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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Thanksgiving's Hidden Costs
  • Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 16:05:08 -0700

Subject: Thanksgiving's Hidden Costs

Editor's Note: A hundred years ago perhaps the largest problem for food
policy was food quantity - ensuring a sufficient supply of food. Industrial
food production has solved this problem in the North but its very success
has bred a whole host of other problems that now present themselves in
myriad forms from food borne diseases to questionable animal welfare
practices and soil and water degradation. The problem our food supply faces
today is now one of quality. The author of this article suggests that
consumer power and government support for sustainable local food
initiatives, which are already flourishing, are ways to amend this unhealthy
food system.

Thanksgiving's Hidden Costs
By Christopher D. Cook, AlterNet
Posted on November 23, 2004, Printed on November 26, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20556/

Picture yourself in the supermarket, loading up your cart on a last-minute
Thanksgiving shopping spree. You're exhausted – you just want to get home,
and your senses are pummeled by the brightly packaged bounty all around you.
You are at once awakened and overwhelmed. What will you pick from this vast
garden?

It's an astounding global selection that appears – at first glance – to be
fairly affordable (assuming you've got a little money). Shiny, freshly waxed
fruits and vegetables beckon from overflowing bins, hardly a bruise or
nonconforming shape in sight. Broccoli, oranges, bananas, asparagus, melons
and pineapples are piled high in the middle of winter. Crops hailing from
Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Argentina, every productive corner of
America and elsewhere, display the terrific powers of industrial
agriculture, seemingly boundless international trade, and rapid long
distance transport of perishable foods.

A few quick swivels of the shopping cart reveal long fluorescent boulevards
of packages and cans, each promising to save you time and enliven your taste
buds. There are pre-cut and flavored fruits and vegetables (produce with
"value added"), fully prepared kids' lunches, multi-colored chips, soups and
stews, frozen dinners, a whole kingdom of precision-flavored cereals, sauces
and powdered meals. Just add water and plug in the microwave. It's a
bachelor's (or working parent's) paradise.

In today's American supermarket, there are no seasons, no limits. The
world's harvests and manufactured meals are at your fingertips. The
supermarket appears to symbolize the best of democratic capitalism, offering
consumer choice and a largess born of amazing productivity. But how does all
this food actually get here? Is it really as cheap and convenient as it
seems?

In fact, this veneer of epicurean egalitarianism conceals a less glamorous
set of realities. Our most basic necessity has become a force behind a
staggering array of social, economic and environmental epidemics –
pesticide-laminated harvests, labor abuse, treacherous science, and, at the
reins, a few increasingly monopolistic corporations controlling nearly every
aspect of human sustenance. The way we make, market and eat food today
creates rampant illness, hunger, poverty, community disintegration and
ecological decay – and even threatens our future food supply. Consider for a
moment the other side of the ledger:

The way this extraordinary bounty is made puts our future at risk – eroding
topsoil and water supplies, poisoning the ground and polluting rivers and
streams with roughly one billion gallons of pesticide and another billion
tons of toxic manure runoff from huge animal factory farms.


That meat and chicken in your cart is filled with growth hormones and
pesticides, nothing likely to kill anyone, but enough to pose possible
long-term health risks. What can – and does – kill is all the bacteria in
the meat, a plague exacerbated by the way animals are "farmed" and processed
in enormous warehouses and lightning-speed assembly lines. More than 5,000
people die each year from foodborne illnesses, and hundreds of thousands
more require hospital care.


Thanks in part to all that meat and dairy, and the proliferation of fat and
sugar in processed foods, nearly one third of Americans are obese, and close
to two-thirds are overweight.


Those meat factories, by virtue of their intense speed and volume, maim and
cripple tens of thousands of workers each year – many of them immigrants
shipped up from Mexico and Central America, discarded and replaced every few
months. Our meat supply, and much of our fruit and vegetable harvests,
depend on this steady flow of cheap, highly exploited, disposable labor.


The system that produces and transports this superabundance runs on oil and
diesel. The average food item on your supermarket shelf has traveled at
least 1,500 miles, and all that long-distance transport requires millions of
gallons of diesel fuel. On today's industrial farm, giant tractors and
combines spew diesel fumes and kick up dust pollution, while huge
single-crop harvests are coaxed by 15 million tons of petroleum-based
fertilizers each year. Experts such as Cornell University's Dr. David
Pimentel have found that U.S. agriculture – largely through its reliance on
petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides – uses some 400 gallons of
fossil fuel a year to feed every American. That's more than 100 billion
gallons of oil and oil equivalents used in the United States each year just
to manufacture food.


