The juxtaposition of two different stories dealing with America’s poor food choices reads like two different world views in collision.

David Sirota fumes after Gallup announced Americans are eating fewer veggies:

David Sirota, Why Americans can’t afford to eat healthy

[…] healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.

As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism — the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.

In this chapter of that larger tragicomedy, lawmakers whose campaigns are underwritten by agribusinesses have used billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize those agribusinesses’ specific commodities (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) that are the key ingredients of unhealthy food. Not surprisingly, the subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that recession-battered consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to “choose” the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support.

Corn — which is processed into the junk-food staple corn syrup and which feeds the livestock that produce meat — exemplifies the scheme.

“Over the past decade, the federal government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop … artificially low,” reports Time magazine. “That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain.”

Yes, it is a bargain, but one created by deliberate government policy that serves the corn industry titans, not by any genetic advantage that makes corn derivatives automatically more affordable for the budget-strapped commoner.

The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry, notes Time, is “that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit.”

So while it may be amusing to use Americans’ worsening recession-era diet as another excuse to promote cultural stereotypes, the nutrition crisis costing us billions in unnecessary healthcare costs is more about public policy and powerful special interests than it is about epicurean snobs and affluent tastes. Indeed, this is a problem not of individual proclivities or of agricultural biology that supposedly makes nutrition naturally unaffordable — it is a problem of rigged economics and corrupt policymaking.

Meanwhile, we see that the First Lady has gotten grocery store chains to commit to operating in food ‘deserts’ and stocking more healthy food there:

Sean Collins Walsh, Big Retailers Make Pledge of Stores for ‘Food Deserts’

Mrs. Obama said that food deserts, where 6.5 million American children live, contribute to the phenomenon. The government and the private sector need to work together to eliminate food deserts, she said.

“With your commitments today, you all are showing us what’s possible,” Mrs. Obama said. “This isn’t some mysterious issue that we can’t address. We know the answer. It is right there.”

The Obama administration’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative, begun by Mrs. Obama in February 2010, aims to financially assist stores that open in food deserts.

The initiative received a $35 million budget this year, well short of the hundreds of millions requested by President Obama. The administration asked for more than $300 million to be approved for it in the next budget.

We know what the problem is? That grocery stores don’t support poor neighborhoods because there is no margin in it? So the solution is… to pay them to do it? I would have thought it would have been to create an alternative food system, one that is motivated by something other than money.

So who has been pulled into the program? Is she sparking a regional food initiative, where local farmers markets will be created in America’s urban centers? Is she getting Will Allen involved in a widescale urban farming initiative? Is she working with Michael Pollan, as a sort of Farmer-In-Chief, to reorganize America’s food priorities?

Nope. She’s working with Walmart, Walgreens, and other national grocery chains.

Yes, they are making commitments to serve the food desert communities, but the US government is paying them to do it. Couldn’t we use the money to create alternatives to the giant chains who failed the people in the food deserts in the first place?

So: on one side we are subsidizing the companies that make the junk food, and now we are subsidizing the grocery store chains so that inner city and rural kids have access to something other than fast food outlets and bodegas.

Instead, couldn’t we look into real alternatives?