The Health Food Financing Initiative — an outgrowth of the administration’s efforts to ensure childhood nutrition — is moving forward. 

Angela Glover Blackwell and Peter Larkin, Growing American Jobs While Slimming Down Obesity

The federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative — for which the departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and the Treasury have announced $45 million in available funds — uses federal loan and grant programs to leverage private capital and help grocers and farmers markets open new locations in underserved neighborhoods, providing access to healthy foods and much-needed jobs.

Other innovative approaches are also eligible to get healthy food to communities struggling without any available options. President Barack Obama has proposed $330 million for HFFI in his 2012 budget.

The power of this type of public-private partnership was recently highlighted when the U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corp., a subsidiary of U.S. Bank, pledged its own commitment to HFFI, announcing that a substantial portion of its New Markets Tax Credit investments will be allocated for fresh food projects in high-need areas.

The benefits would be enormous, especially in low-income communities that have gone for decades without a nearby grocery store to buy important staples such as fruits and vegetables. Right now, more than 23 million Americans don’t have a nearby store that sells nutritious food.

Disadvantaged communities face this problem most acutely. Lack of access to nutritious foods is a major problem in many of these communities, while in poor rural areas, there often are no nearby food options at all.

PolicyLink has released a new report, Healthy Food, Healthy Communities, that reflects the thinking behind the program.

The report is packed with policy recommendations, case studies, and facts:

There are currently more than 1,700 CSAs operating throughout the United States, and CSAs feed approximately 270,000 U.S. households during a growing season (according to the CSA Across the Nation: Findings from the 1999 CSA Survey). [Perhaps a bit out of date?]

[…] if New York State residents bought 10 percent more of their food from New York farmers and 10 percent from New York manufacturers, they would fuel economic growth with 17,000 new jobs and $16.5 billion in revenue (according to www.whyhunger.org).

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?