Why is healthy food so expensive in America? Blame the Farm Bill | Hacker News Reader

Why is healthy food so expensive in America? Blame the Farm Bill

fortune.com

63 pointspseudolus69 comments

I finally learned about the proportional relationship between time/effort required to prepare a meal, and its health benefits. Processed and shelf-stable food is basically chewed for you already, so eat up, baby birds!

The process of digestion itself is important for the body, and so the more you cook or process food, the less happens in your GI tract.

I started shopping in farmers markets, and while this is a net positive, it's not a silver bullet. The store is still packed with unhealthy foods, loaded with sugar and preservatives, full of empty calories, including brands which developed organic cred, and then sold out to agribusiness, like Annie's Homegrown. My PCP said that the organic food movement is a gimmick, and she's partly right. Organic labeling is also not a silver bullet, but it's a step in the right direction. And yes, it costs $$$.

> Organic labeling is also not a silver bullet, but it's a step in the right direction

It’s correlated at best. The health benefits are mixed, carbon footprint atrocious and costs high. Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. An industrial tomato is healthier than a McMuffin.

> It’s correlated at best. The health benefits are mixed, carbon footprint atrocious and costs high.

Carbon footprint only seems large if carbon sequestration is not taken into account. The source of feed is the primary factor here: Is it created locally and sustainably, or do you need large cargo shipments of Amazon soy which burnt down parts of the rainforest?

> Is it created locally and sustainably

Ocean shipping is cheap in carbon. Local means lots of redundant last-mile delivery. (You still need the other transport infrastructure.) The carbon impact of local/organic is largely in its excess transportion.

I eat a lot of local produce. But I don’t kid myself—it’s for the taste and nutrition, and comes at the expense of the planet. That it’s expensive limits that environmental impact.

People burn down rain forests and forests because their farming techniques generate piss poor yields versus modern techniques forcing the use of larger plots of land to generate enough product. Modern farming techniques would cause much less loss of rainforest.

You are speaking of animal farming. I believe ranching is a huge portion of the deforestation.

> carbon footprint atrocious

Instead of herbicides they apparently often burn the weeds off with giant mechanized propane torches.

Stubble burning in grain fields is routine, yearly, and doesn't increase atmospheric C02 (when smoothed over a year).

https://agriculture.vic.gov.au/crops-and-horticulture/grains...

Giant flamethrowers aren't required - the stubble will burn in any case if struck by lightening - it's a fire hazard and burning off increases district safety, promotes nutrient recycling, kills weeds.

Swings, roundabouts - see the link for cons.

As for carbon; crops capture carbon, burning releases the carbon captured. This is the literal 'natural' carbon cycle.

The issue we have with climate and CO2 stems from a century of bringing to the surface millions of years worth of captured and sequested carbon from all the plants that went towards the billions and billions of tonnes of fossil fuel we've been burning through lately (past 50+ years).

This is true.

Though ag burning can be a major pollution hazard, most especially of fine particulate matter, as some in the US and Canada may be becoming more familiar with from wildfire.

Which is to say that all methods, practices, and techniques involve trade-offs.

> An industrial tomato is healthier than a McMuffin.

But is it healthier than a home made McMuffin equivalent?

Yes. It mostly water.

Which is why "stop obsessing over what you're eating and just eat less" is the baseline that most people don't reach to even start worrying about the content.

Eh, cutting out sugar and high fructose corn syrup makes eating less so much easier. A good portion of the US is so addicted to sugar that their body doesn’t tell them they are full.

Once you cut that out then I agree with you. It’s hard to tackle portion control when your body is lying to you about being hungry.

This is a pretty good example of the false dichotomy that most people perceive about food—it’s either highly processed garbage or you need to get everything organic from a farmers market. It doesn’t help fix the problem and people who don’t want to bother with all that hassle could be dissuaded from trying to be more healthy.

It’s true that the more you pay attention, the more you realize a lot of stuff in a typical US grocery store is just bad for you, but the solution is easy and doesn’t have to be extreme: just don’t buy those things. The healthy stuff is sitting right in the next aisle.

