The Real Cost of Cheap/Conventional/Toxic Food
Sometimes shoppers are confused by the differences in price between food grown organically and food grown conventionally. Usually organic loses the price war argument in comparison to what is called "conventional" food. Although, most of us are aware that organic means grown and processed without chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, hormones, toxic pesticides, sewage sludge, irradiation and genetic manipulation.
But, what does "conventional" mean? Is this food called "conventional" grown and processed with chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, hormones, toxic pesticides, sewage sludge, irradiation and genetic manipulation?
Yes, it is.
And, this is one reason why the price war argument should be reframed. Instead of comparing the price of organic food with "conventional" foods (which sounds so normal and safe), let's compare organic food prices to the food price of toxic or poisonous food, which is what "conventional" food is.
The vegetables, fruits and grains that grocers and the agriculture business giants label "conventional" are actually loaded with systemic chemicals, which you can not wash off. The meat is laced with hormones, antibiotics, prions and multiple resistant bacteria that are difficult or impossible to cook out of beef, lamb, chicken or pork.
Clearly, something in our food system has gone terribly amiss since a majority of the food is loaded with poisonous pesticides, laced with antibiotics and hormones and infused with genetically modified growth hormones or genes from rats, bacteria, viruses and antibiotics and then -- through some bizarre logic -- labeled "conventional." Once you realize how toxic "conventional" food is, it doesn't look that cheap.
Once one realizes how toxic "conventional" food is, it doesn't look that inexpensive.
Besides the food safety dangers, there are 3 additional costs that consumers pay for "conventional" food:
1) Estimates are that about half of all the food that
Soy, cotton, corn, rice and wheat are also the most subsidized crops in the
2) Consumers make cheap food cheap when they pay their taxes. "Conventional" food would be impossible without the farm subsidies -- which means that consumers pay at least two times for most "conventional" foods they buy. They don't seem so cheap anymore -- and that does not include the expenses associated with health issues that occur as the result of eating toxic "conventional" foods.
Literally, it’s like they’re trying to force people to give them all their money, get sick and diseased, and then pay for monopoly priced drugs, which just make them even sicker.
Unfortunately, everyone pays the second subsidy bill, even the buyer of organic foods, because the subsidy is a tax imposed on all of us by the Farm Bill, which is written by congress and the White House. The current version was just passed by both houses of congress on the 14th and 15th of May, 2008, and most of the current bill is business as usual: billions more for the richest farmers growing the five most subsidized crops.
And, the truth is that the choice of getting sick and taking drugs is trying to be taken away. Nutritional supplement have been under attack by the FDA for a while now and the end goal is having nationwide Medicare in which we all would be forced to pay for medications and drugs with tax dollars.
3) The third payment for "conventional" food will also be made by the taxpayers, who will pay to clean up chemical spills, cancer-cases, injured farm workers, injured citizens, polluted groundwater, trashed rivers, oceanic dead zones, contaminated wells, and toxified land that result from the toxins used to produce "conventional" food. The environmental clean up record for the chemical corporations is not good, so don't look for help when the time comes to repair the damage.
The problem really isn’t big business at all. It’s the fact that people don’t realize that government is big business. It’s biggest industry in the world. The real problem is that all power, trust and money is ignorantly handed over to them freely.
A fourth payment for "conventional" food is often made at the doctor's office to treat obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, cancer, birth defects, Parkinson's and a hundred other ailments related to pesticides or poisoned food.
Pundits and scientific hacks will say anything to protect big chemical and factory farming, refusing to discuss these "irrelevant" external costs of our modern food system, including subsidies, environmental cleanup, and skyrocketing medical bills. Instead, they argue that we need cheap food to feed starving people around the world.
We have had a long history of public resistance against dangerously toxic food in the
As early as the 1870s, farmers and householders got sick from using arsenic and ingesting arsenic in their food and beer, and they began to protest aggressively. However, the FDA continued to protect the large-scale farmers and the chemical corporations from attacks by small farmers, food safety advocates, consumer protection proponents, and environmental groups through the teens, the 1920s and the 1930s.
From 1933 to 1937, the founders of Consumer Reports and Consumer Research warned the
In 1962, Rachel Carson advised that we must stop damaging and degrading our natural landscape. She warned us to stop eating food poisoned with DDT, lead arsenic pesticides and other chemical sprays. Such "buyer beware" and nature protection advisories from earlier days are even more urgently needed today. Things have gotten much worse.
Everything is toxic now. Back then it was just the food. Today it is almost every surface and tool around us. Our current food supply is more toxic than ever before and our environment more damaged. Many pesticides no longer work because the pests have become tolerant of the poison. So, only the most toxic chemicals kill the bugs, which have developed a resistance to the less poisonous chemicals. Consequently, today the most toxic chemicals are the most used pesticides and fertilizers.
Beyond the external costs of "conventional" cheap food, an important aspect of the real price of organic food is the care and commitment to balanced soil health that is a major requirement when transitioning to organic farm management. In organic, the goal is to restore and feed soil life. That requires applying composted manures or vegetables to inoculate the soil with microorganisms. It also means providing organic (vegetable) matter so that the soil microorganisms have plenty to eat.
To effect this balancing act, organic farmers add lime, compost, fertilizer crops, gypsum, a bit of phosphorous and some potash. The fertilizer crops are the hardest element for new organic growers to include because they must take land out of production to grow the fertilizer crops.
This is good for the next crop but hard for the farmer to adjust to growing a crop that he or she plows in.
Instead of using pesticides, organic farmers closely monitor their crops and release beneficial insects, plant trap or companion crops to confuse the pests, or plant when pests are not such a scourge.
While "conventional" food is usually cheaper in the supermarket, and is easier to manage on the farm, it comes with a dangerous load of pesticide and fertilizer residues that are causing cancers, illness and death. When we analyzed pesticide and fertilizer data for the book "The War on Bugs," we concluded that the corporations call chemical food "conventional" to conceal the fact that the food they produce is grown with the most toxic chemicals on the planet.
If the question about the real price of food was rephrased to ask what is the difference between the price of toxic and organic foods, we would not be marveling about the high cost of organic food, nor advocating sending toxic "conventional" surplus food to the starving millions. Instead, we should be asking "How cheap would poisonous food have to be in order to be a good deal?"
Adapted from an article By Will Allen
Source: Alternet
Organic Food Stores:
All natural/wild Alaskan seafood
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