In case you haven’t heard, Americans don’t always make the best choices when it comes to what they put into their bodies.
Perhaps the best visual example of this affliction to poor food choices can be seen in the rising obesity rate in communities across the United States. It is now predicted that the best case scenario is for “only” 42% of Americans to be obese by 2050. Not only is this strangling the nation’s health care system (obesity-related expenses are on pace to hit $344 billion a year by 2018), but some analysts say our nation’s increasingly sedentary lifestyle is an emerging threat to national security.
However, our aversion to more thoughtful eating has consequences far beyond just an expanding waistline.
More importantly, it underpins a fact that I believe is at the root of all the problems associated with our industrial food system; namely, that Americans simply do not place a high value on food.
And folks, this is not simply an assumption on my part. Statistics from the USDA back me up. Since 1929, Americans have gone from spending almost a quarter of their disposable income on food to less than 10 percent (as of 2009). As mass consumerism has grown in the United States, we’ve started to put more value on the newest XBox games than on what we eat.
The way I see it, the American consumer is using its collective food purchasing power to ask farmers, implore them, to use all methods necessary to produce food in the fastest amount of time for the smallest cost. Growing preferences for foods that are uniform in size, shape and texture tell farmers that (most) consumers have no interest in the environmental, social or economic consequences of a food system based upon maximum output. It’s all about the cheap food.
And while many advocate for farmers to use less fertilizers, herbicides and antibiotics, few are actually willing to live with the results of these actions; which, among other consequences, would mean more expensive farm products (especially animal products) with more seasonable availability.
In the end, how can you blame the collective market (farmers, agri-business companies, food retailers, etc.) for giving consumers exactly what they want?
And this is just the price of food. What about all the land throughout the nation that is responsible for producing said food? Oh yeah, we lose more than one acre of farmland every minute of every year to development in the United States. Why the loss of our nation’s irreplacable farmland isn’t an issue at the forefront of every chef’s, policy-maker’s and ordinary eater’s mind is something that constantly escapes me.
This is particularly worrisome because farms that are in close proximity to cities produce 91% of the nation’s fruit and 78% of its vegetables, yet are almost constantly under the threat of development. As they say, no farms, no food.
My point is that when we devalue both the food that sustains us as well as the land that produces the food, we are essentially devaluing our own future. We are saying that we are more concerned with maintaining a steady supply of cheap food for the next, say, 50 years, than developing a food system that can continue to be sustainable for generations to come.
I understand that everyone isn’t able to make drastic changes to their food budgets, however, spending just a little more on locally and sustainably produced food every year pays big dividends to local economies. It also shows that consumers do in fact value food that is produced with respect for the environment, livestock, and laborers.
We must realize that the choices we make now in regards to what we eat are going to have immeasurable impacts on the future of food and farmland. It’s time to prioritize.
If you look at the history of agricultural and economic development, the percentage spent on food is a fairly accurate indicator of wealth in a country.
It starts at 100% or very close to it, where nearly everyone is subsistence level farmers. People were very poor because all of their money went to buying food. They were the ultimate locavores… except they were perpetually starving. The food they grew was barely enough to keep them going and that was before they had to sell some for money to buy other things.
So that extreme doesn’t work. People can’t go pursue other interest, because their labor is needed on the farm. Speaking of which, we needed to have a lot of kids because we needed the labor.
Saying that we need to spend more on food, doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll go backwards as a nation, but it also doesn’t mean we’ll all weigh less. It’s a flawed premise, assuming it’s the cheap cost of food that makes people heavy. Over-consumption of calories is what makes people obese. We over-consume because food is much easier to find, ready to eat, and because we are too poor to be secure in our food choices.
As humans, we have ALWAYS eaten whatever we could find. Until recently, we couldn’t eat enough, because we could never find enough food. So the real problem is discipline and restraint, a concept which humans are relatively new to.
You can craft a caloric budget that allows for the foods you want along with exercise to help keep the balance. You can do this with the prices of food now and especially if food is even cheaper.
I think the proper way to look at this is to say that people don’t make enough money. When we live paycheck to paycheck, you are never completely sure you’ll have enough to eat in the future or have the money to buy the food(as cheap as it is). So what we do is search for the best values for our money to stretch our dollars.
So if your theory is correct then paying more for that food will make people buy less of it, but that ignores thousands of years of human instincts. More likely, we’d just spend the extra money and seek out more calorically dense foods, rather than more nutritionally dense foods. When I have lot’s of money, I am not so concerned with getting enough to eat. I can eat a light meal, knowing that more is available later. But as a poor person, which I most certainly am, I am much more likely to go to a buffet and consume larger meals.
I think you’ve missed the main premise of this post. I agree that making food more expensive won’t necessarily make anyone more healthy. Touching on obesity was just my way of giving a visual example of our poor choices.
The point of this post is how food is valued in relation to other competing demands on our disposable income, and how this perceived value (or lack there of) translates into a food system that neglects external costs of production all in the name of giving consumers what they want (cheap food).
I fully understand that not everyone is able to pay more for food, that they scrape by on paycheck to paycheck. However, a lot of people could afford to pay more but choose not to. It’s a short-sighted choice.
http://tinyurl.com/EngelsLaw
I think everyone should pay real world prices and perhaps eliminating subsidies can accomplish that. But paying less for food does not intrinsically mean that the food is bad. For every extra unit of something that is produced, the fixed costs are diminished and the product costs less to make/grow. Little Debbie snack cakes aren’t cheap because of some concerted effort to fatten America, it’s cheap because they can make X amount and spread the p,p&e costs across X units, keeping the prices low. If Little Debbie only made half of what they currently make, they would be forced to charge far more to cover fixed costs.
Terrific commentary. Thanks for articulating ideas that are hard for most people to swallow (pun intended), if they think about them at all.
Fluid milk is a great example of how we are giving people exactly what they are asking for, and how we are killing ourselves and our land in the process.
We have subverted the laws of nature by making milk available on store shelves in exactly the same form, same flavor, and same price (except when the market swings wildly, of course, based on speculation, profit-taking, tariffs/imports, corn prices, fuel subsidies, various Mideastern and Midwestern peaceful uprisings, etc), year in year out, regardless of season. That’s not how cows work, and it’s not how dairying should work in a sustainable system, but it’s what we’ve trained consumers to expect.