The High Cost of Cheap Food

"The High Cost of Cheap Food" is a new series on the hidden costs of feeding a nation---and increasingly, the world---on an unsustainable slurry of scraps and toxins.

1. A fast food diet is an unhealthy diet.

Fast food is not a healthy food choice, to say the very least. As long as we buy our food, cash, and only pay for our health care indirectly, if at all, we will continue to believe that value meals are a bargain and health care is expensive. People buy food on impulse, often when we’re hungry, from companies that indulge our tastes for salt, sugar, and fat. If people shopped for their food as carefully as they do for insurance, or even if the health of our food were as well regulated as insurance, we would all eat better.

For nearly all of us, nearly all of the time, Big Food decides what we eat. They control the market, so that even though it looks like a lot of individuals expressing their freedom to choose, in reality there are not enough differences among the choices, and high quality foods are available in far fewer places. The fast food industry sells us an abundance of food made from cheap, refined, low quality ingredients, like “pink slime” and Coca-Cola, foods that are proven killers. This irregularity of regulation in a country that licenses drivers, pet owners, and hair stylists, is explained by the “Amazing Revolving Door” among industries and the agencies that regulate them.

Fast food does not nourish, because it’s designed to be made from a minimal number of the cheapest ingredients available, by people who’ve received very little training---the better to afford the massive turnover of the fast food industry, which pays a starvation wage to its employees. And neither the government nor the marketplace forces corporations to do a better job of feeding the country.

We as consumers are not the end of the line. Everything works in circles---cycles that provide feedback at every step. The marketplace currently prioritizes cheap food over nourishment, quick meals over Slow Food. The entire model for fast food is unhealthy at every level, and getting worse. The good news is that by demanding freshness, diversity, transparency, and justice from the food systems that serve us, the benefits of healthy eating become not just personal, but social. Making better food choices improves the health of the workers, animals, and ecosystems that nourish us, by creating demand in the marketplace for products that are sustainably raised and harvested, and fairly traded.


Next week: The Leading Causes of Death

Image credit: Νick P/Flickr

The Food Economy of Cities

Is it a waste of resources for urban foodies to garden on their rooftops?

Will Boisvert points out to locavores in “The Breakthrough” that transportation is only 5% of the energy used, on average, to get food on your plate, reducing the locavore dilemma to one of choosing between being a “rather cultic” farm share owner and accepting the efficient solution of factory farmed produce from California. But there’s more value in getting close to your food sources than simply saving fuel, and you don’t have to move to the country to get some of the benefits.

Harvesting your own food, even occasionally, gives you more respect for the land and the people who do farm labor. It’s satisfying on an animal level to see and smell the soil and air, and to taste what they yield. It inspires confidence to serve---and is actually more nourishing to eat---foods that you know well and enjoy. Meeting food where it lives advances that knowledge and pleasure.

Boisvert says he’s an environmentalist, not an agribusiness executive, but the ways in which the author of “A Locavore’s Dilemma” ignores the differences between conventional Red Delicious and heirloom Belles du Boskoop in comparing apples with apples, makes him sound more like the heartless businessman behind institutional cuisine than a passionate foodie. Just as focusing on transportation costs in food production is a red herring to environmentalists, focusing on efficiency in food production is largely irrelevant to people whose priorities include health, social justice, and flavor.

The author is correct that a city’s efficiencies force certain lifestyle standards on people in the city that give them smaller environmental footprints. 24 hour subway service is an efficiency that works for the most populous city in the United States, not so well for the Pioneer Valley. But why not encourage city folks, as Shel Horowitz suggests, to use spaces that wouldn’t be otherwise used? New Yorkers are not likely to drop off the grid entirely. They’re going to grow a few salad vegetables, and hopefully take ownership of their diets in a new way.

Consider those rooftop greens a gateway drug to lining up like “junkies,” as Boisvert describes those of us with farm shares. Some items in the reasonably priced (for organic) share box will represent a challenge at first, but the lifestyle changes of eating locally have made us more resourceful consumers: better educated, more confident, with more real answers to the question, “What’s for dinner?”