Going organic is only a way to signal consumer support for a specific type of production, and has very little to do with being more healthy. Is an organic cookie significantly more healthy than a regular one? No, it isn’t. It’s far more healthy to choose the factory-farmed broccoli or raw chicken from the local grocery store.

From the farmers market, I purchase frozen foods, ready-made microwave dinners from the fridge, and sandwiches which are deli day-olds. They may begin with wholesome ingredients, but they've got the same preservatives, processing, and unwholesome stuff, because you can't make or sell those types of food without resorting to all of that. It would be ugly and spoiled before any customer laid eyes on it.

States have taken measures to ensure food security going back almost 10,000 years in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese granaries. If people really want to reduce the degree of intervention in markets by the state, better targets would be entitlements which are both new and have proven negative effects.

While it might be true that the Farm Bill could be a net negative, the risk of social collapse due to lack of food security combined with the very long history and success of states implementing market interventions to maintain good security makes me think this should be one of the last areas to target for reform.

Also the articles comparison between burgers and salad is ridiculous. One of them is highly nutritious with a lot of calories and can be easily frozen for transport. The other is mostly water and fetishistic.

That's a false choice. If you think food security and a healthier food economy are incompatible, you lack imagination, or have never visited Europe.

The problem is, the Farm Bill gives us cheap Little Debbies and other garbage. Not only does it subsidize its purchase (food stamps), it subsidizes is production.

Little Debbie’s would keep us alive in a famine, or keep the home front fed in a total war.

Exactly

We need Little Debbie on the shelves, but the typical consumer to laugh it off Nd buy something better

It's just big business. And the companies reaping the most benefits from it will fight a bitter war to never let go of subsidies.

Worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DISGLjg8Kw

I'm not sure whether something's long history = its legitimation in modern society. Democracy has much shorter history than dictatorship.

Also, it's (highly) likely that state-based food security is needed, but the US just does it wrong.

If by democratic you mean rule by the demos, it has a very long history of at least 3000 years across multiple world regions. Even the much maligned managerial state has a history tracing back to ancient roots.

While history is not a justification for evil, it does mean that extra caution should be taken when making changes to something that is a matter of life and death, such as food security. Often social systems that have evolved over long periods of time have done so for a reason- and in the case of food policy there’s a clear one - social stability.

I’m willing to accept that market based mechanisms could improve food security, but it’s risky. As far as changing the current policy to promote the types of foods urban elites prefer, the result would be catastrophic as most people do not have the caloric needs nor the financial resources that the elites have. People don’t eat burgers because they’re stupid. Obesity is a hormonal disease not a food security one.

> Also, it's (highly) likely that state-based food security is needed, but the US just does it wrong.

I don't know about that the US is one of the few food independent nations out there.

Yeah. Food wins wars. The system is setup to motivate generating a huge amount of calories quickly and cheaply.

It's hard to fight a war if half your country is too fat to serve in the military.

That’s what ozempic is for!

It's hard to fight a war if you depend on imports to feed your country.

Obese people with poor health aren’t winning any wars, which require a lot of running.

Many couch potatoes have been training all their lives to be exceptional drone or mech pilots.

If you think it’s expensive in America, you should see how expensive it is in Europe.

Anything that’s not fast food costs an arm and a leg in Iceland, UK, etc

And on top of that people make way less money and pay way higher taxes.

You are completely wrong. Iceland imports everything which is why the food is expensive there. It would be exactly like saying "Food in the US is insanely expensive, just look at Alaska or Hawaii". Food in 95% of Europe is much much cheaper than in the US. Since we came here from the States, my wife's and mine grocery bills basically halved and food quality easily more than doubled. And this isn't just in one of European countries, this is most of Europe.

Salaries in majority of Europe are at this point pretty much comparable to the States due to US salaries stagnating for a very long time. White collar jobs pay about the same, blue collar jobs pay the same or more, but require real licenses in some cases. Restaurant workers in Europe make much more on average, and can afford rent. Even taxi drivers can support themselves here even livinh in more touristy areas.

"Way higher taxes" is also kind of false. Sure, the taxes are a bit higher, but you get so much more for your money. Entirely free healthcare, education, kindergartens for your kids, public transportation, and all other kinds of social safety nets.

My wife and I are committing to a full move from the United States just due to how unaffordable it's become.

