Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

The real cost of the food we eat and how spending our money on the right food is a long-term investment in the health of ourselves and our future.

Have you ever gone to a grocery store and wondered why the fresh meat, fish, and vegetables on the outer rim are usually more expensive than the processed items that line the aisles of the interior? In this article, I want to break down why the prices we see on the food we eat are the way they are and what we can do to change that for the better.

Oh and don’t be fooled by the highly processed, inflammatory, chemical sludge creations that are made to LOOK like meat that has made their way into the meat section - That crap is still very much considered a processed food and should be avoided completely.

*In case you didn’t pick up what I was putting down, I’m talking about imitation feed that was churned up in the belly of some factory led by a fat-cat CEO counting his profits as he or she peddles cherry-picked science to the media to convince you their creation is healthy. I won’t call it food and I won’t call it meat, because it’s not either. Neither should you. Oh and I called it “feed” intentionally since it’s made of the same ingredients I’m about to discuss below that we give to feedlot cows to fatten them up.

How We Got Here

Most of us know that processed food is bad for us - Yet, we continue to buy it. Why?

We continue to buy it because it’s “cheap”. It’s cheap because the ingredients are cheap. And the ingredients are cheap because they have been subsidized by the government to keep them cheap. Let’s break that down: a subsidy is a sum of money granted by the government to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive.

For this example, let’s use corn and soy. Corn and soy are cultivated through monocropping. Monocropping is the agricultural practice of growing a single crop year after year on the same land, in the absence of rotation of other crops. You would think it’s bad business to put all your eggs in one basket (or all your corn/soy in one basket?) by only growing one type of crop. Well, luckily for these farmers (sarcasm), they are only allowed to grow GMO corn/soybeans designed to resist insecticides and herbicides like glyphosate to ensure successful harvests.

So let’s zoom out for a second.

• Government artificially makes corn and soy cheaper by paying farmers to grow it
• To ensure a successful harvest of corn and soy, along with fulfilling the fine print in government contracts, farmers must buy seeds from companies that produce GMO corn and soy
• They must also use insecticides, and herbicides like Round-Up (glyphosate) to ensure their harvest (but only the ones the fine print says they can)
• That corn and soy is then turned into, among other things, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, canola oil, soybean oil, soy products, and industrial animal feed.
• Those cheap, harmful ingredients are in almost every single, if not ALL, processed food items that the average person consumes.
• The government then gives food stamps out to the nation’s lower-income that grants them the ability to buy this same processed food

It shouldn’t surprise you that the above companies and government all work insidiously together. Ever aware of their share price and the bottom line, these companies send armies of lobbyists to line the pockets of your favorite politicians to keep this cycle going. To reiterate: 

• The government pays farmers to grow corn/soy
• Farmers must use specific seeds and sprays to ensure a harvest
• That harvest is turned into cheap ingredients for food companies to feed us
• Government food stamps guarantee a market for that food by making it so that the nations low-income can buy more of it

Companies will ALWAYS use cheaper ingredients if available and IF the consumer doesn’t care enough to question it. We as a society MUST do better to take responsibility for our own health. The government obviously doesn’t care - they’re getting rich to finance the whole damn corrupt system.

Making Food Cheaper Doesn’t Solve Problems

Some might argue that it’s a good thing that the government subsidizes certain ingredients because it makes food cheaper and available to more of the population at home and abroad. Some tout the innovation (or abomination) of insecticides, pesticides, and GMOs as the cure to world hunger. My counterargument is that we can’t "fix" hunger by giving people empty calories. We don’t have a scarcity of food problem, we have a scarcity of nutrients problem. 

According to a report from The Lancet, we’ve got an obese but undernourished population. This means that an obese person in the U.S. can easily grow overweight from eating mountains of junk food and yet still be deficient in micronutrients that are key for optimal health.

It’s a strange problem we face, where people who live in poverty in America are more likely to be OVERWEIGHT. This speaks to the food that people who live in poverty can afford, processed and cheap, and its dangers. It also speaks to the absolute irresponsibility of vegan product companies promoting themselves as the solution to this problem - Replacing one processed meal with an even more processed one doesn’t make it healthy, even if it “looks” like real food.

The True Cost Of Food

So really, when we see the cheaper price tag on processed foods, we aren’t considering the TRUE cost of food in the long term. Both to our health and our nation’s.

I will highlight this with a fact that I learned during a visit and tour I took on Roam Ranch near Fredericksburg this past April.

After our tour, someone asked the question “how do we explain to someone why meat that has been ethically raised and sourced costs so much more than processed food they could pick up from the grocery store or fast food restaurant?” Roam Ranch’s head land steward, Taylor Collins, answered that the price PER OUNCE of regeneratively grazed, good for you and good for the earth meat was actually CHEAPER than a Snickers bar. This blew my mind - But it’s true. Here’s the math:

Snickers Bar from Walmart: $1.48 per oz = $23.68 per pound

Force of Nature’s Bison: $0.75 cents per oz = $11.99 per pound

Nutritionally DENSE meat is HALF the price of a Snickers Bar. Read that again. The cheap processed stuff is literally MORE expensive than the healthiest food on earth.

Let’s look at another example, for argument’s sake. Let's compare a grain-fed burger where the beef was raised in a feedlot, french fries deep-fried in a mixture of canola/soy oil, and a 16 oz soda sweetened with high fructose corn syrup from a popular fast-food chain.

Price for a meal for 1 person $3-4 dollars if buying off the dollar menu.

That sounds well and good, a single-parent household can feed themselves for $9-12 per day.

Let’s say they do that every day or every other day… How will their health look after a year? How high will their medical bills be? How much school will be missed due to doctor’s visits or falling asleep in class from not being nourished? What about a lifetime of this?

Let’s take that same family and give them a pound of regenerative beef and organ meat. Total cost to feed that same family dinner - maybe $12-15. Similar price - Regardless of what else they ate throughout the day (if anything which is sadly the case in many areas of America), they would be significantly better off having their fill of protein and vital nutrients from nature, the way nature intended. Long-term health - How much better do you think they would be?

Things Are Not Always As They Appear

Do you know the old rule for order of operations (PEMDAS) you learned in middle school math? Sometimes you’ll see one of these math problems going viral and people are torn on the answer because they can’t remember the order in which to solve the problem. 

Looking at the price of food is a lot the same way. Sure, you can just solve the equation from left to right in the order that you see it and deduct that processed item A is cheaper than whole food item B on the initial price tag - But you’d have the wrong answer if you can’t see the whole picture and know the order of operations to solve the problem and what goes on behind the scenes of the food that ends up on your plate.

Let’s learn to look at the whole picture, let’s learn our order of operations when deducing what is truly best for us now and in the future. If we simply stopped buying food we know is bad for us, these companies would change. Companies are very sensitive to the demand of the consumer, but if we don’t begin demanding change, they will not. The best way to demand change is by not buying the shit they try to feed you and start looking at the whole picture to buy what you know deep down is best. It’s an investment in yourself and in your family. Start now.