Instead of having respect for the people who produce his food, Boisvert thinks that growing your own arugula is work properly done by “Mexicans”, middle class urbanites who do it for the vegetables and a sense of accomplishment are suckers, and CSAs are “the worst food deal imaginable.” He imagines fresh produce as no more nutritious than canned , and a hydroponic operation in a Brooklyn warehouse as locally grown food. But canned food is cooked, which destroys nutrients in fruits and vegetables, and hydro is more factory than farm.

In hydroponics, there’s no terroir to convey the distinctive flavors and nutritive qualities of the soil, making locale irrelevant, and there’s no sun as a free energy input for plants. Instead, there are grow lights and vitamin solutions: micro-factory farming. This is convenient for restaurants and grocers that want delicate greens delivered on a just in time basis, year-round, but as Boisvert points out, it’s not an efficient use of energy to produce food. It also doesn’t teach city folk to respect the origins of their food, but to expect it to conform to the same control and mechanization as other aspects of city life.

Every solution has to be localized, even if it partakes of global solutions. In New York City, foodies seeking ingredients from upscale groceries and farmer’s markets can add local hydroponic salad greens to their options. As well as scouring the city for goods, aspirant urban locavores have their rooftops on which to grow, although there is the concern Horowitz raises, that the air up there is no cleaner than at ground level, and not as clean as the air in California, or the Hudson Valley.

But rooftop arugula and hydroponic mache are additions to, not replacements for, what feeds the vast majority of New Yorkers: the fields of not just California, but the world. The U.S. may be self-sufficient in the staple crops that make industrial food, but the foods we eat fresh, livestock and produce, are increasingly grown in other parts of the world. The USDA puts very little emphasis on the importance of fresh, raw, and green vegetables in our diets, as reflected by the tiny percentage of USDA subsidies that go to garden crops, and the gradual de-emphasis of vegetables in dietary guidelines.

Which brings us to the real issue at hand, the priorities on which we base our lifestyle choices. True urban locavorism may be science fiction (or a future dystopia of vat food), but urban food production on a small scale is currently being practiced, if not for its efficiency, than for other qualities important to people, such as freshness, nutrient density, flavor, and novelty.


---Image of NYC rooftop garden credit: Jeffrey/Flickr

What is sustainability?

It sounds so simple, and the good news is, it is. Like art, sustainability resists definition and yet, to the person who knows and cares about it, given an unobstructed view, it’s obvious what is, and what isn’t. In other words, “I don’t know sustainability, but I know it when I see it” may represent our best effort to define and control sustainability.

That’s not just me: that’s the experts. Frederick Kaufman, at a TEDx conference in Manhattan on food, is a consultant to those who would commodify sustainability, and he says that when industry tries to measure sustainability, all they’re really tracking are costs. Those sustainability measures on fish at Whole Foods Market, or on bottles of detergent, are a marketing tool. Like the “nutrition facts” label, “sustainability” labels are the facts that food industry have agreed to present on their labels.

Even our recent hypervigilance about common food allergens is brought to you by the same government that does not require disclosure of GMO products. The government is not looking out for you, or for starving people halfway around the world. At best, they’re trying to reduce health care costs. If we had single-payer health care, our government would finally be incentivized to fix the systems that feed most people in America.

A recent effect of the lobbying efforts of food manufacturers and retailers, is the promotion of some of the most odious chains as saviors in the food desert. It’s popular to all pile on to Walmart, which deserves every kick to the groin and kidneys it gets, but let’s not overlook the other chains the Obamas are praising. I don’t think there’s food for me in a Walmart, or a Walgreens, and they don’t think there’s food for me at the local, independent grocer. Walgreens is a pharmacy, not a grocery store, and Walmart is a discount department store. Their expansion into food does not in any way reflect connections to foodways that I value. Its “foodways” are traveled by 18-wheelers, and come from manufacturers, not farms.

