Food may be cheap, but is it a bargain?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how cheap our food is, what with “value meals” and discounts galore. I recently spotted a 5-pound container of peeled garlic from China for $7.99; at a farmers market a few days later, garlic was $1 a bulb -- and I had to peel it myself!

Similarly, almonds were about $8 a pound from the farmers market, $3.49 at Super King Markets.

If you’ve got teenagers at home, you might be spending a small country’s GNP on food, but even considering last year’s food price increases, Americans spend less of their disposable income on food, about 6%, than the citizens of other countries. Considered another way, we spent 18% less on food in 2007 than in the 1970s, Ellen Ruppel Shell writes in her new book, “Cheap,” which looks at the cost of consumer goods.

But is cheap food the bargain it seems? Naturally, it's a complicated question.

For all too many of us, all that cheap food is making us fat -- and obesity is no bargain. Estimates are that obesity and its attendant diseases will cost more than $100 billion a year.

But many people have come to consider high-quality fruits and vegetables fancy, elite products available at Whole Foods or farmers markets at high prices, Shell said. “What’s gotten lost” is nutritious food at affordable prices.

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, noted that over the last quarter-century, fast-food prices have decreased while produce prices have increased -- at comparable levels. “There’s no question that they are relatively more expensive,” and so people with less money buy food that’s less nutritious, she said.

And if Americans are growing increasingly uncomfortable in their jeans, some people are as uncomfortable with the state of our food affairs.

“Food is too cheap. But it depends. If you are a poor guy in a Bombay slum, it’s too expensive,” said Hans Herren, president of the Arlington, Va.-based Millennium Institute, which promotes sustainability and issued a report this year on the state of agriculture.

Cheap food has a “huge environmental cost that everyone has to pay for,” including polluted wells and dead rivers, Herren said in a telephone interview from Northern California, where he was vacationing.

A rapid increase in agricultural productivity over the last century or so “is a very good thing for human welfare, which doesn’t mean it was free,” said Daniel Sumner, director of the Agricultural Issues Center at UC Davis.

That growth is in part a result of new knowledge and technology. In addition to improving irrigation systems, for example, farmers have learned that Napa Valley is better for cabernet sauvignon and Sonoma Valley for chardonnay, “to use some of my favorite examples,” Sumner said. California no longer devotes 1.5 million acres to barley or cotton; instead, it grows more almonds and pistachios, he said.

Industrial agriculture, government protections, billions of dollars in subsidies and world markets all play a role.

When 2-liter bottles of soda can cost the same as a smaller bottle of unsweetened tea, and school lunches too rarely contain fresh fruit and vegetables, it’s no wonder consumers can be confused about what’s cheap and what’s a good value, Shell said.

Getting takeout all the time means we “really discount our time,” Shell said. The driving, the waiting in line for the food is rarely considered part of the cost of a cheap takeout dinner, she said.

“We have to think about another model,” she said. She cites the Eastern supermarket chain Wegmans, which she said tries to use local products at reasonable prices.

Governments need to support farmers, Herren said. The question is which farmers and under which circumstances. He cited a program in Switzerland, where farmers who provide “eco-services” get subsidies. For example, the more diverse the flowers in their fields, the more government money they get.

“We need to connect the dots between food production and over to nutrition and health of the environment and health of the people,” Herren said. “Everything is connected in the system.”

-- Mary MacVean

Photo credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[susan k]

Just because the percentage is lower, doesnt mean its cheaper than the 1970s. Health insurance costs have quadrupled and take up a higher percent of the national average income. Every item can't be 100% of the budget. I was shopping in the 1970's and food was no different then.

[Ryan D]

Ms Allen's article was so incredibly ludicrous in areas that at first I thought it was meant to be farcical. But apparently she was attempting to sarcastic.
Regardless, her article was not only inaccurate, but extremely reckless.
jumhealthy has a great post here, and certainly better reading that Ms Allen.

[john649]

I agree with jimhealthy: The Keep your self-righteous fingers off my processed food by Charlotte Allen is one of the most shallow, inane articles to hit the internet in a long time. She conspicuously left off the comments section....hmmmmmm. Wonder what she's afraid of? This is what eating that processed food does to the brain.....
Sounds more like a repub town hall rhetoric than anything of substance or worth reading. Waiting for her join the birthers and start blaming Obama for her processed food obsession!

