And unfortunately the standard liberal response seem to be do something that won’t work and costs nearly a million dollars.
I’m having trouble deciding which standard response serves us better.
But if I can distance myself from the standard conservatives, I’ll say that I’m willing to entertain ideas that may help actually solve this issue.
This one doesn’t qualify.
Plus one to this approach. Agreed.
But it probably won’t work while we bemoan the problem, but are two faced on solutions. We DO subsidize the food industry - the types of agriculture in particular which makes cheap processed foods cheap. Then we bemoan the fact that poor people - who lack time and money - prefer foods that are cheap and convenient.
My father worked in the tobacco industry through about 1977. And got out because the decade before 1977 was making life darn tough. There were a lot of jobs lost in tobacco - from sales (which is what he did) to manufacturing to farming. And, in the long term, it worked out pretty well - if you didn’t make your living working for Brown and Williamson like he did (and his worked out pretty well - he ended his career selling office supplies - much less health risk).
I’ve worked for the junk food industry - there are a LOT of jobs in the manufacturer and sales of cheap and convenient food. Until we end the subsidies for agriculture that makes these so cheap, and tax the hell out of the product, like we have with cigarettes, we don’t have the guts to do anything other than bemoan the situation we’ve boxed ourselves into. And we don’t. We need the efforts that we are proposing now - better education on nutrition, better school meals to get kids an opportunity to try broccoli who might not see it at home, that sort of thing. But that needs to be done in conjunction with hobbling a sector of the economy, and we won’t do that, not now.
Coming back to tobacco for a second, tobacco had an advantage that I’m not certain the junk food industry can completely replicate - they had a growing international market that saved their bacon. Tobacco is in many ways an American business, and American tobacco companies became international tobacco companies. We are really busy exporting our junk food, but I’m not sure that China can’t step in and make junk food just as efficiently (more so) for the international market as Frito Lay does. Its an interesting question - can we keep those jobs in Idaho that make high sodium Au Gratin potatoes if we sell fewer of those “vegetables” here in the U.S and more prepackaged crap Au Gratin potatoes in the BRIC? From what I remember on international food sales (and I last worked in it 20 years ago) food sales and food companies are regional and internationalizing it was tough.
This is where you lose me. Instead of “This liberal proposal to help the poor is a bad idea” you jump to “liberal ideas to help the poor are pretty much all bad ideas”, so much so that maybe we’re better off not attempting anything to help the poor.
If all the social programs in place today to help the poor went away, wouldn’t the poor be significantly worse off? And if so, surely that indicates that at least some of those programs are having a significant positive impact on the lives of poor people.
As for what to do about this particular problem, while I don’t think improving the availability and affordability of healthy foods by itself will make much difference, maybe it would if combined with some program to incentivize poor people to buy those foods. Although I admit I’m not sure what’s the best form for such a program to take.
As to where we get the millions of dollars to pay for it, that’s a much easier problem, one which we liberals have already solved. We can take the money from the rich, they have loads of it! 
I think a better idea would be to make cooking classes mandatory in junior high. What good does it do to have access to healthy ingredients if you don’t know how to prepare them? When you are dealing with households where no one knows how to cook, then you are solving the wrong problem to give them access to fresh vegetables.
To eat healthy you don’t need fresh fruits and vegetables. Up until 50 years ago, no one had access to fresh fruit and vegetables all year around. Frozen and canned foods are healthy enough. A plate of rice and beans is healthier than junk food, but someone needs to know how to cook rice and beans.
The problem is that anti-smoking crusades are a livelihood for many people. They don’t disband and go away when all the rational goals have been achieved. The forbid outdoor smoking without any proven health risks and now they are attacking third hand smoking. They don’t want people to smoke at home because they will come into work with the smell of smoke on their clothes.
Problem: Lots and lots of people–especially poor people–have no tools to cook with in the first place.
This is an issue without a single root cause. It has many.
[ul]
[li]Unhealthy food is cheap (fixable, but requires government regulation)[/li][li]Unhealthy food is convenient (fixable, but requires government regulation past where I’d be comfortable, and I don’t have philosophical issues with regulation)[/li][li]Unhealthy food tastes better to a lot of people than healthy food (no one is fixing that)[/li][li]People don’t have access to healthy food (what this initiative tries to solve, but the other issues are bigger)[/li][li]People don’t have the knowledge to cook healthy food (what middle school home ec and community outreach tries to solve)[/li][li]People don’t have the tools to cook (not many people trying to solve that, though its solvable with things like a toaster oven and a crockpot and a hotplate - all fairly inexpensive tools).[/li][li]People don’t have exposure to healthy food (which is where those school lunch initiatives come in)[/li][/ul]
I think the tool problem is small. I think the bigger issue is cost, convenience and taste. The taste thing can be addressed partially through exposure, but my 14 year old, who gets plenty of exposure to healthy food, would MUCH rather eat cheetos and coke than grab a banana. Education, exposure and access - the causes we are willing to address, aren’t going to really get us much farther than we are now - a little bit - but not enough to call the issue solved.
Cooking classes that include nutrition information. Yes, good idea.
