The bill has more or less passed. The reconciliation bill will be taken up shortly by the Senate and many seem confident it will pass here as well. Considering the major elements of the bill include things like ending discrimination against individuals with preexisting conditions, ending limits on lifetime spending, allowing adult children up to age twenty six to be included on their parents’ policies, ending premium disparity between men and women, and subsidizing affordable policies while taxing cadillac plans, it seems to be more of an insurance reform bill than a health care reform bill. The bill doesn’t include things like reforming measurements of service delivery, moving from quantity to quality or tort reform to decrease defensive medicine practices concerned more with legal liability than the health of patients.

And what about preventive care? Not much beyond what many state health departments already offered. The implied benefit is that with the promise of insurance, more people will take advantage of doctors’ services before the issue becomes a crisis. But there was one, minor attempt to consider preventive care in the bill. And it reveals that within Congress, there may be a dim recognition that our food system has something to do with our health. The Wall Street Journal blog “Washington Wire” posted an article Monday about a provision within the bill “requiring restaurant chains to disclose calorie information on menus.” Because these requirements first have to go through the FDA, menus won’t see changes for a few years. Of course, reactions from the restaurants are mixed but the movement to get information into the hands of the consumer isn’t new. And in fact, it seems, it isn’t helpful. An article by The New York Times published last October reveals “Calorie postings don’t change habits.” The study was conducted by professors at NYU and Yale to test the impact of labeling laws in New York City and found, “that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.” So, the provision is headed in the right direction but going about it in the most delicate way. The thinking seems to be, leave it up to the consumer and do as little damage as possible to the private food industry. But, as the study shows, we don’t understand the consumer. Human beings are not rational actors, food is not just a matter of calorie counts, and the “consumer” is not a neutral actor with equal access to all products. If we want to address the connection between health and food, it cannot be done through this minimalist philosophy of intervention that imagines a simple surgical incision can heal the whole body. Calories, cost, convenience, familiarity, marketing, information, etc. all factor into our relationship with food. Slow Food embraces the recognition that the most important information about food is hardly its calorie count. Health is not a numbers game. It is not a matter of converting individuals to a lower intake level. Health happens on the scale of the community and we need provisions that recognize this.

Carlo Petrini writes in his book Slow Food Nation of a “network of gastronomes and the figure of the co-producer” as the social infrastructure necessary to counteract a food system that requires each commodity chain to span hundreds of miles. But Petrini continues, “the problems posed by this long chain of intermediaries go beyond that of the distance (physical or cultural) between two ends of the chain. Rather, the graver concern lies in matters of economics, ecology, and social justice.” (Petrini, 227)

That is what brought me to Slow Food. It struck me as a movement that was willing and excited to struggle with an incredibly embedded situation. It seems simple; good, clean, fair but it is a life’s work. It is a struggle that shares the dreams of figures as diverse as Temple Grandin, Martin Luther King Jr., César Chávez, Jane Jacobs, you, and me. And as such, we must begin to imagine a strategy of change that compliments this wide range of interests, a strategy of change that uses the strength of these tangled webs as reinforcing cause and effects. To that end, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has published its report “Beyond the USDA, How other government agencies can support a healthier, more sustainable food system” by Maggie Gosselin. The guide is meant to acquaint the reader with the variety of organizations that regulate and impact our food so that we can begin to imagine a multifaceted approach to changing our food and more practically, so that we as activists can utilize all of the grants and resources these different agencies offer. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services, which broadly oversees food labeling and food safety awards Community Service Block Grants to state Community Action Agencies that then re-grant the money or act directly on programs that help address housing, nutrition, employment, and education needs in low-income communities. The next agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, could contribute to a better food system through its ability to “establish better oversight of water and air pollution” or through “following the Supreme Court ruling that requires the EPA to regulate to mitigate damage caused by greenhouse gases.” The author recommends a joint USDA-EPA task force to address greenhouse gas emissions on farms. The EPA offers several grants, including the Environmental Justice Small Grants to organizations implementing solutions to environmental and public health problems. The paper goes on to discuss the Department of the Interior (responsible for 10 percent of the land in the United States and oversees livestock grazing on that land and fisheries), the Department of Commerce (who, as part of their jobs, grants patents to agricultural products), the Department of Transportation (in charge of food transport and thus with the capability of researching and improving food access), the Department of Housing and Urban Development (whose commitment to ‘livable communities’ must be pressured to succeed and who award grants to higher education institutions to develop partnerships with depressed communities), and more. Some of those names are likely familiar but some might surprise you.

When you imagine a food system that is good, clean, and fair, what exactly do you imagine? It will not just mean a change in land use, it will mean a change in the Farm Credit Administration and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. This might seem intimidating. I admit that I am intimidated by futures speculation, I cannot claim to understand how it works or how it should be changed. But I read this report as inspiring. This is why Slow Food will succeed, because it is a movement that has a role for every individual, every agency. Your skills are valued. And once we’ve recognized this and addressed what exactly our skills are, we can meet the government half way and use some of these grants to work in city planning, trade policy, land use, education and outreach, and environmental research.

Take a look at www.iatp.org