Why Cheap Food is a Myth

Several weeks ago, I was at an all-day party where we all brought food. I brought various munchables from the Whole Foods deli department. Because they were from the deli department, there were huge labels across the tops of the containers that had the ingredients and the prices.

Upon eyeing the prices, one of the women was shocked. I glibly tossed out my favorite quote from my brother-in-law, Joth: You can make more money, but you can’t make more health. And I can safely say that was a really bad idea.

What followed was a defensive speech about how she has four kids and I don’t have any (hmm, do the two, eighty-pound greyhounds and the cat count? I mean, I do have to feed and care for them, and that doesn’t come cheap, trust me). But that was just a smokescreen. The real reason came out a bit later: I refuse to spend so much of our money on food. I’d rather spend it on fun stuff for the kids, she said.

Ah-ha!

Such a rich two sentences. Let’s deconstruct:

• I’ve just gotta start with that second one. Fun is more important than food? Huh?
• Furthermore, when I was a kid, "fun" was going outside and playing Charlie’s Angels, complete with zero props except our imaginations and abilities to recall, verbatim, recent episodes (scary, I know. Glad this isn’t a psychoanalysis blog.).
• What many people don’t realize, is that the less expensive food is, the less healthy it probably is, and as we all know, the more cruel, inhumane, and bad for the environment it probably is.
  • In The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason,  a humane farmer tells the authors:

It’s this whole American thing about having cheap food. It’s a fallacy. That guy thinks his food is cheap, but you and I are subsidizing that cheap food by paying for the social and ecological issues that are occurring in that community (p. 99).

• Not to mention, of course the original, actual subsidy.
• Eating unhealthy food results in more illness and higher costs to maintain health, so again, cheap is a fallacy.

I don’t mind that my food is, relatively speaking, expensive. I haven’t been to a doctor in years (except the annual groinocologist visit and that unfortunate, yet hilarious trip to the emergency room a couple of weeks ago), I haven’t been sick in years, my cholesterols and triglycerides are fabulous, I’m not overweight or underweight, and I don’t take any medication. I do have an incurable skin condition, called melasma, lest you think I
have no problems. But I got it the one time I took prescribed
medication (it’s a side effect of birth control pills). No joke.

True, I’ll turn 40 in December and probably promptly fall apart.

But I made it this far with nothing but some hyperpigmentation on my face, and I think that’s a testament to eating expensively for several decades. Try it. You’ll be glad you did.