The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans.Price subsidies for commodity crops result in price-per-calorie dysfunction like these examples provided in the article. One dollar can buy:
- 1,200 calories of potato chips
- 875 calories of soda
- 250 calories of vegetables
- 170 calories of fresh fruit
When we enjoy a cheap hamburger from animals finished on grain in high-density feedlots, or bargain-price pork or chicken where thousands of animals are raised together in close proximity, we are getting that cheap meat at the cost of:
- a horrendous (at the very least, a most unnatural and crowded) quality of life for the animals
- routine antibiotic use to prevent control disease in such unnaturally large concentrations of animals
- pollution from the huge quantities of waste produced in such concentrated areas
- increased chances for food contamination from large, high-speed processing plants
- increased use of petroleum-based fertilizers to grow the endless monocultures of cheap corn to feed the animals
- our own health and enjoyment of the food (did you know, for example, that the fats in grass-fed beef and dairy products - such as humans have been eating for thousands of years until the last several decades - are considerably better for us than the fats from grain-fed cattle?)
I encourage you to read the article, which concludes:
The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty — it's based on selective forgetting. But what we eat — how it's raised and how it gets to us — has consequences that can't be ignored any longer.
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