The Lie that is the Dollar Menu

Last week, Elizabeth over at ThinkNG, WritNG, BloggNG wrote a very compelling post (which I highly recommend!) about the amount of households in America who are “food insecure,” and posed a few hard-hitting questions including:

What is to be done with the fact that income level is the biggest indicator of obesity? And why is it that fresh food is so much more expensive than processed or fast foods?

Well, long story short: it’s all about the money, honey.  And that money comes in a couple different forms:

1. Profits for the food industry.

2. Government subsidies of wheat, corn and soy.

It seems like a simple answer, but those two forms of money encapsulate one of the biggest problems America is facing today, and each of them in their implementation have a list of consequences you wouldn’t believe.

Profits for the food industry

Ever since the trust busting days of Teddy Roosevelt, there has been a negative connotation assigned to corporate conglomerates, which were only in the game to make a buck, and would do so at any cost.  Unfortunately, that mentality has never really been eradicated from corporate America, especially in the food industry.  In the past fifty years there has been a growing trend in corporate agriculture: Grow it faster, make it fatter, bigger and have the whole process be as cheap as possible (sounds like they have been listening to a little too much Kanye West, no?).

For example, the largest slaughterhouse in the country, located in Tar Heel, North Carolina slaughters 2,000 hogs PER HOUR, and is staffed by illegal immigrants who are encouraged to cross the border by thecompany who hires them, paid and treated badly, and then in many cases picked up by immigration police and deported after a few years. The hogs they slaughter matured on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), and are raised using the cheapest methods possible.  Companies like this prize efficiency over quality, because quality is expensive to produce.

The HOW—high tech methods of production and solutions to theglitches in the system—has eclipsed the WHY. WHY do we need meat fillers treated with ammonia? To kill the bacteria that ends up in the meat. Why are there bacteria in our meat? The animals raised in CAFOs stand knee deep in their own feces for the entirety of their short lives. Why are there feces in our meat? Because the carcasses are processed so quickly there is no way to ensure that they are clean. This line of questioning could continue on forever. But the fact of the matter is that instead of getting to the bottom of the issue at hand, the food industry will almost always create a high tech band-aid to slap over the offending glitch in the system. The result then is food that is higher in fat than its grass-fed or organically raised counterparts--and potentially more dangerous. Then that product is sold to every fast food restaurant and grocery store in America, and consumed by those who are either ignorant or do not have the money to buy organic.

Government Subsidy

The cheap food this country has accepted as reality is in fact a lie. The entirety of our agricultural production is based primarily offof three crops: wheat, soy, and corn.  Believe it or not, these three crops comprise the ingredients of the majority of the calories in the middle aisles of your local supermarket—snack foods! In their Farm Bills (which should really be called Food Industry Bills), our government subsidizes the production of these three crops because of their ability to be altered from their natural state and used as practically anyingredient type--sugar, fat, wheat... you name it. Most of the sugar in processed food comes from corn, as well as preservatives.  On the other hand most of the fat in these same foods comes from soybean oil that is molecularly altered so that it is solid at room temperature. Crisco anyone?

The government pays farmers to over produce these commodity crops because they can be stored and processed in to so many food-like substances. The results of this system are a mystique of cheap food and the sad truth that the cheapest calories make you the fattest.

Elizabeth is right, it is shocking that you can buy 1,000 calories of chips or cookies with a dollar, but only 250 calories of carrots… not to mention an indicator of the priorities of the food industry and their impact on America’s health, especially those that only have that one dollar to spend on dinner.