[jimhealthy]

Pls don't miss "Keep your self-righteous fingers off my processed food" by Charlotte Allen in this Sunday's LA Times. Ms Allen's diatribe against "foodie snobs and lefty social critics" who are "demanding we all pay more to fund their agendas in these harsh economic times" likens the call by some for more healthtful food to Marie Antoinette's suggestion to let the starving Parisians "eat cake" because there was no bread available. Only now, Ms. Allen contends that snobbish foodies are telling us "to eat artisanal cake."

Evidently Ms. Allen hasn't seen the current invoices being presented to US taxpayers for today's epidemics of diabetes, heart disease and cancer -- or the long lines of the unemployed collecting their tax-enabled benefit checks because short-sighted CEOs and government regulators ignored the consequences of sending their jobs overseas.

She only sees the visible portion of the price tag on her "cheap" food. Our tax dollars are making up the difference through industry subsidies, out-of-control Medicare costs, environment clean up and collapsing US industries. She's like those loonies who scream "Keep your hands off my healtcare" at boisterous town hall meetings, even as their premiums rise, there is no real competition in the industry to control medical inflation, and that they can be cancelled any moment their provider decides it's in the company's best interests to keep them as customers.

Marie Antoinnette's "let them eat cake" remark was in response to Parisians rioting because there was no bread -- and little else available for their basic needs -- while she and her Royal Court luxuriated on the backs of the poor. This seems like what a lot of CEOs and politicians are doing to most of us these days.

It is high time the US ended it's laisse faire policy toward big business as the health of our nation continues to decline. The right-wing fringe decry "socialism" but what do they call it when our current government subsidizes every major industry with tax dollars? Most big industries here don't have to pay the full cost of doing business (cleaning up the air and water they foul; caring for the sick and diseased people they create; etc.) because, through tax dollars, our government is their partner.

Worse: Their products are shoddy, dangerous and unhalthful. So we end up paying much more for those 99-cent cheeseburgers in the end. It is exactly this short-sighted perspective that got our economy into today's terrible situation. All those highly-educated, well-paid CEOs sold us out for short-term profits instead of managing their industries so there would be future jobs and a productive economy.

Ms. Allen can eat all the cheap processed food she wants -- and when she gets diabetes or needs a bypass let her get in the long Medicare line and hope there's enough taxpayer-paid insulin and stents to go around.

Her anger is misplaced, like the rage of the "Obama Care" ranters. They remind me of a child throwing a tantrum because she can't get her way, screaming "You're not the boss of me!" The "foodie snobs" didn't steal their jobs, their 401Ks, their personal power; the last Administration did. Now impotent, these people demand the "freedom" to eat, drink, smoke and shoot themselves to death even if it kills them -- and everyone else in the vicinity. So infantile in development are they that they could care less about how their selfish desires affect the "greater good" (which, by the way is the principle of democracy that this country was founded on).

How long will it take Ms. Allen and those like her to realize that there's no such thing as a free (or even "cheap") lunch -- even if you grow and cook it yourself?

If Ms. Allens wants to see the true price of today's "cheap" food, take a look at the poolside photo of morbidly obese kids in today's NY Times at www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/weekinreview/30bruni "Eat Your Peas. Or Don't. Whatever: by Frank Bruni. It will break your heart. If we don't start doing something about the dismal quality of today's food, we will be nostalgic for today's healthcare "crisis" 20 years from now.

[Celia]

We may spend 6% of our income on food, but does that mean fresh only? How much is spent on restaurants and take-out? I bet that's a whole 'nuther ball of wax.

[suli]

I don't know what income bracket you are in.......but food is NOT cheap for
my income, quickly disappearing. I do not live in an area where Farmer's Markets are available year round, and the variety of the summer market food is
is limited, at best. Groceries are even harder to "forage" through in search of local, seasonal and nutritious and varied. A bunch of 5 wilted leaves of swiss chard costs upward of 4 dollars. Spinach is old, wilted and beyond nutritional value. Okay, frozen here we come. Pasta, potatoes, squash, beef (very pricey local bison) no local free range chicken, organic chicken (all flown or trucked in at high cost to everyone involved) and fish....yeah, right. Catfish, catfish, catfish.
Mud fish!
And lastly, food is not cheap..........ESPECIALLY to the laborers who do back breaking work in suspect conditions from insect deterrents (organic or otherwise), living conditions that for the most part are slumlord category and at wages most would run from.
To them, this is the costliest food of all, it costs them their lives.

[Rachel McCormack]

One of the other problems is how little we associate our food with something that was once alive or growing in the ground. How often do we eat things from boxes with a list of ingredients half of which we don't even recognise?
The more processed food we eat the less pleasure we take in sitting at a table and eating proper food, the fatter we get, the more food we waste, the more we look for cheap food.