What's wrong with cheap food
smartpei.typepad.com
smartpei.typepad.com
I don't want a "smarter" farm policy. I'd like no farm policy. It's clear that both parties don't actually care about this issue besides making sure that agribusiness is happy.
Imagine having no Farm Policy and we end up having food shortages, there would be a revolution.
Personally, I try to buy/eat as much local organic food as I can and experiment by growing food indoors.
I can imagine. After all, this country has no Plate Policy, and I routinely end up eating off the floor. And I really wish we had a Consumer Electronics and Computers policy; I'm really jealous of the country that produced the iPhone and the Macbook because of those attributes.
Fortunately, the country I live in does have a Real Estate Policy and a Banking System policy, and they're willing to put my money where their mouths are! It's working out about as well as one would expect.
So you agree we have policies only for issues that matter.
Just because policies fail does not mean that we do not need any.
What alternatives do we have to make sure we don't have food shortages, surprise food price increases and that it all scales for everyone etc.,?
As time goes on, more and more areas will "matter" in this way.
What alternatives do we have to make sure we don't have food shortages, surprise food price increases and that it all scales for everyone etc.,?
Well, we could try using markets and speculation, since that's what they're good at. Radical, I know.
But policies do not communicate information very well. They don't respond as fast as markets do, to changes in demand or supply. They are liable to political interference, as different sectors of the economy capture policy-making bodies and extract rents: the people who know most about an industry come from the industry, so there tends to be a two-way door between policy-makers and the industry, warping incentives.
So I would argue that to secure more certainty for food supplies, we would be better off looking at insurance-based mechanisms, rather than direct government involvement in food production, subsidization, etc.
If your community suddenly realizes it needs more food, there is no way that the food can come to existence in days or even weeks. To some degree, other communities will be more willing to sell more of their food surplus to you if prices go up (after of days or weeks of delay to have the whole thing sorted out), and that would pick up some of the slack. But in the short and middle term, what will happen is that the poor will simply get priced out of the market.
An intelligent policy would be to provide a food buffer, a margin of safety, that gives the price signal enough time to travel through the markets. In this case, you get the benefits of a free market, but prevent the worst side effects of it.
I have read Pollan's Omnivore Dilemma, and found his description of New Deal agriculture policies very interesting. I encourage you to have a look and compare those with the ones in effect today.
History has shown that's not really the society that civilized humans want to live in.
There are good arguments for having some services provided by the state (though we may argue whether they are good enough arguments). I did not take the grand parent as making the argument that everything the state does is evil.
It baffles me that people think social development can be somehow exempted from evolutionary processes. Call it callous or compassionless, if you want, but there will always be less fit members of a species/society. Humans didn't get to this spot on the food chain by subsidizing failure. If we want to increase prosperity, we should stop encouraging the propagation of actions/ideas/genes that would otherwise be unsustainable without throwing short-sighted policy and/or tax money at it.
I just don't buy the idea that the short-sighted whims of politics can make the world a better place.
[edit: adding for clarity: "stop encouraging" DOES NOT translate as "start discouraging"]
In time of trouble, you can turn for help to family, friends, neighbors, private charity, or government. In roughly descending order of efficiency and humanity.
Including government at the end of that chain is a noble attempt to make sure no one falls through the cracks--like the federal reserve as a "lender of last resort". The problem is that, like the federal reserve, the guarantee at the end of the chain changes the dynamics at the front.
We respond to a government guarantee to care for the old and infirm by not doing it ourselves. Why plan to care for your mother when the government will do it? Why support private orphanages when you pay taxes to support institutionalizing them?
The result is emaciated expectations of family, friends and neighbors, and sickly private charity. Government may be inefficient and inhumane, but it's cheap--spending someone else's money--and it's guaranteed. So it dominates the space. And when the other options die away through disuse, it looks like there are no other options. And all that's left is dependence on the state.
The idea that it's government care or no care is an illusion created by a couple generations of government dependence. I am convinced that our way -- institutions, beaurocrats -- is really the inhumane way to care for the poor. I want to get rid of it, not because I don't care, but because I do.
Almost all of the industrialized nation have some sort of safety net and/or universal health care. On the other side of the spectrum you get countries like Somalia, where they, you know, do let people die.
I had thought I would find counterexamples in places like the Antebellum south, or ancient Rome, and while I found a reduced emphasis on the state, I did not find it completely gone. And while my off the cuff memory is that there are places in the world, even today, where the obligation for children to care for their parents in old age is so complete that people have children for that very purpose, I don't have a citation for it. And I really don't have the experience to know whether it's preferable.
