Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

Chapter Eight takes some time to discuss the "real" price of food.  A chief complaint about switching from "conventional" food to organic and locally grown food is the perceived higher cost.  The aim of the chapter is to dispel this perception.  The low cost of conventionally grown food is largely a myth, according to the chapter, because the price on the shelf does not convey the hidden costs associated with eating inferior food.  There is the environmental damage of cheaply grown food, and the health risk associated with that.  There is the cost of the farm subsidy, which allows the farmer to sell corn at a rock bottom price.  There is the lack of nutritional value found in low quality food, meaning you have to buy more of it to obtain the same nutrients.

                            

All of this and more is discussed in a recent Time Magazine article which starts off thusly:

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

The full article can be read here.

-Zachary Brandt