An Urban's Rural View

It's an article of faith in certain circles that food companies will make and sell products that are known to be unhealthy as long as they're profitable. You don't have to be a corporate shill to see that there are problems with this belief.

One is that it begs some important questions: Known to be unhealthy by whom? What is the definition of unhealthy? What if the product is unhealthy consumed in excess but unobjectionable in moderation?

Another problem is that it's a sweeping generalization, and sweeping generalizations are the rocky shoals on which rational discourse goes aground. Food companies aren't all the same. Some will dig in and defend the indefensible. Some will change what they produce. Some will fight in some cases but not in others.

The biggest problem with the belief is that it blinds believers to the constructive potential of the profit motive. They overlook an economic truism: If demand for something (in this case healthier food) exists, supply will materialize. The trick is creating the demand.

Responding to demand, for example, Perdue Farms Inc. spent a dozen years learning how to produce "No-Antibiotics-Ever" chicken. Its success emboldened the company to satisfy another demand and diversify into organic chicken, which now accounts for 5% of Perdue's total sales and is growing 30% to 40% a year.

"As long as it's growing, we want to continue to produce to that demand," CEO Jim Perdue told Delmarva.com (http://tiny.cc/…).

As that suggests, food companies have more than one way of pursuing profit. Some fight. Some switch. Some do a little of both.

If you start with the belief that they all will always fight, you rule out cooperation between industry, government and academia. In the process you underestimate the benefits of educating consumers and overestimate the effectiveness of regulation.

Worst of all, you commit to a war you may not win. You leap from justifiable criticism of corporate practices to "they're just like the tobacco companies, they can never be trusted."

But food isn't the same as tobacco. Food companies don't have to fight; they can switch if there's money in switching. Their customers can quit smoking but they can't stop eating; the best they can do is eat healthier food.

But they don't like being ordered to eat their Brussels sprouts. Government can only do so much to make them. Even justifiable government interventions, like telling schools they can't use taxpayer money to feed kids salt- and fat-laden lunches, run up against heavy resistance.

No, a food war is not the answer. Give the market a chance.

There are many questions about the validity of Say's Law—essentially, the idea popularized by the movie "Field of Dreams" that "if you build it, they will come." There's far less dispute about the law's converse: If they come, somebody will build it. If consumers want healthier food, companies will provide it.

Unfortunately, these are sacrilegious thoughts if you've bought into a sweeping and ultimately distorted generalization about how food companies behave.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

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