The Outstater
A Social Contract: Health and Human Capital
‘SALUS POPULI suprema lex esto” (Let the health of the people be the supreme law) was Cicero’s test of good government. It is the core social contract of our society, both the justification and the limit of state power. But an adjunct of this foundation, Dr. Berry Keating, will argue in the winter journal that Indiana is failing Cicero’s test.
“The goal of the increases in insured coverage and spending has surely been to improve health outcomes, but life expectancy in the state has been declining since around 2010 and continues to trail the national average,” writes Dr. Keating. “A 2022 public health commission highlighted dramatic disparities across counties, with gaps of more than a decade in expected lifespan between the healthiest and least healthy parts of the state.”
Dr. Keating is monitoring a range of health issues. There is one aspect, though, that a group of us, including a good number of state and county officials, think we can do something about — the denigration in how our food is grown and prepared.
It is a big issue but much of the work has already been done; it’s just being ignored. We have understood in detail for some time how Hoosier health is being undermined by poor agriculture policy. Our strategy, then, will be to gather the evidence needed to forcefully set a reasonable plan on the governor’s desk. He will be presented hard evidence, some of it alarming, attesting to the wisdom of sound, people-oriented, sanocentric agriculture.
For now, though, I would like to lay out a softer argument. I would focus on human capital, another factor in maintaining a healthy Indiana. It begins by at least noticing the disappearance of small towns — the historic font of the Hoosier spirit.
G.K. Chesterton, the English theorist, presented the challenge in his “Outline of Sanity” (1926): “To be free and to be independent is to be a part of something bigger than oneself. The idea is to get back to a society where people can live together as neighbors and not just as wage slaves or bureaucratic cogs.”
There is no good reason for Indiana to sacrifice its topsoil for export to global financial networks — and to do so without a thorough public discussion. Growing genetically altered corn to turn into energy does not get us ahead. There is much less reason, Chesterton would warn us, to throw away generations of human capital.
“The great problem of our age is the tendency of people to assume that economic growth is a universal cure for all ills, while it often brings new problems and exacerbates existing ones,” wrote the economist E.F. Schumacher.
That is nowhere more true than in farming, where the notion that endless growth, a feature of industrial agriculture, is beneficial in all aspects. You can dismiss the next few paragraphs as nostalgic debris if you wish, but it is hoped my memories usefully contrast with our current sense of self, of how we see the society around us.
I spent my early journalism career traveling the Midwest. The small towns of those years are gone or at least unrecognizable, as are the local implement dealers who could fix things, the lawyers on the square whom you could trust, the corner grocers who would let you sign a tab, the one-chair barbershops where you could speak your mind, the hardware stores where they actually knew something, the feed stores where they complained alternately about politics and the weather, the weekly newspapers that knew their readership and the restaurants with hot coffee and rhubarb pies.
And it wasn’t too many years ago that our Hoosier countryside was dotted with small family farms growing food you could actually eat. Today, less than 15 percent of Indiana corn is used for human consumption (syrup, meal, tortillas). The rest is animal feed and biofuels.
Some blame corporate agriculture for all of this. Corporations, however, are following incentives, and those incentives can be changed without destroying profits. Corporate executives are not necessarily the enemies of Cicero’s salus populi.
Several of the towns on my route held annual “founders’ day” dinners where hometown sons and daughters who had “made good” in the outside world returned to be honored and to give a little speech. I was always surprised by how impressive the accomplishments of the honorees, often corporate executives, and how sincere the pride of the townspeople, and how heartfelt the gratitude of both.
Even in town many families still had full gardens, and I mean full. My grandparents dedicated their entire backyard to a vegetable and fruit garden plus a crowded chicken coop, a drilled well and a bee hive in the oak tree. The “root cellar” was full of home-canned goods. No car, no central air, big front porch.
But again, there’s no there there anymore. It makes me sad that I cannot trust our ubiquitous suburbs popping up like tent cities around crime-ridden urban cores to raise the same quality sons and daughters as were honored at those founders’ day dinners.
For people who grew up among 4H clubs, classless basketball and sewing circles were truly diverse citizens with the advantages that implies. They were in daily contact with a wide range of personalities at all levels of society. Necessity taught them to realistically assess their own abilities and those of others to work toward common goals, and to do so without letting self-centered motives or envy get in the way.
You see, human capital as well as corn was being grown back then. We can have them both, and good health to boot. Stay tuned. —tcl
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