On a personal level, I see very vividly the evils of institution and bureaucracy: the people it misses, the way it mistreats even the people it helps. I have helped homeless friends with transitions from shelter to shelter, even opened my home to them when it was appropriate; I don't think highly of the treatment they get, well out of the public eye. And I'm pretty sure if the city hadn't been there as an option, I'd have done more, and they'd have been better off. Is it good the city was there? I guess. But I hate the false dilemma that says it is the only way, and my instinct is that family, friends, and community are far better.
I do not know what the correct role is for the state, but I cannot but hate anything that weakens the responsibility of a man to care for himself, or that seeks to replace the hospitality that family, friends and neighbors owe to each other.
NPR's excellent Planet Money podcast did a few shows on Denmark, which is like an economic bizarro-world. Employment law is such that it's really easy to fire people, but they have a very strong social safety net (2 years unemployment, or something like that) so the workforce is very fluid. Employers aren't as afraid to hire people (as they are in countries with strong labor laws like France) because they don't have the same fear of legal or interpersonal repercussions. Firing in Denmark is no big deal.
Taxes are progressive, crazy high, support fully subsidized health care, and the people there are the happiest in the world.
Note: I'm not trying to say every country should be just like Denmark, but just that the way we've always done things isn't the only way that can work.
On the other hand, you see people who complain about how "government can't do anything right" and "all regulation is bad" yet they don't realize the only reason that their houses survive earthquakes without killing them is that their houses comply with government designed and enforced building codes. There's a reason the Haitian earthquake killed more people than stronger earthquakes in other places. Haiti has had "limited government" for decades.
It's easy to paint limited government as a moral ideal, and it's easy to find prominent examples of government failures. I personally hate bureaucracy as much as anyone else. The fact remains that a lot of people (often quietly) get meaningful help from our overall society via democratically elected governments.
> There's a reason the Haitian earthquake killed more people than stronger earthquakes in other places. Haiti has had "limited government" for decades.
That's actually false. Haiti ranks as the 141st economically free country in the world out of around 200, and 24th out of 29 in the Caribbean. Government spending is around 20% of GDP, the income tax rates are comparable to the USA, but the property tax rate is sky high - up to as much as 15%. So no, Haiti hasn't had "limited government" the way Singapore or Hong Kong has limited government. They've got quite a bit of government going on, it just happens to both inept and corrupt.
I still like building codes, though :)
Building codes have got nothing to do with it. My sister went there a few weeks ago. I've seen pictures. Some of those houses look to me like they'd fall over in a stiff rainstorm.
[Edit: The hospital my sister helped build is the subject of the video featured on this page: http://heartlineministries.org/EarthquakeNeeds.aspx . If you haven't seen Haiti, it's worth looking at the community they served and the problems they solved.]
There is little doubt that agricultural policy in the west is all about protecting a specific industry from the realities of globalization and not about securing the food supply.
Being a small country, not having a farm policy and also going to war with your neighbors might lead to food shortages. The agricultural policies of the EU and USA do way, way more harm than good.
They are rather laying out problems with any farm policy. Any farm policy will distort the economics of food production. Any farm policy will influence individual consumers choices in a non-market-based manner. Any farm policy will have international implications, and any farm policy that looks anything remotely like ours at all will harm less developed countries.
I personally am inclined to think we should have a farm policy. If we are going to have an intelligent discussion about it, we should start by acknowleding that those that disagree with us might have valid points that are at least worth considering.
Really trying to understand the viewpoint of someone you disagree with is far more productive than tilting at strawmen.
What is "The economics"? This is the next common fallacy on the libertarian side. That there is some sort of law of physics that represents "The economy" and that any regulation interferes with this one true law of God.
There is no such thing as "The economics" or "The one true market". There are many markets, and all of them are based on arbitrary rules with trade offs.
Please check when the British had their last famine, and when the times they used farm policies.
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Everywhere else is some flavor of dictatorship, and they have farm policies too.
(This was just a lame attempt to explain reality.)
Also, he opens up referring to 1 billion people going hungry, but never returns to this point. If we embrace techniques that produce less food, what happens to these people?
I agree the full Time article is better, but it still doesn't address the billion people it mentions going hungry. Ultimately the agricultural system that is sustainable determines the population that is sustainable, and I am concerned that the people who aren't going to be sustained won't have much say in the matter.
