Accessing Healthy Food Is A Challenge For Many Families In The U.S

When you think of “ what impact food have on society?” when someone think about all over the world, what impact does it have in other cultures, or even at home? Starting from when a person was a child food has changed and impacted your life. Now that people are older do they have healthier resources? A lot of questions come to mind when thinking about food and how much of an impact it has. Where a person live determines whether food can have a positive or negative effect on their lives.

Over time, we went from farming our self to letting factories do it for us. The changes in our society that have a big role in how food changed are soda taxes, health-care reform, and labeling of genetically modified foods.

Specifically, in the U.S not all Americans have the same access to healthy food. Most Americans don’t have to look that far to find healthier food options, however other Americans don’t have to look far to find someone in their family with a health issue in their families because of unhealthy food.

“More than two out of three adults are overweight or obese, as are one-third of the children from six to nineteen” according to NIDDK. Four of the top 10 leading causes of death domestically are influenced by diet; starting with coronary heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. We are going toward “2.7 billion overweight adults by 2025” according to Press release World Obesity Day. Making healthier food more available does not just mean making it cheaper, but equal for farmers to be able to keep farming without going out of money.

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Children are especially at risk. “The current generation of children could become the first in modern history expected to have a shorter lifespan than their parents”- says BBC news article Will today’s children die earlier than their parents? A 2005 program that made reformulating products aimed at children and reducing marketing voluntarily- and put junk food makers in charge of regulating themselves- barely managed to move the “needle” slightly. 80.5 percent of all food advertised to children on TV were for products in the “poorest nutritional category” – says NCBI.

Everyone is told to eat fruits and vegetables, but the government subsidizes processed food ingredients. “Food activists have often bemoaned the disconnect between the kinds of food the federal government encourages Americans to eat and those it promotes through the vast agriculture subsidy systems,” says Union of Concerned Scientist. For instance, while the government recommends that half of Americans’ daily nutrition comes from fruit and vegetables, produce production comprise around “10 percent” of all agriculture subside, while commodity crops like corn and other grain made up 61 percent of federal subsidies worth billion of dollars-Environmental Working Group. The effect this has on what we eat is enormous. Farmers have less of an incentive to grow fruits and vegetables because they do not subsidize at the same level as crops like corn and soybeans. Instead, many grow cheap (largely genetically modified) corn much of which is used for animal feed or biofuel, or turned into ingredients turned into snack food.

Many people who grow, cook, and sell American grown food have it the worst. “ workers all along the food chain face daily challenges- from pesticides exposures and abuse threats to workers in the fields to low pay and long hours for food retail workers” says Farm Workers Justice. Three- quarters of those polled by FPA are somewhat or very concerned that five of the eight of the worst paying jobs in America are in food systems.

Most of today’s farming is harming the environment. Climate change is largely in the context of America’s energy production and usage. Rarely is industrial agriculture- one of the leading causes of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as erosion, water pollution, toxic algae, bloom and oceanic dead zone- discussed explicitly at a national political level. Judging from FPA poll, Americans are ready for candidates who want to make farms greener. Large majorities of voters across party lines favor government incentives to encourage sustainable farming practices that protect the environment. Overall 75 percent favor this, including 62 percent who favor it strongly. By party, 85 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of independents, and 62 percent of Republicans favor incentives to encourage sustainable farming.

Accessing healthy food is a challenge for many families particularly those living in low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, and rural areas. Accessing, high quality and healthy food is a challenge for many families; this challenge is most pronounced in low-income neighborhoods of color. Recent national-scale studies conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service and The Reinvestment Fund have found that “25 to 30 million Americans- about 9 percent of the total population- are living in communities that do not provide adequate access to healthy food retailers” that include supermarkets or grocery stores, within a reasonable distance from their home.

In the final analysis, America are endangering its people by not helping them with better resources for healthier food. All Americans should have the same access to healthy food and the same resources, that’s affordable for all.