The bulk of the food in your shopping cart – especially the meat, dairy and
packaged products – is owned by a handful of exceedingly powerful
corporations that exercise increasing control over what we eat, how it is
made, how much it costs, and who produces and profits from it. Just five
corporations now control 42 percent of all grocery sales in America.


Due to this intensifying corporate takeover, nearly 20,000 farmers go under
each year (one every half an hour), the victims of market centralization by
food corporations and supermarkets. When these farms disappear, the social
and economic fabric of rural communities is shattered; whole generations of
highly skilled producers of food are lost.
These are just some of the immense costs we never see on our supermarket
receipts. But we pay them nonetheless, in the form of taxes and public
spending: in excess of $10 billion a year in public health costs to treat
food-related illnesses, not to mention high cholesterol and heart disease;
environmental expenses for monitoring and cleaning up factory farm runoff
spills that have discharged millions of tons of animal manure into rivers
and streams; workers' compensation costs and public medical bills for
injured farmworkers and meat factory employees, who typically have no
insurance; unemployment and welfare payments to foreclosed farmers, and
often many of the surrounding businesses that rely on those farmers.

The Bad Miracle

How is it that the most essential ingredient in human life – trumped only by
oxygen and water in our hierarchy of necessities – has become a force of
such destructive magnitude? Since the 1950s we have heard the feverish
boasts of agribusiness: giant new machines raking in phenomenally massive
harvests; the miraculous ever-increasing productivity of the American farm;
breadbasket and "supermarket to the world." No one can deny that the modern
industrial super-farm produces unprecedented bounty.

But most of the costs and casualties of Big Food are far-removed from
supermarket shelves. "The present land economy rests on a foundation of
general ignorance," argues writer-farmer Wendell Berry. "Most of us don't
know how we live and at what costs, either ecologically or human ... For how
long can we maintain an industrial superstition that we can beat the world
by destroying the world's capacity to produce food?"

Our ignorance is nurtured by – and at the same time strengthens – the
growing corporate stranglehold on our food system. In recent years, leading
firms like Tyson Foods, Safeway, ADM and Cargill have gobbled up competitors
and consolidated their near-monopoly control over the entire food chain. In
just three years, between 1997 and 2000, the top five food retailers in
America (Kroger, Albertson's, Wal-Mart, Safeway and Ahold USA) nearly
doubled their market share – growing from 24 percent of all retail food
sales, to an amazing 42 percent. The top four beef producers occupy an
almost unprecedented 80 percent of the U.S. meat market.

Each time the Justice Department approves another merger or takeover, both
farmers and consumers lose power over what we grow and eat, how it is grown,
how much it costs.

Our Bodies, Our Money

The very way we eat affects the future of food. Our buying and dining
choices today affect our food options tomorrow. It's not simply a matter of
big-farm-versus-small-farm, or pesticides against organics, natural versus
genetically engineered. The food we eat is the product of a whole system
that is in the process of destroying itself – poisoning our air and water,
turning topsoil into useless dust, and putting farmers out to pasture. If we
are to have a truly healthy cornucopia that sustains society, the entire
system of making, distributing and marketing food must be sustainable.

What's needed is a whole new way of thinking about food – one that
encompasses health, affordability, accessibility, ecological sustainability,
and an economics that enables farmers to keep growing food.

There are paths to a better way: muscular antitrust measures to break up
corporate control over food; subsidy reform that shifts payments (currently
$15-20 billion a year) from large-scale agribusiness to ecologically
sustainable diversified farms; aggressive regulation (and enforcement) of
the meat industry's shoddy food safety practices and mistreatment of its
workers; a serious reduction in the 500,000 tons of toxic pesticides dumped
on our food each year; and major public investment in community food
security projects that link together small local producers and consumers to
supply healthy, affordable, sustainably produced food (the USDA ladled out
just $4.6 million for such efforts last year).

There are many other promising trends afloat – movements to expand farmers'
markets, serve organic foods in schools, and to encourage institutions like
schools and hospitals to purchase local organic food whenever possible.

Lacking major change in our food system, we all suffer. Some quickly, from
tainted meat and foreclosed farms, others gradually, from pesticide
sprayings and fat-laden, carcinogenic diets. The only winners are
short-term: large-scale subsidized farmers and agribusiness executives and
shareholders. But even they have to eat.
© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20556/
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  • [Livingontheland] Thanksgiving's Hidden Costs, Tradingpost, 11/26/2004

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