Last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its report, State-Specific Trends in Fruit and Vegetable Consumption Among Adults in the United States 2000-2009. One thing is for sure – on the whole, Americans aren’t eating their vegetables. Or their fruits.

Only 26% of adults responding to the CDC’s survey met the national target of three servings of vegetables a day, and only 32% met the national target of two servings of fruit a day. What’s more, during the period 2000-2009 there was no change in vegetable consumption, while consumption of fruit actually declined slightly.

Accordingly, the US Department of Health and Human Services has announced, as part of its Healthy People 2020 Initiative, the following goals: "Increase the contribution of fruits to the diets of the population aged 2 years and older," and “Increase the variety and contribution of vegetables to the diets of the population aged 2 years and older,” presumably through such means as its Fruits and Veggies: More Matters campaign.

I’m all in favor of fruits and vegetables. But the government taking our tax dollars to try to browbeat people into eating more of the same? Eh, not so much.

It’s not like these guys have such a great track record on this sort of thing. After all, these are the same sort of folks that gave us the intentionally incomprehensible and uninformative Revised Food Pyramid, not to mention the gospel of the Four Essential Food Groups. Literally for generations, American schoolchildren were taught that milk is an essential food, ignoring the facts that a) there is no such thing as an “essential food,” and b) tens of millions of Americans cannot even digest milk and dairy products because they lack an enzyme necessary for doing so.

I remember when I was a boy, the law forbade selling of soft drinks in our high school cafeteria (how quaint that seems now) but it was perfectly okay to sell ice cream bars larded with sugar and saturated fat, because that’s an essential food, doncha know? But I digress.

Why aren’t people eating more fruits and vegetables? A pretty good guess is because of policies fomented by agribusiness which discourage people from doing so. The government takes billions of our tax dollars every year to subsidize the production of corn and soybeans, which are converted into high-fructose corn syrup and soybean oil, which in turn are transmogrified into a dizzying variety of junk foods. Federally subsidized corn and soybeans are also fed to cows and pigs and chickens to ensure an abundant supply of cheap meat. And so people react the way anyone who’s taken Econ 101 would predict: they eat more meat and more junk food, and fewer fruits and vegetables.

And now our rulers are demanding even more of our tax dollars, to create an another imbalance to correct an imbalance they created with our tax dollars in the first place. It’s a con game that would embarrass a used-car salesman. But it works.

Anyway, what the Hell business of the government is it if people aren’t eating “enough” fruits and vegetables? The answer is provided by Dr. William H. Dietz, Director of the CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity:

 “A diet high in fruits and vegetables is important for optimal child growth, maintaining a healthy weight, and prevention of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and some cancers, all of which currently contribute to health care costs in the United States.” 

Oh, yes, the good old health care cost argument. But the reason health care costs are soaring is not because of all you dummies out there who won’t eat your vegetables – it’s because we have a Medical-Industrial Complex which is Hell-bent on shoving down people’s throats (figuratively and sometimes literally) as many expensive and invasive interventions as they will stand for, which relentlessly pathologizes more and more of normal human variation, and which takes our money and uses it to saturate us with advertising to the effect that we are all fragile, disease-ridden time bombs who will drop dead without endless expensive medical interventions throughout our lives. When these same folks point to soaring medical costs and click their tongues and piously proclaim, “Look how medical costs are going up – you better let us tell you how to run your lives,” it’s time for the rest of us to pelt them with rotten vegetables.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

UPDATE: Here's an article in the New York Times explaining how the same Department of Agriculture that takes our tax dollars to fund propaganda campaigns to tell us to eat less cheese also takes our tax dollars to fund propaganda campaigns to tell us to eat more cheese. Way to go, guys.