As I’ve mentioned plenty of times in this column, my wife and I love good food.

We travel far and wide to seek out both top-notch restaurants and unusual ingredients to experiment with in our kitchen.

I blame the fact that I’m carrying more extra pounds than I like to admit on two main things: that I love food too much for my own good, and that I do about 10 percent of the exercise regimen that a man with my appetite and stress levels should.

In other words, my belly is my fault and my fault alone.

However, when it comes to the growing childhood obesity problem in our country, we all share the blame.

If we examine the problem on the surface, it’s quick to blame parents for the obesity of their own children. But it’s not that simple.

In supermarkets, unless you cook regularly and have a pantry fully stocked with the basics (so that you only need to add protein and vegetables), it might appear that a frozen meal that just needs to be reheated is cheaper.

For many families, a $5 frozen pizza is the most economical solution (though, if you know just a little bit about cooking, you know that you can make a much better pizza for less).

Similarly, a bag of potato chips is cheaper than a bag full of apples.

One of the main roots of the problem, though, is government farm subsidies and their role in what parents and schools serve children.

First, let me start off by saying I have nothing against farm subsidies in theory, though that might shock regular readers of my column.

I believe it’s important for hundreds of different reasons that we have a strong network of independent farmers.

I also can’t blame farmers on the whole for growing more of the heavily subsidized crops and less of the ones the government doesn’t subsidize.

After all, wouldn’t you want to make as much for your family as possible? I know I would.
But the problem lies in exactly how much we subsidize select crops, and more importantly, the ones we don’t subsidize at all.

Why is corn seemingly in everything from soda to cattle feed to applesauce? Because it’s so heavily subsidized that to food processors and feedlot operators, it’s “cheap.”

Because of those subsidies, a food item that replaces a lot of natural products with cheap corn-derived substitutes (such as high fructose corn syrup replacing natural fruit juices and cane sugar; and corn oil replacing healthier oils and fats) will cost less than its natural counterpart.

The applesauce I mentioned before, for example, is a brand-name applesauce that uses apples that didn’t rate high enough for eating on their own or picked before fully ripe ground up and sweetened with a lot of high fructose corn syrup, rather than the healthier version, which is good apples slowly cooked down and sweetened with a small dash of sugar.

We’re subsidizing corn, wheat and soybeans because they can be grown nearly everywhere, especially in politically important states like Iowa. And food processors like those products because they can be chemically changed into nearly anything sweet or savory.

Our government, however, doesn’t subsidize healthier fruits and vegetables, like carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, grapes and cherries. And when it does subsidize healthier vegetables and grains, it doesn’t follow its own food pyramid.

Take oats, for example:  Tobacco farmers in 2009 received 23 times the amount of subsidies that oat farmers received; corn famers received 469 times as much.

Schools in general, burdened with insufficient funding, haven’t felt especially compelled to make lunches healthier. And it doesn’t help matters that for far too many children in our country, school lunch is often their only “meal” of the day.

If we want to set students up for a healthy future, we should be teaching them responsible food choices, not catering to what a room full of adults thinks students will like.

If a child only likes junk food, it’s probably because they’ve never had a well-prepared, well-seasoned and well-balanced meal.

A child’s tastebuds are no different than an adult’s. Would you rather have a reheated, dry hamburger on a stale bun and bland potato fries, or healthy, slow-roasted pot roast with carrots and potatoes? I’d choose the pot roast, and, believe it or not, it might also be cheaper.

We should be doing two main things in schools: providing healthy meals to all students for free (after all, we pay for books and teachers) and putting more emphasis on home economics courses, specifically cooking.

After all, this generation will soon be a generation of parents wandering the supermarket aisles thinking of food choices.

Bryan Clapper is Daily News publisher. E-mail him at bryan.clapper@leaderpub.com.