Two Essays on Healthcare, Food, Energy, and America's Selective Needs For Choice

Healthcare and America's Selective Needs For Choice:


The recent media and political brawling regarding healthcare reform illuminates how selective Americans are regarding their right to choose. Intense lobbying by the healthcare industry has convinced many Americans that they will forfeit their right to choose their healthcare plans and that Obama will have us all on the public option. The fascinating part is that amidst all of this backlash against reform, there couldn’t be many Americans who have not felt intense fiscal impact from the skyrocketing premiums which rise seemingly endlessly on an annual basis.


Not even energy prices have risen at such a rapid rate yet when oil prices went through the proverbial roof two years ago, Americans were clamoring for opening up Alaskan Wildlife areas, offshore oil drilling, and any other type of reform that might even marginally bring down their energy bills. Yet they are adamantly against reforming healthcare even though such annual costs are rising 10-39% a year depending on where you live. No single other cost in my budget is escalating at that pace. And I know I am not alone: all business owners will tell you that increasing healthcare costs are a massive burden on their balance sheets.

Underlying all of this mass hysteria is the notion that Americans, especially rabid Republicans, simply don’t want Government telling them what choices to make. Yet this is hardly a universal decision.

When it comes to food consumption, the government not only tells us what to eat, it virtually forces us to consume the goods it, along with the whims of the clients of hords of lobbying firms, thinks you should consume. You might find this hard to believe but let’s examine the issue.


Every five years, the government announces a massive farm bill. It is the mother-load trough for agri-business firms to eat from: huge subsidies are in the offing. How does this work: factory-animal-production companies and big agri-business corporations higher lobbyists who in turn ‘convince’ our elected officials to shape the farm bill so that the lobbyists’ clients benefit the most. The government in effect takes large swaths of Americans’ tax dollars and says to big agri-companies “Produce more corn and we will give you a subsidy”. By taking dollars from all of us and giving it corn producers to grow cheap corn, the government is essentially saying we should all eat corn. Because corn is so cheap, it is now used in everything given scientists have figured out how to manipulate corn into endless food products.


Corn is also at the heart of why meat is so cheap in the supermarket: factory-animal farms figured out that feeding animals cheap corn was less costly and more efficient from a profit perspective than feeding those animals grass. Michael Pollan and Jonathan Saffran Foer have written excellent works on this issue so I won’t dive any deeper.


Suffice it to say, the right to choose what I eat has long since been stolen by the government. What if I want tax dollars to be spent bringing more farmer’s markets-type veggies and produce to where I live in Brooklyn? What if I don’t want my tax dollars being spent on so much corn and so much animal slaughter? When I go into the supermarket, I look around and I don’t see products on shelves but instead I vehicles for cheap corn and soybeans to be pumped into we Americans. Does the government think we will be healthier eating all of this petroleum-based corn and soy instead of on morally grown fruits, vegetables, and maybe humanely produced animal products if some of us have to eat meat?


Like with our forced spending of tax dollars to make certain foods cheaper, the government tells us what energy sources to use. The petroleum industry for years has reported record profits while at the same time receiving enormous amounts of tax payer dollars in many different forms. By offering the current energy market participants such incentives, the government is forcing us to consume more and more coal and oil because they are the less expensive energy sources. Clean energy companies face an unfair playing field against the ingrained normalcy of current policies. Yes, Arhcer Daniels Midland and other big agri-companies have benefited from tax subsidies for clean energy too. But the scales are still not inline given the many soft costs not incurred by big energy and food producers. These costs have been previously documented as well so I won’t go into them.


My larger point is why are Americans so outraged about potential changes to the obviously broken system of costs and premiums to their healthcare choices and yet they don’t care about such equally large choices regarding energy and food for which little debate occurs?


Personally, I am outraged that my government spends so much of our tax dollars recklessly supporting companies to bring corn, soy, crude oil, and coal into my world when I would like those very tax dollars to be spent on organic produce and animal products with humane production standards, biofuels, and clean electricity.



Energy Balance of Food vs Ethanol: Rethinking Human Energy Needs


I would like to explore another oddity about the American mind regarding food and energy specifically. I often am asked a very nuanced question by ‘average’ folks when I tell them I develop clean fuel projects: They ask, “Ethanol, doesn’t it take more units of energy to produce ethanol than the amount of energy produced when the ethanol is used?” I am always amazed at how self-congratulatory they are to themselves because they think they’ve got me. My rebuttal, however, often causes them to pause instead: “How much energy does it take to produce unit of energy from petroleum?”, I ask, to which they generally have no idea. So how can they ask me about the energy balance of ethanol when they have nothing to compare that to? I mean, for all they know, it could take twenty units of energy to produce one unit of oil energy! When they realize they don’t have a clue, the absurdity of their question becomes clear, even without me answering their initial question.


This got me thinking about how selective Americans are about when they care to be inquisitive about the energy balance for the energy they consume. And then it clicked: my entire life, I have always separated food and energy into two separate categories. But they should be viewed in such a way at all!

Food and fuel for your cars or electricity for your home are all what we could consider to be total energy inputs that we need throughout each day, each month, each year of our life in order for our lives to be what they were. Think about it: you wake up, you put food in your stomach to get the body moving (along with coffee maybe?), you then get in a car which needs fuel to move you to where you need to go, and eventually return home which needs electricity and other key inputs to keep you with shelter. Throughout our day, we consume water endlessly, and more food doubtlessly, etc.


What I realized is that only ask this question about energy balance when it comes to ethanol! Why don’t people care that the pineapple from Costa Rica which they just bought at Whole Foods required 57 units of energy to produce every one unit of fuel for their stomach.


I argue that a massive shift needs to take place about how we view the ‘fuel’ we need to survive. It comes in myriad forms from gas to apples to water. Our consciousness needs to view energy efficiency uniformly across all of those different fuels for living that we consume each and every day. Instead of holding ethanol to higher standard than petroleum, let’s compare how much energy went into the production of units of energy across various products. I think Americans will be shocked to learn that the energy balance of most of what I am calling our overall ‘fuel’ sources (meaning food and energy combined) is actually quite abysmal and definitely much worse than ethanol! Start thinking about the energy balance of bringing you that cheese from France or that Mango from India or that artichoke from California. Mostly likely, it took way more fuel to make that life fuel than that life fuel gave you when you consumed it.