Originally published June 22 2013
There 'isn't enough fresh produce' for everyone: Ridiculous claim from Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee
by Jonathan Benson, staff writer
(NaturalNews) Every five years, a special government committee meets to discuss updates to the official Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a public advisory on how the federal government thinks we all should eat and live. And this year, a member of the committee has come forward with ridiculous statements about how "there isn't enough fresh produce" in the world for everyone to follow the guidelines, as if produce is some kind of static resource that cannot be expanded to meet demand.
As reported by CNSNews.com, Yale School of Public Health Professor Rafael Perez-Escarnilla believes people will simply not be able to follow the upcoming 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans because of an overall lack of fresh produce. Representing one of the 15 members of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, Perez-Escarnilla apparently has no idea how agriculture works, nor does he understand the basic framework of economic supply and demand.
"There isn't enough fresh produce grown globally through sustainable practices to allow the individuals to meet the recommended daily intakes," Perez-Escarnilla is quoted as saying during a recent interview, which is posted on the Yale School of Public Health website. "The imperative need to understand how to improve the ecological sustainability of the global food systems that need to be in place to allow all individuals to follow the Dietary Guidelines has become one of the most important and complex global challenges for the 21st century."
First off, it is important to note that the federal government's official Dietary Guidelines are intended for Americans only, which means it is not the job of Perez-Escarnilla, or any other person working for the federal government for that matter, to figure out how to obtain global compliance with its dictates. Secondly, fresh produce is a dynamic resource, which means as more people demand it, more of it can be grown to meet that demand.
In other words, there really is no global dilemma as far as produce availability is concerned. In fact, the federal government currently pays farmers not to grow certain crops in order to control prices, which means there is an artificial shortage of these crops. So much for the idea that there is not enough produce, Mr. Perez-Escarnilla.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime
Rather than try to hatch some newfangled plan to increase produce availability through more government intervention, why not teach encourage more people to grow their own produce at home? The Dervaes family near Los Angeles, for example, currently grows more than 6,000 pounds of food per year on just one-tenth of an acre of land, which produces 90 percent of their daily food and generates roughly $20,000 per year in additional profits.
You can view a SoCal Connected report on the Dervaes family and urban farming here:
http://youtu.be/NCmTJkZy0rM
The point with all this is that it is really not that hard to grow fresh produce. Perez-Escarnilla and others that lament about fantasy produce shortages are not living in reality. Either that or they have an ulterior agenda to increase global governance over the food supply by pretending that the people of the world are all too stupid to figure out ways to grow more food for themselves.
There is also the major issue of unfair government subsidies that encourage unhealthy eating.
"Government subsidies of grain, dairy and sugar make the foods which are the most fattening and least nutritional the lease (sic) expensive," writes one commenter on the CNSNews.com article. "Kill the subsidies and allow fruit and vegetable producers to compete on a level playing field."
Sources for this article include:
http://cnsnews.com
http://publichealth.yale.edu/news/archive/article.aspx?id=5536
http://www.pbs.org
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