Download HOW CAN A BAG OF CHIPS COST LESS THAN AN APPLE?

HOW CAN A BAG OF CHIPS COST LESS THAN AN APPLE?
Why does eating healthy food usually mean shelling out more
money? How can raw fruits and vegetables that come right
out of the ground or off the vine cost more than processed
junk food that's spent a few days in a factory? Daphne Oz
goes looking for answers.
Over the past couple months, I've found it hard to ignore
how difficult it has become to eat healthily. Since
graduating college and moving out on my own, I've had to
learn how to navigate the treacherous terrain of managing a
budget. Of all the new expenditures that come along with
life outside the nest—utilities, cable, gym—I was most
shocked by how expensive the food I wanted to buy was. And
I wasn't looking to buy beluga caviar—I'm talking about
organic cottage cheese versus conventional; fresh-squeezed
orange juice versus from concentrate.
As I began to look over my receipts and peruse the aisles
of my local grocery and health food stores, I noticed an
obvious (and disturbing) trend. The more heavily processed
and artificial a food, the less expensive it was. How is it
that something that you eat exactly the way it looks when
it comes out of the ground or off a tree can cost more than
something that went through a day and a half of mechanical
digestion by heavy machinery? Doesn't it strike you as a
bit odd that our supermarkets are crammed with 99-cent bags
of chips, but apples can cost $1.25 or more? Or that a
hamburger at a fast food restaurant might run just less
than $4 compared to a large salad, which can cost twice
that.
Look at the example of a hamburger. First you have the beef
(which involves raising livestock, slaughtering them,
processing the meat, potentially freezing it and shipping
it to the point of sale). Then you have the bun (which is
processed flour, meaning all the wheat had to be grown,
harvested, ground, mixed, baked and then shipped). Now add
whatever other vegetables and spreads might be included.
You get all this for $4. But what if you want to eat a head
of lettuce and some dressing? It's going to cost you twice
the amount? How can this be?
Back in the early 1900s, the U.S. government invested in an
agriculture policy that aimed to promote production of
those foods that could be easily stored or shipped to
soldiers fighting in World War I, like corn and wheat. To
make sure we had plenty of these grains, we decided to pay
farmers to grow more of the crops we needed most—and
consequently stop growing most other grains, vegetables or
fruits. This practice is what we now know as subsidizing.
Because government money could be used to cover some of the
costs of production, the price the consumer had to pay for
these items fell. Of course, with this lower price came
higher consumption. As demand grew, so did our production
levels.
Today, 30 percent of our land base is being planted with
corn. Even out of wartime, we have continued to subsidize
corn and wheat production, adding canola and soybeans to
the list, largely because beef, pork and chicken growers
demand these crops be constantly available at the lowest
possible price—which means meat producers can also be
counted as recipients of subsidies.
As we produced more and more grain, our supplies eventually
surpassed the demand. To help get rid of some of this
overstock, we commissioned farmers and scientists to find
new things to do with these stores. While farmers began
feeding corn and wheat to animals that had never eaten
these plants before—like cows and fish—scientists
ingeniously found ways to convert these crops into a
variety of different forms. Some experts estimate that corn
derivative products exist in nearly 90 percent of all
processed foods.
It might not look like corn on the outside, but many of the
processed food items available to you, whether we're
talking crackers, candy bars or soda, are made from corn in
the form of high fructose corn syrup. In addition, many of
those obscure terms you might not recognize on the
ingredient label—maltodextrin, xanthan gum, saccharin, diglycerides—are corn derivatives. Corn is also the main feed
for most meat and poultry animals, so there's corn in that
grilled chicken sandwich too. One striking example: Farmed
fish are now being taught to eat corn for the first time
ever! So not even your sushi is corn-free.
Today, we spend nearly $25 billion in subsidies to fund
farmers of corn, wheat, soybean, canola, beef, pork,
chicken and dairy. The result is that farmers can charge
the consumer much less than the price it costs to produce
these foods and make up the difference through government
funding. This might sound like a good deal for us at first—
we get something for cheaper than we should—but the reality
is that it has completely distorted the position and
predominance of these foods in our eating hierarchy because
they are so much cheaper.
In fact, you actually do pay more for these foods than what
the grocery store receipt says. Those subsidies are your
tax dollars, after all. And the true cost of industrial
agriculture is almost impossible to calculate because we
have no enforceable way of quantifying how much producers
should pay to offset the pollution their operations create
or the long-term damage to human health from
overconsumption of certain foods and exposure to chemicals,
hormones and antibiotics used in some cases.
Since we aren't being made to bear the full cost burden of
our eating habits, of course we eat more than we would
normally. It's hard to say exactly how much a pound of beef
would cost if we took into account all the factors involved
in getting it nice and neatly packed into a patty on your
plate (feeding, housing and medicating the cattle,
slaughtering and processing the meat, treating the meat for
bacteria, pressing it into patties, shipping and storing
it, plus the costs in environmental pollution from animal
refuse and processing fuel, just to a name a few). If it
were $20, how often would you indulge? I've heard figures
as high as $90! Imagine how different your eating habits
would be if you had to pay this every time you wanted a
steak.
The point is, subsidized foods cost way less than they
should and have a much larger presence in our lives as a
result, and not because they're any easier to produce than
regular old carrots. In fact, farmers of subsidized crops
are charged with producing such a huge amount of food that
their operations generally become much more complex,
involving lots of machinery, medicines and chemical
compounds to compensate for that fact that there is no
possible way for them to manage their operations simply
through human labor.
The worst of it is that American consumers are deliberately
being kept in the dark when it comes to where, and how, and
by whom their food is produced. Agricultural giants own the
seeds, the fertilizer and pesticides, even the farms in
some cases, and are well-equipped to limit how much can be
said and how much can be done about their business
practices. They spend money to divert your attention away
from their operations—to make it difficult for you as a
conscious consumer to discover what is going on, or to say
anything about it if you do—because they're worried that,
once you find out the truth, you might not want to buy
their products anymore. And you know what? They're probably
right.
Subsidies lay the groundwork for what's happening in our
food system. What can you do about it? As a consumer, vote
with your pocketbook. Create a market for affordable,
accessible, healthy food by making sure that you opt for
organic, local and humanely produced items whenever
possible.
If you demand it and are willing to pay more for it,
producers will supply it. Moreover, it may influence our
government to actually start supporting family farmers who
can produce the diverse array of food we need to be
healthy, rather than funneling all of our collective tax
dollar food subsidies into a few industrial producers.
While the pie-in-the-sky vision of a country teeming with a
vast network of family-owned farms is still years away,
there are ways to work within the current system to make
foods healthier and safer for us all. A March 2010 Wall
Street Journal article documented how some of the biggest
players in the food business—such as Kraft Foods, ConAgra
and PepsiCo.—are now taking high fructose corn syrup out of
many of their products—such as Wheat Thins, Hunt's Ketchup
and Gatorade, respectively. Why? Because their consumers
asked them to put sugar back.
It's more expensive for producers to use sugar
subsidies make corn syrup a cheaper sweetener,
switching over anyway. This just goes to show:
the consumer is king, and what we want is what
So how are you going to wield your power?
because corn
but they're
In America,
we'll get.