Text of Radio Piece
Aired on Touchstone Radio, KEOS 89.1
First aired July 16, 2004
Listen online at: http://www.rtis.com/touchstone/tsradio/static/cd40-04.html
For me, the most sobering sight on the A&M campus is the view through the big windows into the Rec Center: rows of students on exercise treadmills, walking or jogging determinedly toward nowhere, eyes locked in on a TV screen that like as not will run a commercial for the same McDonald's food that they're so diligently burning off in the first place. It's just a touch too spookily reminiscent of the scenes in the Matrix movies where vast crops of humans are grown for energy, with tubes feeding them and removing their wastes while their minds are fed a vision of virtual reality that gives them every impression of living normal lives.
Aggies, like the rest of the nation, are paying a little to consume cheap calories, and a lot to burn them back off. At A&M, it's a $78 per semester fitness fee. Off campus commercial gyms, with names like "Fitness Factory," charge from twice that rate and up. The name says it all: our food calories (and thus the obesity epidemic), as well as the "fitness" services we use to reclaim our fitness from them, are industrially manufactured commodities, available for a price.
And then again, maybe those calories aren't so cheap after all. Saving up your McDonalds receipts for the semester would only skim the surface of what we're paying for them. We'd also need to figure in the $20 billion of our taxes spent each year on agricultural subsidies, 70 % of which go to the largest one-tenth of food producers. On top of that, there's the estimated $75 billion cost of obesity-related health care. We have a for-profit agribusiness industry based on overproduction, a for-profit food industry based on overconsumption, a for-profit exercise industry based on pointless exertion, and a for-profit health industry based on treatment of symptoms rather than causes.
The food industry relies on yet another for-profit industry to keep consumers buying into this system. In 2000, it spent $ 26 billion on advertising – 2 and a half times the amount in 1980, with over half of it promoting fast food, candy, booze, and cola. Meanwhile, consumer food spending went up three times more than gross farm incomes, and corporate income taxes dropped to an effective rate of 25 %, half of what they were in the '50s.
Treadmilling toward graduation into an economy that's seen steady or declining median household incomes since 1999, today's Ags will struggle even harder to afford their cheap calories. They'll also be the first generation in the U.S. to have a shorter lifespan than their parents – thanks largely to obesity-related diseases, which are set to replace smoking as the leading cause of death here.
A good clue to a cheaper, healthier alternative comes from recent studies of allegedly backward Amish farmers. Though they take in as many or more calories as the average American, they have much lower rates of obesity. The reason? They exercise far more than even the most rabid fitness nut at the Rec – and they grow their own healthy, wholesome, and free food in the process, rather than just running to stand still. While exercising, they're also outdoors among family and neighbors, rather than swallowing whatever prime-time lies the corporate advertising industry is feeding them.