Quick summary :
- subsidized cheap food has adverse health effects and health care is expensive
- affects the ecological system and is not sustainable
- animals raised in meat factories have to be fed a lot of antibiotics that have consequences on human health.
A McDonalds salad costs more than a Big Mac, not because veggies cost more than meat, but because McDonalds salads typically come with meat (chicken/bacon) that's as expensive as ground beef, and the salad veggies, cheese, and dressing are more expensive than a hamburger bun and condiments. (The prices of non-meat salads are anchored to the prices of the meat-containing salads.)
I'm all for criticizing food subsidies, but let's do it honestly. Even with subsidies, ground beef costs about twice as much per pound as the veggies I commonly buy, and ground beef is at the bottom end of the meat spectrum. Subsidies don't make a Big Mac cheaper than a salad; price anchoring to chicken-bacon-ranch salads make McDonalds salads expensive.
Cooking yourself it's a no-brainer, and you know exactly what you are eating. Also I have on my patio all the herbs and few vegetables (I live in a urban area in Miami, don't think I have fields behind my condo). When you go to the store you pay $3 for a couple of springs of sage, when you could buy a sage plant for $3 and keep using it all year long. And the money you save you can reinvest it in more healthy (and more expensive) food.
For the most part there is no real extra benefit for Organic food - assuming you are not opposed to the idea of pesticides and other treatments (which are mostly benign anyway).
Personally all I require from my food is that it has been farmed ethically and preferably produced on smaller scales (i.e. no Bernard Matthews Turkey)
That can save you a lot.
(seconded on the cook for yourself part - it doesn't have to take long and it's a great way to unwind :D)
From a nutritional viewpoint, what you said agrees with what I've read. I think there's real worth, though, in experimenting with different farming techniques that don't rely on mass produced chemicals. Reliance on these chemicals makes me think of the "putting all your eggs in one basket" adage.
Recently I heard an NPR piece about nutrition studies done across decades. One line that struck me is an apple grown in the early 20th century in the US had the nutritional value of 3 apples grown today. I'm not sure how the researchers came to that conclusion. But, if it's true and if a similar ratio applies to other produce, we have the potential for a serious health issue coming up.
EDIT: Enclosed the quoted text in actual quotes for readability.
As I said in my main post I think the real important thing to work on is ethical farming - regardless of organic or not.
The other thing is that from a sustainability point of view (in terms of the farming infrastructure) Organic is very cost/labour intensive compared to other techniques.
There is probably a good balance; as you say we can reach it by experimenting.
I assume your talking about some sort of chemical? Which is why I made a point of mentioning the idea of ethical farming.
It's not that Organic farming has no benefit - but there isn't much extra benefit compared to properly farmed non-organic food (my extended family runs an organic farm so this is based on experience/observation).
The major problem with Organic food is it is uneconomical due to more labour intensive methods, higher product failure rates, too small scale etc.
As I mentioned; there is sure to be a compromise somewhere in the middle that has economical but safe farming :)
I was thinking about math and wrote DDX.
What i meant to write was DDT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
caused some quite awful effects.
"For example, in Sri Lanka, the program reduced cases from about 3 million per year before spraying to just 29 in 1964. Thereafter the program was halted to save money, and malaria rebounded to 600,000 cases in 1968 and the first quarter of 1969"
it's pretty awesome at retarding growth of some of the most virulent disease vectors - but at the same time, it's also a fairly awful carcinogen and I wouldn't want it sprayed on my lettuce to keep away some pesky caterpillars. :)
Another important point is that the term organic has been distorted so that you can't buy a product claiming it is organic and actually be sure it was grown using completely organic farming methods using seeds derived from an organic growth.
For starters, sugar and starch have more calories than lettuce and fruit not just for each dollar, but also for every pound.
The author took a couple of well known symptoms(run-off! animal cruelty! resistant bacteria!), tossed it together in a salad bowl, and chucked it in the general direction of the nebulous "food industry".
He doesn't offer deeper reasons of why the system is how it is, doesn't suggest methods of fixing the situation, and goes no further than regurgitating one sided talking points.
Two, because the choices aren't equally available. At least in Detroit (the only city I'm qualified to share anecdotes about) it's not as if healthy and unhealthy food choices are across the aisle, or even across the street from one another.
You simply can't make healthy choices without special scheduling, trips and thus even higher cost. Can people do it? Sure. Do they? Absolutely. The local gardens and the Eastern market are the absolute brightest spots in this city. The problem is that they simply can't afford (in time, energy or money) to make that choice nearly often enough.
So, to me, the question isn't "why don't people make better choices?" nearly as much as "why do we, as a society, make it so much harder to make better choices?".
