The True Costs of Cheap Food
Small farmers outside the conventional food system’s supply chains and supermarkets struggle to cope with the prices of the food they produce. It’s “hard for us,” Serena Stuart, a small farmer from central Missouri, says about her and her husband. The Stuarts “want people with a lower income to be able to have [their] food,” but they “aren’t getting paid for producing it.” Serena sighs as she explains the work it takes to produce more environmentally and socially responsible products for her local community: “I don't pay myself a very good salary.” Paul Krautmann is an organic grower who strives to farm more sustainably and humanely. He asks me, “Is it ethical to feel warm fuzzy feelings working in the hot sun to only be able to sell to the people with means?” The farmer seems distraught, but carries on. I see the conflict in his eyes—that he’s stewarding a more responsible form of agriculture, but he’s also got to make a living, keep the lights on, and afford his children’s college educations. The conflictions Paul and Serena face—the cost of their food and the inequalities surrounding it—are indicators of a much larger food system that doesn’t prioritize sustainability, humanity, or justice. There’s no market for soil restoration, animal liberation, or dismantling systemic injustice, but there sure is one for commodity corn and soy.
The economics of American agriculture are complicated and convoluted… partly because they don’t make sense, partly because the ways in which we think about food don’t either. On the one hand, the US’s neoliberal economic policies prop up corporate agribusinesses with subsidies. On the other, our loose environmental and political regulations favoring consolidation and growth drive prices into the ground, and drag the environment and society down with them. Today’s ecological devastation is among the negative effects that economists call “externalities”—the prices we don’t pay economically, but the burdens we nonetheless share unequally.
The cheap food we enjoy comes with a hefty price not seen by the buyer. Added to the price of processed cheap foods is the Midwestern landscape of corn, soy, and wheat monocultures which require the ever-growing expenditure of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the tax money which subsidized the farmer to deplete their soil, the erosion of the soil which was stripped of its nutrients, the weakening of the ground’s ability to capture carbon, and the run-off of chemicals into our streams and creeks. Our fast food was once a living being in a confined animal feeding operation, suffering in a white metal barn adjoined with a manure lagoon that leached toxic waste into our environments, and out of all foods, contributed the most to climate change. A burger and the CAFO it comes from diminishes property values, destroys rural economies, and doesn’t show on the menu what excessive amounts of the earth’s fossil fuels it took to make it only a couple bucks.
With our cheap meals, soil erosion, extracted oil, and global warming are all served on the side, and the industries responsible for these externalities are not held accountable for their costs. “No one is paying the true cost of the degradation of the American landscape,” Krautmann tells me at his farm, but at the same time, “we all pay for it.” We are not all paying the same price, however: Marginalized communities of color disproportionately bear the food system’s burdens, including pollution, poor nutrition, and diet-related diseases. In fact, the cost of our food is much higher than we think—way higher. A report from the Rockefeller Foundation measures the true cost of food at $3.2 trillion per year, which is more than triple what Americans pay at the checkout.
So why, when the effects of our food are utterly unaffordable and inequitable, does our food remain so cheap? Out of any country, we Americans spend the smallest share of our income on food. There’s something about our food system—its loose regulation, corporate influence, and personal preferences—that makes that feat possible, and even thinkable.
The tug-of-war between supply and demand doesn’t fully explain why American grains are in such high supply, or why CAFOs dominate meat production over farmers and pastures. To understand why the US grows so much corn and so much meat—and why it’s all so damn cheap—you’ve got to look at the power of subsidies, and the power of the industries that lobby for them. This is an incredibly complex story, one that goes beyond US subsidies and into history and geopolitics, but the gist is that large, corporate agribusinesses use their political clout to garner government funding that—you guessed it—disportionately benefits them. While consumers are touted as the beneficiaries of low prices, small farmers are cut out and the largest industries rake in the most profits. “Rather than providing a support system for all farmers” writes the American Institute for Economic Research, “government intervention has developed a variety of processes that incentivize the development of large monoculture agriculture.” That sort of farming, aided through subsidies, research, and the services of land grant universities, are what help reduce “the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5 and the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to… $5.” Without government subsidies which effectively trap all farmers and benefit a select few, the most environmentally and socially degrading foods would have no market.
But while corporations and their political influence constrain the choices consumers are faced with, we all have our dirty preferences for cheap food. “Nobody disagrees: We Americans eat badly,” Washington Post food columnist Tamar Haspel writes. While “healthful eating does indeed cost more,” she notes, the reasons for our poor choices, poor diets, and poor health go beyond price. “[Until we acknowledge that we—rich and poor—are complicit in our food supply, that we help shape it every time we buy food… we’re unlikely to improve it.” We’ve got to recognize that our bottom lines are more than just the number on our receipts, such as the joy we get from eating OREOs or factory farmed, eternally caged, water-electrocuted chickens. “It’s irresistibly cheap… that’s the difficulty,” Paul Krautmann reminds me, and in so many ways, that’s the problem.
A restructuring of the American food system and a recalculation of the costs of our food is in order. Should US tax dollars feed us, fatten us, warm us, while only benefiting a select few of us? Or should it sustain us, nurture us, and empower the most underserved of us? There is no exact way to measure the costs of our cheap food. No economic model could account for the mental separation of an eater from their food, the psychological toll of immigrants exploited for cheap farm labor, or the longstanding impacts of communities dispossessed and marginalized for centuries. While some concrete costs can be added to our receipts, the true costs of our cheap food are far greater than how we see, treat, and eat it. Either we start paying the full price, or farm and eat differently. Not all of us can afford the former, and—amid the unwinding effects of climate change—we are in desperate need of the latter.
Read more of G.F.’s work here