Since a key issue here seems to be whether the actual plan under discussion is a stupid one, I want to restate something I said earlier:
You could have done a lot of that work without the program by asking.
A close friend of mine is on the board of an inner city co-op. The co-op is in a good neighborhood for co-ops - a lot of fairly highly educated hippies (or the children of hippies) willing to spend more for whole foods and healthy groceries. But its also butts up against a neighborhood that is anything but white and highly educated. And the co-op has made a true effort to bring healthy food into the lives of those people - you are talking about a bunch of liberals who truly WANT to help the poor. They educate. They have cooking classes. They carry non-organic produce because its cheaper - and then subsidize it. They take WIC.
The immigrant population is fine with it and the co-op does a lot of business with them. They aren’t used to the junk anyway. But the rest of the neighborhood rejects it. Not only aren’t they particularly interested from a taste/time standpoint - they find the efforts patronizing and intrusive.
But that’s not really what I’m saying.
Bricker’s version of the liberal mindset that conceived of this plan seems to be “hey, we’ll just use our vast governmental powers to spend Bricker’s tax money and make fresh fruit available in inner cities, and hey, there’s no way that that won’t immediately reduce obesity and the birds will sing and the rainbows will shine down and everyone will be happy”. Which seems at least somewhat in accord with what you’re saying. But the key question for me is whether that sort of naive attitude was really at work, or whether (far more likely in my opinion) it was something more like “well, this is a challenging issue, and here are various studies and previous experiments people have tried, which have been less than perfectly successful, and here are the things we’re going to do differently, and here are the various ways we’re monitoring what’s going on so that we can learn from what happened and hopefully do a better job next time we (or someone else) tries something like this”.
If the program cost a million dollars and had zero tangible outcome but was implemented by responsible and intelligent people with the second attitude I describe, as long as they don’t then turn around and say “whaaaa! it didn’t work! give us 10 times as much money and we’ll distribute 10 times as much fresh fruit, and this time it will DEFINITELY work” or something ridiculous like that, I have no problem with the program having been tried.
http://205.254.135.7/emeu/recs/appliances/appliances.html
Are you talking about people that don’t own a pot? What is the point in giving fresh vegetables to people who don’t have a pot to cook them in?
What is the distinction between this program and the previous failed programs? That is, your theory is that these people said, “Here are the things we’re going to do differently…”
What are those things?
Slate is owned by WaPo but hardly conservative.
Do poor people eat badly because of limited options or personal preference?
I also liked the link to the article encouraging people to learn to cook.
I would have a got a lot more use out of a cooking class than I did out of metal shop.
I also liked the part where they talked about how ‘food desert’ classification tended to overemphasize supermarkets over green grocers and farmer’s markets.
Well, (a) as mentioned earlier, I emailed the director of the program in Philadelphia, hoping to ask her, and got no response, and (b) aside from that I have no idea.
It seems to me, however, that you are the one making the fairly specific claim. You are claiming that there was sufficient evidence that this program, as implemented, would not work; and that the fact that it was implemented anyhow is evidence of liberal stupidity. In other words, you are claiming that the program is sufficiently similar to the ones mentioned in the studies you linked to that it could be presumed to be guaranteed to fail. Which is why I brought up the issue of being an expert in sociology and environmental community studies or whatever the heck field of expertise it is that one would need to really evaluate these things. I mean, it’s entirely possible that a truly IDENTICAL program could be reasonably expected to have radically different outcomes due to the demographics of the community in which the program was being implemented, or other factors that make Philadelphia in 2012 different from some other city in some other year. Beats me.
But to me the larger issue is this: I think we both agree that there are times when the government should spend taxpayer money to try to address issues in society. I’m also willing to concede that, overall, the generically liberal philosophy will do so more often. That is, if there was a magic button that could be pressed to instantly cure childhood obesity across the US with a 100% success rate and cost $50,000, all but the most caricatured of extreme conservatives would agree to spend that money, whereas if there was a program that cost 1000 times that and seemed likely to maybe help the situation some, then you might find something that some, but not all, liberals supported, and few conservatives supported. And that’s fine. Reasonable people are supposed to disagree about things, let the marketplace of ideas decide, etc.
And without actually having access to the discussions and proposals that let up to this Philly plan, I feel like I can’t really say where on the spectrum it lies. It’s certainly possible that it will, in the fullness of time, be proven to have absolutely no positive effect whatsoever, but was still, given the information that was available at the time it was begun, a reasonable thing to attempt. It’s also possible that it was in fact a la la liberal fantasy with absolutely no substantiation or due diligence put in ahead of time, and your criticisms are well founded. But in neither case does its existence somehow provide damning evidence for a fatal flaw in liberal philosophy in general.
Liberal philosophy, like conservative philosophy, has its strengths and its weaknesses, and you could probably make a reasonable case that one of the weaknesses of liberal philosophy is that it’s more likely than conservative philosophy to go overboard on spending money on plans like this without sufficiently solid justification… but by the same ticket, one of the weaknesses of conservative philosophy is refusing to consider plans like this even when they deserve to be tried.
Liberals make mistakes. Nevertheless, I think the United States is a better country - all things considered - than it was in 1900. I also believe that most of the improvement has been advanced by liberals and opposed by conservatives.