Last November, we published an op-ed article in the Washington Post calling on the president to establish a National Food Policy (NFP). Given that the production and consumption of food has a bigger impact on Americans’ well-being than any other human activity, our premise was that it deserved the same attention as such well-established federal policy areas as national security, the environment, education, or healthcare. Yet, despite its increasingly evident importance to the health of our people and our environment, the U.S. has no NFP — no plan or agreed-upon set of principles — for managing American agriculture or the food system as a whole.

Rather than attempt to lay out the specifics of an NFP, we set forth some broad principles that we felt should guide its development, principles around which we hoped the larger food movement could coalesce. We wrote that an NFP should reorganize the resources of government to guarantee that:

All Americans have access to healthful food;

Farm policies are designed to support our public health and environmental objectives;

Our food supply is free of toxic bacteria, chemicals, and drugs;

Production and marketing of our food are done transparently;

The food industry pays a fair wage to those it employs;

Food marketing sets children up for healthful lives by instilling in them a habit of eating real food;

Animals are treated with compassion and attention to their well-being;

The food system’s carbon footprint is reduced, and the amount of carbon sequestered on farmland is increased;

The food system is sufficiently resilient to withstand the effects of climate change.

These goals are anything but controversial. Yet weigh them against the reality that our current policies and public investments have given us:

Because of unhealthy diets, 100 years of progress in improving public health and extending lifespan has been reversed. Today’s children are expected to live shorter lives than their parents. In large part, this is because a third of these children will develop Type 2 diabetes, formerly rare in children and a preventable disease that reduces life expectancy by several years. At the same time, our fossil fuel-dependent food and agriculture system is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other sector of the economy but energy. And the exploitative labor practices of the farming and fast-food industries are responsible for much of the rise in income inequality in America.