Institute For The Future

Broccoli: The Next National Security Imperative

 

That hamburger isn't just making your children heavy: It's causing a fundamental national security problem. At least that's the argument of a large group of generals and experts called Mission Readiness who released a report today called "Too Fat to Fight," which argues, among other things, that growing obesity rates will pose long-term recruiting challenges. And their solution is equally surprising: They want to ban junk food from schools to promote healthy eating. We frequently talk about school lunches as a focal point of parental activism; apparently, it's now a site of military intervention.

 

Oddly, this is the second time junk food has come up in the context of national security in the past few weeks. Last month, General Stanley McChrystal banned ice cream and fast food from military bases in Afghanistan, though the decision appears to have as much to do with the logistical difficulties of getting Burger King into Afghanistan as it does with the deleterious health impacts of fast food.

 

I don't have much to say about whether or not eating one's vegetables is a national security imperative, but it's an interesting signal about the expansion of, and potential limits to, the role of using schools as a site for food and health activism. For example, the Mission Readiness report (full version available here) focuses exclusively on reforming school foods: Get rid of vending machines in schools, prohibit a la carte food purchases, that sort of stuff.

 

My guess is that they've targeted school lunches both because they do really matter, but also because they're a safe target. It's one thing to say that schools should serve healthier foods; it's another thing to tell parents what they should be feeding their kids at home.

 

At the same time, while school-based interventions might be safe, they're also incomplete. In a very good feature for the Atlantic, Marc Ambinder, in chronicling the public health--as well as his own personal health challenges--with obesity points out that the problem is really much broader:

 

 

 

Obesity belongs in a different category of social illness. You can’t become a smoker until you decide to start smoking. For all the peer pressure and advertising that helped turn many 20th-century Americans into walking chimneys, you don’t have to smoke to live. “But if you go with the flow in America today, you will end up overweight or obese,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me when I met him at an obesity conference in Washington last summer. “This does not absolve individuals of the responsibility of trying to get more exercise and eat healthier. But it suggests a synergy between policy intervention and personal efforts to lose weight.”...

 

 

This jumble of circumstances and effects is what Thomas Frieden means when he says that just being an American can naturally lead you to be obese: obesity is an almost inevitable consequence of living with our cultural norms, our history of agricultural production and subsidies, our long-standing socioeconomic inequalities, and the impact of technology on our behavior and bodies. Against this formidable dynamic, America has erected two lines of defense: name-calling, and hectoring about diet and exercise.

 

 

 

 

 

In effect, taking that point to its logical conclusion suggests that attempts to reduce obesity should focus on large-scale, structural interventions rather than on the individual. And at some level, this is what school lunch activism is aimed at doing. But school lunch is one of many factors contributing to obesity--the time people have to cook, exercise rates, social norms about eating--there are a whole bunch of structural and cultural factors that extend beyond the school house.

 

So, in ten years, will the military be telling you what to feed your kid? I'd guess not.

 

But what I think these efforts in schools point to is a broadening effort to redesign our environments to promote healthier choices, and I'd guess that, in one form or another, we'll soon be seeing schools not as the end, but the beginning, of these sorts of initiatives.