we’ll have fewer big people.