That is false. Fast food is quite expensive, while things like lentils, frozen spinach/brococli, beans, peas, tomatoes, etc. are really cheap.

Some healthy food is expensive. But not all cheap food is unhealthy.

Sure, salad kits and some berries and nuts and ribeyes are expensive.

Beans, potatoes, bread, rice, oatmeal, pasta, certain produce like apples and green beans canned and frozen vegetables are all quite cheap. Even certain cuts of chicken and pork.

It's the convenience factor.

Society has forgotten how to cook, people want to microwave chicken nuggets and pizzas, and wash it down with sugary drinks, and add in the crazy addictive snacks and sweets we have access to.

Society has forgotten how to cook, people want to microwave chicken nuggets and pizzas, and wash it down with sugary drinks, and add in the crazy addictive snacks and sweets we have access to.

This just isn't the case. To be able to cook, you need some things.

You realistically need electricity and refrigeration - without this, cooking takes a lot more time and a lot more trips to the store.

You need pots and pans and the ability to clean, and housing that has space to cook. Some specialty things have a lot of utility: A large freezer lets you prep things and/or store the frozen vegetables. Beans cook faster in a pressure cooker.

And most of all, you need time. Richer folks can use some of their money to spend less time on mundane things, and poor people generally spend more time just trying to live. Beans take hours to cook without even considering soaking time. Heck, it is still 20 minutes plus time to cook in a pressure cooker (I cook and freeze beans). Potatoes take a bit of time to get done: Bread takes hours to cook too.

And that's after folks stand at a cash register for 8 hours while customers get angry at something outside of their control or some other physically active job.

I enjoy cooking, and I do a lot of it. But I'm not working and I cook a lot less and easier stuff when I work.

Of course people want easy things to eat. It makes time to enjoy a bit of day.

> You realistically need electricity and refrigeration

I'm pretty sure people were cooking for quite some time before electricity and refrigeration came along.

> Beans take hours to cook without even considering soaking time.

You do understand that you don't actually have to stand over the pot the entire time they're cooking, right? And that crock pots are a thing that exists (and which can also be had very cheaply from thrift stores)?

What you apparently think of as "cooking" is "making the latest frou-frou trendy recipe". Old-school peasant cooking (from any peasant society you care to name) is cheap, easy, and consumes very little time.

Standing over the pot is irrelevant. You still need the time to do it. The poorer you are, and that's more and more of us, the less time you have. The person working a standard 9-5 has just under 4 hours of available in their day. Poorer people have less.

> You still need the time to do it.

You put the beans in a crockpot to soak overnight while you sleep, then turn it on when you go to work. There's no "time" involved.

Maybe five minutes.

You don't need anything that elaborate. I've been cooking since I first moved out in college. A hot plate, a single pot and a fridge does the job.

Be efficient with your prep and you can prepare enough for 4-5 meals in a hour. The rest is leftovers.

This is such a tired argument.

Nobody said anything rich vs poor or employed people (who are the only people who own pots and pans) vs unemployed (who are the only people who have time to cook, apparently)

You know beans come in cans, right? And you can buy already baked bread.

It's convenience, again. We not only love ready made food so much well drastically overpay to have it delivered.

Part of the problem is acclimatization to "restaurant meals" which require a lot of prep and experience to make properly. People learn to expect this kind of food, then when they look at making it themselves they balk. Then they buy frozen meals that purport to be similar to those restaurant meals. Instead they should learn to make and appreciate simple meals that use fewer ingredients and require less prep.

It doesn't take much reading in Basic Economics[0] to see that government interference in markets drives up prices.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465...

Are they really comparing the cost of vegetables and fruits to meat? How much do fruits cost? $2.00 a pound? Apples, bananas, peaches,etc are cheaper than meat. Same with vegetables. Cabbage, lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes are cheaper than any meat.

It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?

Not sure the article really makes a convincing case - it lacks a proper comparison. The EU (and national governments in the EU) spend considerable on farming with all sorts of weird incentives but healthy food is cheaper there from my experience.

From what I've been able to find, the cheapest food is among the healthiest in the US too. There's just also a lot of healthy food with a 10x markup because it has fancy packaging, but you don't need to buy that.

