Is Food Too Cheap?

Great article with lot’s of perspective from Michelle Madden at the Huffington Post:

There is something unsettling when enormous quantities of food are sold at bargain prices — when food is so abundant that a restaurant can offer a double sized portion of your meal for $1 extra, or a store can sell a pound of Twizzlers for 50 cents or eight chicken breasts for $4.

Basha’s left me wondering…Is food too cheap? Do we eat too much (in particular low nutrient-density food — the cheapest of all), and waste too much, because we pay so little and therefore don’t value it? In other words, we over-buy because it’s cheap and over-eat because we’ve bought it. And what we don’t eat, we toss, because we know we can buy it again. In the early 1900s we spent 25% of our income on food, today we spend less than 10%, and it’s dropping. Over the past 25 years, the price of a McDonald’s hamburger has gone down 30%. Is it any surprise our waist lines are expanding, and our illnesses worsening, with every dollar we save?

When did quantity trump quality? Why do we balk at paying $6 for a pound of grass-fed, small-farm, nutrient rich beef, but keep coming back to the $6 all-you-can-eat, pasta buffet. America has always been the land of plenty, but we have plenty of plenty. And that’s the problem.

We have driven costs so far out of the food system that in so doing we have not only driven down nutritional value, but driven out the notion of food being a precious resource. And when we do encounter its preciousness, in the form of whole, “clean”, fresh food, at a farmers market or if we’re lucky, our local store, we pay exorbitantly for it. So is it any wonder most of us choose the lowest priced products (refined carbs and factory raised animals), eating more than we need, and getting fewer of the nutrients our bodies crave.

It makes the two-for-one special, start to look a lot less special.

via The Sweet Beet: Is Food Too Cheap?.