The True Cost of a Cheap Meal

By Katie Cantrell, Tikkun

While perusing the items at a quaint antique store, I happened upon a catalog from the 1920s advertising farm-fresh food. It featured cabbage for two cents per pound, a dozen eggs for 44 cents and a half-gallon of milk for 33 cents. The shop owner told me that he was perplexed by the prices because, adjusting for inflation, it should cost roughly $4 for a dozen eggs and $8 for a gallon of milk in today's dollars. Consumers today pay less than half of what we would expect to pay based on historic prices.

The antique store owner, like most Americans, didn't realize that we currently spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than ever before. While on its face that may seem beneficial, this system of cheap food relies on billions of dollars of externalized costs that are kept hidden from consumers.

Externalized costs are negative effects of producing or consuming a good that are imposed on a third party and not accounted for in the sticker price of an item. Among food products, there is no greater discrepancy between printed cost and true cost than with animal products. When we take a closer look at meat, dairy and eggs, externalized costs become apparent in four primary areas: animals, health, social justice and the environment.

Animals

Although we use terms like “pork" and “beef" to obscure the origins of meat, by now most adults know that their farmyard friends are ending up on their plate. But few people realize just how many animals are killed for food or how drastically the lives of those animals vary from the cheery songs we sang as children.

Nine billion land animals are raised and killed for food every year in the U.S. Of those billions of animals, 99 percent are raised on factory farms. Technically known as “concentrated animal feeding operations" or CAFOs, factory farms are defined by dense quantities of animals kept in intensive confinement for their entire lives.

A single facility will house tens of thousands animals, often in cages or crates so small that they cannot even turn around. The animals are unable to engage in the most basic of natural behaviors; the only time they see sunlight or breathe fresh air is when they are shipped to slaughter. Increasingly, even brands that label themselves “organic" or “cage-free" raise thousands of animals in factory farming conditions.

Surveys show that 95 percent of Americans believe that farm animals should be treated well, but 99 percent of farm animals are raised in conditions that closely resemble a horror movie. Recognizing this disparity, agribusiness corporations go to great lengths to hide the unsavory truth from concerned consumers. In response to a string of shocking undercover investigations—revealing “downed" dairy cows jabbed with forklifts, chickens laying eggs on top of rotting corpses of cagemates, pigs beaten with metal poles—agribusiness began lobbying for so-called “ag-gag" laws. Rather than improving conditions and increasing inspections, agribusiness pushed to criminalize unauthorized photography and videography at food production facilities, a change that would make felons of undercover investigators and whistleblowers. Almost thirty states have introduced some variation of these bills and eight states have passed them (although Idaho's was recently struck down as unconstitutional).

However, these bills have had an unintended consequence; formerly oblivious consumers are forced to question, “What are these corporations trying to hide?" People are beginning to realize that the bucolic label and low price on animal products hide some unsavory truths.

Health

Animals are not the only ones suffering and dying as a result of the enormous amount of meat that Americans consume. Every day, more than 3,500 people die from heart disease, stroke and cancer—as many fatalities as if six 747 jets crashed and killed everyone on board. While people would stop flying if six jets crashed on a daily basis, we have come to accept it as a matter of fact that thousands of people will die daily from preventable diseases.

A study of more than 6,000 adults, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, found that people with diets high in animal protein were 74 percent more likely to die before the end of the study than people with diets low in animal protein. The study also found that people with high protein diets were four times more likely to die of cancer—the same mortality risk as smoking cigarettes.

Several studies have shown that vegetarians are approximately one-third less likely to die of heart disease, diabetes or stroke. If a pill were shown to make these causes of premature death 33 percent less likely, it would be prescribed by every doctor in the country. Yet there is an even simpler, less expensive solution, one without any negative side effects.

Luckily, the health care world is beginning to take note. Kim A. Williams, the president of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), lowered his own cholesterol levels by adopting a vegan diet and now hopes to put the ACC “out of business" by recommending a vegan diet to all of his patients. Kaiser Permanente recently advised all of its doctors that, “Physicians should consider recommending a plant-based diet to all their patients, especially those with high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity."

Health professionals are increasingly warning patients that the “value meal" isn't so cheap when you factor in long-term health care costs.

Social Justice

While the personal health impacts hit close to home, the other human costs of factory farming remain hidden from view.

Slaughterhouse workers face the most dangerous job in the country. Their injury rate is thirty-three times higher than the injury rate of other factory workers, yet they usually have no health insurance or job protections. Many suffer from cumulative trauma injuries that cause lifelong debilitating pain. Often, workers are undocumented, leaving them vulnerable to sexual harassment and wage theft.

On top of this, they face a deeply disturbing job. Many slaughterhouse workers develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from seeing so much suffering and death on a daily basis, much like soldiers returning from war. Since they have no access to basic health care, let alone mental health care, many turn to alcohol or drugs in order to numb the pain. Domestic abuse and sexual assault rates are higher among slaughterhouse workers; researchers theorize that this is due to the desensitization to violence and mental illness caused by the job.

If we could not bear to slaughter an animal ourselves, why pay someone else to do our dirty work for us?

In addition to impacting workers, factory farms and slaughterhouses also have dire impacts on local communities. Factory farms are almost always located near low-income communities of color, resulting in what is deemed “environmental racism."

One study found that people living within one mile of a pig factory farm were three times more likely to carry MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. Families near factory farms also suffer from asthma, heart palpitations and migraines, among a myriad of other health problems, as a result of continually breathing fecal matter and toxic gases wafting from 20-million gallon manure lagoons. A must-watch video on YouTube, Spy Drones Expose Smithfield Foods Factory Farms, recently revealed this environmental injustice firsthand, with elderly neighbors describing a rain of pig feces deluging their homes.

These frontline communities must bear the brunt of our food choices; they are the ones paying the true cost.

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