Category Archives: Real Food

The Cost of Your Burger and Fries

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I  had intended to write about crackers this week, but crackers will wait while I share the news that Food, Inc., an Academy-award nominee for Best Documentary, will be available on line, for free, now through April 29th only, at Food, Inc.  Billed by Variety as a “civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry,” I urge you to find 94 minutes this week to watch it.

This news about Food, Inc. comes at a good time for “Your Health is on Your Plate,” because it was just last week that a reader named Julia commented on the higher cost of meat from pastured and grass-fed chickens relative to lower-priced, mass-produced meats.  She expressed the concerns of many when she said that it’s a difficult choice to make when you are purchasing and cooking for a large family.  But is it really true that mass-produced meat is cheaper?  It is not.  Food, Inc. explains why.

The money that we remove from our wallets turns out to be just one small part of the total cost of mass-produced, manufactured food products.  The actual costs, a great deal higher, are transferred to three other sectors: health, the environment, and society as a whole.  As a physician with a background in environmental studies, I stand at the crossroads where the three arenas intersect, and I state with authority that the costs are unacceptable and unsustainable.  Health effects are reflected in the absolutely unbelievable rates of obesity and diabetes, and the skyrocketing medical costs of caring for those with these diseases.  Environmental effects are made visible in the rivers of animal waste spewing from feedlots.  And the parallel between the inhumane treatment of animals that become our food and the workers (without whom these artificially suppressed prices are not possible) who process that food is not coincidental.

In Food, Inc., I heard a family choose dollar-menu sandwiches, fries, and shakes over fresh produce, all while spending $70/month on the father’s diabetes medication.  I saw photographs of feed lots filled with thousands of animals knee deep in their own excrement.  I learned that the number of slaughter houses in the United States has dropped from several thousand to just 13 over the past several decades, effectively concentrating and destabilizing the meat processing industry.  I was introduced to a woman who has campaigned, so far unsuccessfully, for safer cattle feeding and butchering practices ever since her 2-year-old son contracted hemorrhagic colitis that was caused by the E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria in the burger he ate 10 days before he died.  Feeding animals a grain-based diet, which they did not evolve to eat, increases the risk of illness to both the animals and the people who consume them.

Eating well doesn’t have to be expensive.  Eating meat every day is expensive, but eating different things, such as lentils, chickpeas, salads, whole grains (especially when purchased in bulk), and greens, is not.  A few years ago, one of my patients, a janitor in a local high school, dropped 50 pounds and half of his medications over the course of a year or so.  “How did you do it?,” I asked.  “Beans and greens,” he said with a grin as he pounded on his chest and then opened both arms wide.  “It’s the secret to my success.”

Jamie Oliver, the cook who transformed England’s school lunch program, has now decided to tackle Huntington, WV, with the highest rates of obesity in the nation.  His goal is to teach families to prepare meals in their own homes by using real ingredients in place of pre-processed, manufactured products.  I’ve been watching episodes of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” as he wins over school cafeteria workers, a local disc jockey, and the many obese residents of a town filled with optimistic families.  Jamie Oliver understands that teaching people to enjoy and cherish their food is key to teaching them to prepare it.  And learning to prepare one’s own meals with fresh ingredients is the crucial first step to preventing obesity and diabetes.

Simple-food guru Alice Waters says that good food is a good investment. “You either pay up front, or you pay out back…in your health and your way of life and the health of the planet…”  Jamie Oliver says that Alice Waters’s books “…bring her recipes to everyone.  There’s nothing elitist about that.”  For more on affordability, check out Dawn Viola’s post at Wicked Good Dinner, voted one of the 10 best food blogs of 2009.

In the current environment, a burger has become a better buy than a bunch of broccoli.  Chips are cheaper than carrots.  Easy down-payment, lifetime to pay.  It reminds me of subprime, variable-rate mortgages.  The actual price is untenable, unthinkable, and, actually, unaffordable.

According to Michael Pollan, this is precisely why change is required at the policy level.  The “Farm Bill,” ignored for decades by most of us who assumed that it was irrelevant to those who don’t farm, is actually the heart of the American food system, and we will become more familiar with its content as we begin to make the standard American diet our own business.

Here’s more good news:  We remain complicit only as long as we continue to purchase cheaply manufactured calories.  The fact is, our purchasing power is substantial.  We vote each and every time we open our wallets.  So let’s get out there and vote.

Grass-fed Beef, Wild Salmon, Organic Tomatoes, and Whole-grain Wheat

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Our food supply has undergone an unprecedented change in the past century; the drive to decrease consumer costs while maximizing profits has compromised the quality of our food supply to an astonishing degree. This phenomenon is reflected in the actual words we use to talk about food. Words that describe food have come to mean something quite different than what they meant just a few generations ago.

Despite the country meadow scene on the cartons, you can be sure that the dozens of eggs for sale at conventional supermarkets were laid by chickens that never saw a sunny day.  If you’re looking for eggs from chickens raised the old-fashioned way, you’re looking for “free-range” chickens. Inasmuch as our fragile, centralized food industry depends heavily on fertilizers and pesticides to increase crop yield and protect against insects and other predators, strawberries and potatoes grown without such interventions are “organic” or “pesticide-free.” “Wild” salmon are the kind that swim upstream and grow strong and healthy, not to mention nutritious, on what salmon have always eaten. Plain old milk, without any of the butterfat removed, is now “whole” milk.

The list goes on and on. Old-fashioned oats, pastured lamb, whole-wheat flour, hormone-free milk. These are retronyms, objects or concepts whose original names are now used for something else. If the more typical examples of retronyms (e.g., rotary phone, analog watch, black-and-white TV, cloth diaper, biological parent, tap water) reflect a century of explosive technological change, what are they doing in our food?

Steaks at conventional supermarkets come from steer raised in a feedlot, or confined animal feeding operation [CAFO], on grain, growth hormones, and antibiotics. If that’s not the kind of beef you want, you have to go to a different type of store and specify “grass-fed” beef. One hundred years ago my great-grandfather, who made his living as a butcher, had no reason to advertise his beef as grass-fed. All cows ate grass, and none of them received antibiotics or steroids. That’s what he meant when he advertised “Beef for Sale” in the front window of his store.

Although we continue to describe foods with the same words we have always used, the words no longer mean what they once did. “Wheat,” the staff of life, no longer refers to the entire grain, with its bran fiber coat, starch core, and wheat germ intact. Now it means only the starch core of the grain, the “endosperm.” The intact wheat, including its fiber and germ, is “whole-grain,” a retronym.

Before the industrial revolution changed the American landscape, most goats, cows, hogs and chickens lived in the barn, or alongside the house. Vegetables grew out back by the kitchen door. Families fertilized vegetables with compost, and leftover vegetables found themselves back in the animal feed. That world, in which people lived within an endless chain of recycled biomass, is virtually extinct in the United States. Our food supply has been redefined.