The cost of food
If you haven’t yet seen Food, Inc., be sure you take a couple hours to sit down and watch it with your friends and family. We finally saw it after the first of the year and it’s a great eye opening story (much along the lines of Michael Pollan’s other work).
(Watch the trailer.)
Good Magazine also has a great two minute video highlighting some of the ideas Food Inc. brings out in the documentary:
And Michael Pollan was on The Daily Show recently and gave one simple phrase of advice -
“Eat food.”
He continues, by saying…
“Cheap food has a really high cost… That cost is getting paid by other people — the public health system. There’s a disconnect between what you pay for a cheap fast food meal and the ultimate cost for eating that way.”
It’s interesting how quickly we forget the real cost of the things we consume. While our burger may only cost us 99-cents, there’s a lot more we’re giving up in order to enjoy that processed meat.
Last August, Bryan Walsh wrote in Time Magazine about the cost of our simple pieces of bacon:
Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He’s fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he’ll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That’s the state of your bacon — circa 2009.
(See Time Magazine’s photo essay – From Farm to Fork)
It all brings me back to one thing, “It’s never quite worth what you give up to get it.”
like style made by slaves
like bribes to throw the race
like women who know their place
like an indian casino or a tank of unleaded
it’s never quite worth what you give up to get
- derek webb
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