How the US Constitution affects our constitutions
Posted by Marc Hodak on April 28, 2007 under Unintended consequences | 
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Michael Pollan published an article outlining the peculiar incentive built into our Federal government’s farm bill for Americans to get fat. The early part of the article focuses on an economic reason for the counter-historical fact that todays poor in America are more overweight than the wealthy. He noted an experiment by a University of Washington researcher, Adam Drewnowski:
Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods ��� dairy, meat, fish and produce ��� line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.
As a rule, processed foods are more ���energy dense��� than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them ���junk.��� Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly ��� and get fat.
When he peeled away the reasons that processed food are so much less expensive, it came down to the cheapness of certain commodities like corn, which are heavily subsidized, which subsidies are supported by powerful midwestern congressmen.
The whole article is fascinating. It looks beyond the incentive to obesity to offer a glimpse of the panoply of perverse incentives built into this beefcake legislation:
The health of the American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.
When he went one layer deeper to ask why this congressional delegation had such power, his answer was basically farm bill complexity and voter inertia. I would have proposed something more transparently institutional–heartland senators have a number of votes far out of proportion to the number of people they represent. In other words, our bicameral system for allocating a disproportionate amount of power to more sparsely populated states may be the ultimate explanation for America’s obesity. The Constitutional Convention’s “Great Compromise” made us fat.