Why Public Policy Belongs on Your Plate
When we sit down to eat, it’s easy to forget that our whole food system depends on biodiversity. One out of every three bites of food exists thanks to pollinators like bees, butterflies, bats, and birds. Microorganisms keep soil healthy. Wildlife, from wolves to native plants, are essential to the ecosystems that filter air and water.
Even less attention is paid to the fact that this relationship also works the other way around. What you put on your plate can save species like Mexican gray wolves, loggerhead sea turtles, and monarch butterflies. By sticking to whole, fresh, nutritious, plant-forward, and responsibly grown foods, you can help protect wildlife and the planet.
Still, the food we eat and the way it’s grown aren’t purely personal choices. There are countless obstacles to wildlife- and planet-friendly eating: misleading advertisements, inadequate consumer choice and availability, unforeseen consequences of production, confusing product labeling, lack of transparency, and on and on.
These are the problems we need to solve to protect ourselves, our shared environment, and our future. This is where public policy becomes critical.
Our nation’s food system is a patchwork quilt of laws and rulemaking that determine how, where, and what food can be produced and distributed. Food policies are the stitches that hold the system together and prevent it from falling to pieces, but private interests in cahoots with government officials have been picking that patchwork apart at the seams over the past several decades, making it look like a bundle of rags.
Independent, family-run farms once occupied most of the rural United States. Today corporate conglomerates have taken over an increasingly uncompetitive market, and the number of small and mid-sized farms is steadily declining. Meanwhile, institutions that are supposed to regulate the agriculture industry, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are heavily influenced by agricultural interests.
Big agrifood corporations have the resources to lobby successfully for policies that directly harm smaller food producers and exploit workers while contributing to climate change; polluting the air, water, and local communities; abusing animals; and creating public health hazards in the process. The current food system is hanging on by a thread.
This is one of today’s greatest challenges, not just because the government has become so intricately intertwined with corporate interests but because we can’t afford to fail.
The good news is that we can sew this system back together with just, sustainable, and biodiversity-friendly policies that encourage Earth-friendly diets while holding corporations accountable for how our food is produced. If that sounds simple, it’s not. But it is feasible — and necessary.
Welcome to Rooted in Policy, a new publication dedicated to making the connections between policy, agrifood systems, and biodiversity more digestible for everyone. My name is Leah Kelly, and I’m the food and agriculture policy specialist at the Center.
This blog will help untangle the vast and complicated array of policies and problems that shape how food gets from production to your plate. In future posts I’ll dive deeper into key components of the policy landscape, including dietary guidelines, federal assistance programs, government procurement, the farm bill, USDA regulations, industry lobbying, food labeling schemes, and more.
Staying informed and engaged on policy is crucial to understanding how government decisions affect you and change our food system. A single policy can affect everyone’s food choices, from who has access to certain foods to how much it all costs.
Sound, effective public policy can guide us out of our current untenable situation and into a brighter future where our food system works for the people, animals, and native ecosystems who depend on it — rather than for corporate profit. I hope you’ll join me.
Rooted in Policy is a blog making the connections between policy, agrifood systems, and biodiversity more digestible for everyone. It’s written by Leah Kelly, food and agriculture policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity.