There's certainly a willpower and personal responsibility component to this problem, but the larger issue is why our society has stacked the deck against it.
In my experience this is only true about processed and prepared foods. Check the price on dry beans or rice in bulk. If you're willing to bake your own bread the cost is competitive to even the cheapest products. Learning these techniques requires a time investment initially, but if your time is really so valuable why are you living on a few dollars a day?
because the choices aren't equally available.
This is a big problem, and a free-market paradox in my opinion. When healthy food isn't available, it's removed from the culture and unless everyone has good education about nutrition demand disappears.
Many of those without health care insurance still eat food that is linked to detrimental health.
AM-PM hot dogs are considerable cheaper, and more convenient.
Taste is supposed to identify healthy and needed substances vs. deleterious or poisonous substances, so when this is subverted artificially, it feels like a trick to me.
Here's the deal, though:
You could conceivably add the right chemicals to a pile of offal cooked in a skin of some kind and it'd taste like a gourmet sausage. You might have in fact eaten such a thing. It's also common to add flavorings such as "grandma's special recipe" or that from a dude in a coat from Kentucky. All these things make us think that something tastes good, which as also commented in this thread translates in your brain to mean: "hey, this is good for you, have more!".
But the reality is, what you're eating is almost certainly mechanically reclaimed meat (where carcasses with so little meat it's almost pointless to continue cutting are put through a machine which crushes, juices, minces and turns out a slushy type 'meat' goo). and MRM is the place where salmonella and other friends live. It's also not really meat: there's plenty of cartilage (aka 'gristle') and such that is cut so small, you actually ingest it. It doesn't cook properly, and it's not really good for you to eat- you just pass it. But if it's carrying salmonella or e-coli... I hope you didn't have something important to do for the next couple weeks.
Also, the nutrition recovery from such a meal is incredibly limited. You feel bright and happy for a short period (the msg et al) and then you have a come down, a craving, and want some more- for that high again. So in fact, what you're eating is a bunch of mind-altering chemicals ontop of a bed of processed waste.
Food shouldn't be like that.
Food should melt in your mouth and be an explosion of flavor and something you genuinely feel excited about. It should be, you have a meal, which provides you with some instant energy, and also some which is "slow-burning". Brown grains (rice, some wheats, etc) are great for this. You will feel full and energised for longer periods.
Cheap base foods are cheap because they are often subsidized (e.g.: corn) or because their most common consumer is the cattle, pigs, chickens etc that you want to eat. This has given a false sense of price - people expect all food to be as cheap. So supermarkets etc will look to find ways to make everything else like it. So you'll see battery farmed chickens, who are so close together they often aren't able to stand up; You'll find chickens who are injected with water to make extra weight. (yeah, that chicken you just bought? probably a pound of it is water. You just paid chicken price for water).
Good food is good because it provides great nutrition, is often respectful of the environment and is sustainable.
Everything else is just yet another sign of man's dominance over everything else.
(BTW, no, i'm not an enviro-hippy, it's just that i refuse to eat crap if i can help it- why put yourself through that kind of thing when there's so much better choice out there?)
taste cells on the tongue contain chemoreceptors. Those turn chemical signals into potential - i.e nervous system signals.
Since normal food has normal type chemicals, whereas manufactured, msg type food has make-it-taste-nice chemicals. Those are two different sets of chemicals and so, yes. food which tastes good is different from thinking it tastes good - they activate different chemical pathways and trigger different receptors.
That's why we have taste buds for it.
Cheap food typically gravitates towards a combination of these 2 ingredients.
Cheap food tastes great until you try it next to food made from high quality ingredients and prepared the way you want it. For example, I used to like white bread. Since getting used to the different flavors in multigrain bread, white bread is too boring. (By multigrain, I don't mean the refined stuff being labeled as multigrain. I mean the kind in which you bite into a chewy grain with a nutty flavor.)
Not saying this is healthy, but there's no reason it should cause obesity if you're smart about it.
I am fond of going with the seasons, but I am also fond of oranges, which do not grow here--any season.
The main source of food is local markets, which operates at morning and evening times. Most of goods are managed to be sold the same day, and delivery agents adopts to this circles. So, each morning it is fresh.
If you enter into some local tea-shop or kitchen and take a look which kind of dishes they serve and how it was made and from which ingredients you could catch the idea.
Of course, most of fast foods are using not fresh or organic sources simply to get more profit, but if you can cook yourself you can choice whatever you want on nearest market.