USDA deems battered french fries a fresh vegetable
The national waistline just won't slim down these days. The U.S. obesity rate held steady with 31 percent of adults and 17 percent of young people seriously overweight, according to government figures. Many fail to recognize that the plumping of America is due to changing standards of nutrition, and for many low-income people, it is a lack of access to nutritious foods.
Despite the tipping of the scales — and the dangerous health problems that go along with obesity — the United States Department of Agriculture has classified battered frozen french fries as "fresh vegetables." Though the USDA insists that the classification only refers to rules of commerce and is not an indication of nutritional value (other frozen french fries had already been designated as such), the statement indicates just how compromised the USDA has become in its standards.
Instead of being proactive and forward-thinking about the dietary health of the nation, the government agency holds itself up to standards set in 1930. The Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA), written almost a century ago, only allows for two categories of food in commerce: fresh or processed. The authors of this act did not likely conceive of battered frozen french fries. If they had been confronted with such a product, would they have agreed with George Chartier, a spokesperson for the department's Agricultural Marketing Service, who said frozen fries are fresh simply because they don't meet the standard necessary for them to be listed as processed, and adding batter to the fries does not change the classification?
Perhaps the USDA should investigate updating PACA to match modern technology and food processes and eliminate the dichotomy within its own agency — that dichotomy being that for commerce purposes, frozen french fries are "fresh vegetables," but for nutrition purposes, they are processed foods. The simple fact of the matter, PACA is now making things easier for food conglomerates, instead of protecting the small farmer as intended.
The battered french fries are mostly sold to fast food restaurants and to supermarkets, and by making it easier for companies to trade them as fresh vegetables, the USDA is choosing the food industry over public health. The politics of the food industry is contributing to the obesity crisis in this country.
At the recent TIME/ABC News Obesity Summit, Andrew Weil of the University of Arizona said, "This is not an issue of personal responsibility, when people don't have healthy choices in the supermarket. Obesity is a symptom of a problem, of not eating right. But many non-obese people are also eating unhealthfully."
As obesity continues to snowball into a serious health crisis, it is imperative for federal government agencies like USDA to act on behalf the public. State and local governments are responding to the crisis more quickly than the federal government. "Public health policy is being shaped today in local school districts and school boards around the country. People in Washington are quite often the last people to get it," said Tom Stenzel of the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association during the Obesity Summit.
"I know that I was digging a grave with a knife and fork for myself. And like many other Americans, that's exactly what we end up doing," said Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. "We darn sure can't afford the cost of obesity-related diseases in the next 10 to 20 to 30 years as a new generation of obese people comes into focus."
That leaves a looming question to legislators in Washington. Are they going to continue to ignore the elephant in the room like they did many years ago with the link between tobacco and cancer? Ignoring obesity will only cost the government — and therefore the public — in the end.
"The early days of tobacco history involved everybody standing around the campfire holding hands and saying we need to collaborate, cooperate. We paid a huge price for that because it stalled public health effots to control tobacco for decades, and who knows how many millions of people died as a consequence," said Kelly Brownell of Yale University at the Obesity Summit.
