Editorial: A Call for a National Agenda for a Healthy, Equitable, and Sustainable Food System

In an editorial for the American Journal of Public Health, Distinguished Professor Nicholas Freudenberg and Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, & Public Health at New York University, proposed a new agenda for federal food policy in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Whether Democrats sweep the election or Republicans retain the Senate or White House, the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, the deepening economic crisis, and the continuing disruptions from climate change demand rethinking how federal food policies can contribute to improved human and planetary health,” the professors write.

A Call for a National Agenda for a Healthy, Equitable, and Sustainable Food System

In less than a month, US voters will choose their next president and Congress, creating the opportunity for food, farm, and social justice activists to shape a new federal food agenda. Whether Democrats sweep the election or Republicans retain the Senate or White House, the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, the deepening economic crisis, and the continuing disruptions from climate change demand rethinking how federal food policies can contribute to improved human and planetary health.

 

The threats to our food system are formidable. Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, food insecurity in US households with children more than tripled, from the already unacceptable 9.3% to 29.5%. In addition, food prices are rising. In the United States, poor diet is now the leading cause of mortality, causing more than half a million deaths per year. Almost 60% of the calories in the US diet now come from ultraprocessed foods —energy-dense, nutrient-poor products produced by the industrial food system—that are strongly associated with the rise in diet-related chronic diseases.

 

Our current food system damages our environment as well as our health. A recent Rockefeller Foundation report notes that food production, processing, and transportation are now responsible for widespread deforestation, loss of biodiversity, water pollution, and up to 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change exacerbates food insecurity, intensifies food loss and waste, deepens inequities in food distribution, and harms farmers and food chain workers.

 

Over the past two decades, a low-wage food workforce has become normalized, worsening economic inequality as executives and investors in the global food industry take an ever greater share of revenues. In the past four years, the erosion of economic security, workplace safety, labor organizing, and other protections for the food workforce have further worsened the lives of millions of rural and urban food workers. Not since the early 20th century before Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and the Progressive Movement forced reforms and unionization that improved food safety and the safety and incomes of workers have food workers faced such perilous conditions.

 

Reversing our food system’s contribution to ill health, environmental degradation, and inequality will require the development of a coherent national food policy that can mobilize the vast majority of Americans who are harmed by the current system. To catalyze the development of a plan that movements of food, agriculture, women, environmental, rural, and labor activists as well as Black, Latinx, and indigenous people and other people of color can jointly advance, we raise seven questions that such a policy agenda must answer. These questions emerge from several recent reports summarizing the problems facing US and global food systems.1–4,6 For each, we suggest in Box 1 a few solutions that advocates have recently proposed. We invite others to consider and add to these starting points for a comprehensive food plan for the nation. Our aspiration is to encourage what are now mostly separate movements to begin to forge more unified postelection goals along with strategies to advance these goals. A food policy agenda for the next decade must provide answers to these questions:

 

1. How can the federal government reverse the alarming rise in food insecurity as a result of COVID-19 in ways that make meaningful progress toward ending food insecurity and hunger in the United States?

 

2. How can federal policies contribute to eliminating the systemic racism in our food system7 that leaves Black and indigenous people and other people of color with higher rates of diet-related disease, more food insecurity, less land ownership, and poorer paying and more unsafe food jobs?

 

3. How can the federal government encourage the emergence of a food system that makes healthy food available and affordable to all Americans?

 

4. How can federal policy reverse diet-influenced premature deaths and preventable illnesses that increasingly burden the American people, their health care system, and their productivity?

 

5. How can the United States align its global and national farm, food, rural development, and climate policies to reduce food-related carbon

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Nicholas Freudenberg is with the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, City University of New York, New York, NY. Marion Nestle is with the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, New York University, New York, NY.