Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Farmers get short-changed in our current food system
I saw this on AgWeb:
I knew this came from USDA’s Food Dollar series, which reports measurements of where the food dollar goes in the chain of production.
The USDA also illustrates the dollar in reports. The most recent, with figures from 2023, is here.
These USDA illustrations used to be easier to read, so I like the way AgWeb shows the current data.
But you get the idea: farmers don’t get much. The real money in food is in processing, retail, and service.
Note the incentive in processing.
No wonder the number of farms continues to decline.
What the Farm Bill (an apparently hopeless cause at the moment) really needs to do is to start from scratch and do two things: promote smaller scale organic and regenerative farming that will protect soil, mitigate climate change, and repopulate the Midwest, and make sure those farmers make an adequate living.