The other industrial food megolith the mainstream health press wanted us all to cheer along with was McDonald’s, for it’s inclusion of apples in Happy Meals. To say I’m cynical about McDonald’s is putting things mildly. It’s becoming more well known that apples are one of the very highest sources of pesticide and other toxic substances in our conventionally grown fresh produce, so taking all things into consideration, the health claims of apple slices over French fries are slim. Obviously, McDonald’s has been working hard to reform its image, but its food remains industrial. The company has tremendous buying power, and can command any change in their chain they want. If it was a good business move for them, McDonald’s would start selling us grass-fed beef. But they don’t sell premium, and expectations have been set by the marketplace for conventionally raised, grain-fed beef. McDonald’s sells the minimum that people who eat drive-thru will accept.

I don’t agree that conventionally produced food is good enough for anyone to accept on a regular basis. Some foods have less poison in them than others, but it all grows from depleted soil. The USDA can tell you that all apples, or all potatoes, are essentially alike, but they don’t keep statistics on organically grown produce. Why not? Because then people would clamor for them? It suits large industry to keep people responding just as slowly as they do to new health concerns in society.

The small farms and stores that were driven out by big business, and which are not even marked on food maps because they are small, are flexible and highly responsive. I can walk into the stores (or up to the folding tables in the farmer’s market) where I regularly shop, and talk directly to someone who can make the changes I suggest, and answer my questions. Wouldn’t you rather have a relationship like that with the person who sells you your food, than to have no idea where it comes from and, when you have feedback, have to deal with someone with no power, working in the lowest rung of a corporate hierarchy? Walmarts in every town, and the destruction that has caused to small towns, is what America has bought for our narrow, short-term focus on “everyday low savings.” We didn't value the small business as much as saving a few dollars each week. Few tried to calculate the real cost of doing business that way.

Kaufman says that when industry measures sustainability, it is actually measuring inputs and outputs that can all be described by their costs in money. He says that whoever can answer the question of how to measure sustainability will be answering an important one. So this is how we fix the problem. You make all dollars sustainable dollars by making it so industry has to follow rules—laws that government makes to protect the environment and people—so that they are sustainable. So they don’t abuse workers or animals, or pollute. That’s how we do things in a democracy: you don’t leave it up to industry to decide to do the right thing, any more than you leave it to plantation owners to abandon the practice of slavery. If something is wrong, it’s wrong even before it becomes untenable. Haven’t you heard that corporations are sociopathic? Did you know that if you act like a corporation and aren’t already a sociopath, it’ll just make you unhappy?

If you believe in fundamental consumerism, everything is truly worth what it costs. Similar belief systems allow people to accept “nutritionism,” the belief that a multivitamin truly contains all they need to stay healthy, or that following government dietary guidelines will offer protection against disease.

Government agencies say that GMOs pose no danger. Experts say that we can’t prove a threat. Why is it so easy for me to identify the threats of GMOs, if there are none that are provable? Are they even studying the right things? The arguments of GMO apologists are that its a utopian fantasy that we can feed the growing world population without using genetically modified organisms. The so-called utopians want scalable solutions; the futurists see only top-down solutions. But top-down thinking is what allows us to clear cut forests, strip mine mountaintops, build nuclear power plants and fertilizer manufacturing facilities. The Dot Earth piece is saying that since big governments see no harm, there isn’t any, and anyone who says so is alarmist.

This is bullshit. First of all, the reason people starve has nothing to do with the fact that there’s no fancy, delicate GMO rice rich in beta carotene, with a “suicide gene” that prevents saving seeds to sow the next year.

"Unless I'm missing something," wrote Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine, "the aim of this audacious new advertising campaign is to impale people like me—well-off first-worlders dubious about genetically engineered food—on the horns of a moral dilemma... If we don't get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the third world will go blind. [Source: HuffPost]

If we’re actually concerned about human suffering, the answer is the same as it has always been: value feeding people over money. There's enough food now, and people go hungry because they can't buy food, not because it doesn't exist. The whole point of civilization is to work collectively to help the whole world, not to enrich a few people who manage to turn the workings of the world into a series of gambles. Monsanto has spent more money trying to convince us to let them go about their business, making money, than it has actually feeding anyone. The root cause of hunger and malnutrition, now and always, is greed.
Conventional farming is not sustainable. GMOs, which require their patent holders and technology to reproduce, are even less sustainable, and will contribute to hunger, not eradicate it. Anyone who cares about food, or people, or suffering, can see that. What do we want to sustain: business interests or the interests of people?