Another awesome food industry tactic exposed

The fast food industry has lured low-income consumers, along with the affluent, into paying ridiculously high prices for low-quality meats, potatoes, vegetable oil, and sugar. However, the high dollar-and-cent costs are but the tip of the iceberg. The true costs of quick food must include the costs of poor health, lost dignity in work, degraded landscapes, and ethical and moral decay in business matters, including international trade and investment. We are paying a tremendously high price for the time saved by choosing quick food.

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The costs of making food quick and convenient probably are no less that the cost of making food cheap. Nearly eighty cents of each dollar Americans spend for food goes to pay for marketing services—processing, packaging, transportation, storage, advertising, etc. All of these costs are associated with making our food convenient —getting it into the most convenient form and package, getting it to the most convenient location, at the most convenient time, and convincing us to buy it. So, we pay far more for the convenience of our food than we pay for the food itself. In fact, we pay more to those who “package and advertise” our food than we pay to the farmers who produce it. So by far the greatest part of the total cost of food is the cost of convenience.

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In spite of stepped up soil conservation efforts of the 1990s, American farms still are losing topsoil at rates far exceeding rates of soil regeneration. Feeble efforts to control soil loss through reduced tillage leave farmers increasingly reliant on herbicides that pollute our streams and groundwater and that disrupt or destroy the biological life in the soil.
All life on earth is rooted in the soil. As farmers destroy the natural productivity of the land, they are destroying the ability of the earth to support life. We are destroying the future of humanity to make agriculture more “efficient.”

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Waterways and wildlife are paying the price for our love of fossil fuels too. Petroleum is one of the ingredients used in industrial fertilizer. The United States uses 23 million tons of chemical fertilizer every year (10 million tons are used on corn alone). Runoff from fields carries these chemicals to our streams and oceans. This results in “dead zones”; pockets in the ocean that are almost completely void of oxygen and therefore cannot sustain life. Runoff from areas around the Mississippi river have resulted in a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that is over 6,000 square miles in area. This greatly impacts the region’s fishing industry, which loses the profit normally generated by the 212,000 metric tons of seafood that disappear each year(there are more than 400 "dead zones" in the world). The ramifications of cheap food do not end with the environment. Processed foods and industrialized meats are impacting our national health, both physically and economically. 70% of antibiotics used in the United States are given to livestock so that they might survive the conditions on factory farms.

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As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy - demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 - but the earth can no longer deliver.

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