Availability may be an issue, but price isn't. Healthy food is cheap. Lentils are among the cheapest things you can buy.

Healthy food is pretty cheap in America relative to salaries if compared to many other countries. I think that it appears expensive because unhealthy food is so cheap here.

There is somewhere convenient you can get free healthy produce, no questions asked, in San Francisco, every day.

People are still lining up to pay money for hamburgers.

Yup. I’ve eaten all sorts of freshly grown delicious tomatoes (my favorite fruit or vegetable) both regular and heirloom. Cherry tomatoes are something I can pop in my mouth like candy. If given the choice I want the smash burger. It’s like the burger competition from Parks and Rec: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TVkV2oGPM2k.

https://archive.is/9dRjn

I can understand some subsidies for farm commodities for limited time, but not ALL the time.

*healthful

Let the markets play out as they are supposed to. Incentivizing one industry over other is meddling with the capitalistic nature of US.

Nowhere on the planet Earth do "markets play out as they are supposed to". There exists precisely zero economies without significant public involvement in private markets. Zero.

That's how you get a dust bowl with all farms growing only the most profitable crop.

It's already bad with with corn and soy monocultures

This is contradictory. The soy and corn monocultures are the direct result of the farm bill.

> the capitalistic nature of US

Am I the only one that finds this branding of the US being a capitalist haven to be complete and utter bullshit? Companies regularly and in the open bribe (sorry, “lobby”) politicians for changes to regulation to give them unfair advantages, externalizer costs, etc etc. Walmart, a bastion of low price capitalism, relies heavily on a workforce on government food stamps to operate. Private and public utilities get politicians to pass laws making it more difficult to install solar. Car dealerships with political clout force companies like Tesla to sell through their channels or leave the state. Etc etc etc. Not a day goes by that I don’t see articles that support this and yet everyone still pretends the US is capitalist to its core!

We are a nation founded upon the love of money. We take Pride in these humble roots, and we celebrate every three-day weekend at the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet.

It is capitalistic in the sense that people with large capital make the big decisions. It's easy to pay off politicians if there are only 2 sides. Heck, a manager from Blackrock just recently blatently stated that its easy to buy a Senator. For just 10k you got him in your pocket.

And what are called "political donations", would fall under the law of corruption in many European countries.

> Heck, a manager from Blackrock just recently blatently stated that its easy to buy a Senator. For just 10k you got him in your pocket.

This is one of many reasons I’m convinced our government is kayfabe at this point. Nobody who was truly making the calls on a trillion dollar budget would sell for that cheap. The general pro wrestling level of discourse is another reason, but there are many more.

It's a matter of degrees. I've been to truly "communist" countries (e.g. Cuba), and lived in several European countries, and without a doubt US has a much more capitalist bend.

Freemium Markets™, aka Pay to Play.

Efficient systems are fragile, redundancy and stockpiling are both inefficient but without them you have fragility. Fragility in the food supply means starvation. Anybody who suggests that the food industry should be entrusted to the ruthless efficiency optimizing mechanism that is free market capitalism should be beaten with sticks until they fall quiet.

> Anybody who suggests that the food industry should be entrusted to the ruthless efficiency optimizing mechanism that is free market capitalism should be beaten with sticks until they fall quiet.

That's actually been done before, more than once.

The result was 30 million starving to death in the USSR and 60 million starving to death in China. Plus the odd few million in North Korea, Ethiopia, Cambodia, etc.

I'd rather we not run that experiment again, thank you.

The trick is to have neither unregulated free market capitalism nor communism, but instead a liberal democracy in which the government regulates and subsidizes the industry. You know, like the system western nations already have. Wild outlandish concept, I know. Not jumping to one political extreme or the other is a mind-blowing proposition for you I'm sure. There is a whole world of common sense sitting in between Ayn Rand and Stalin.

> Not jumping to one political extreme or the other is a mind-blowing proposition for you I'm sure.

I'm not the one advocating beating people with sticks.

When people propose ideological "fixes" to a system which is already wildly successful at producing a massive surplus of food, the correct response is to beat them with sticks until they drop their ideological rambling and start thinking in terms of practical survival.

Beating people with sticks just because they disagree with you is never the "correct response" to anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com