A new study shows that "healthy" foods have risen in cost by about 20 percent over the past two years, while core food inflation has only been 5 percent. And this isn't a study comparing the food "genre" of healthy, and so merely tracking the rise of organics -- it's comparing like items, at like outlets, over a two-year period. So eating health now not only requires knowledge of what healthy is, and not only demands access to retailers with healthful selections, but increasingly, you need a pretty substantial income to afford a nutritious, varied diet. As one of the study's authors says, "It takes three things [to eat healthy]. Education, money and time. If you have all three, you're home free. If you have two out of three, you can manage. But if you have only one out of the three, or zero of the three, you are pretty much screwed. And a lot of low-income people have zero out of three."Luckily, our tax dollars go towards subsidizing massive amounts of red meat and high fructose corn syrup, so we're ensuring the crap food stays cheap and doing nothing to broaden the availability of healthful options. And the really fun part is that we not only get to support this state of affairs through our subsidies, but through our health spending, as we pay for all manner of chronic diseases (like diabetes, heart disease, etc) that are direct outcomes of our eating habits. We could, of course, rework the subsidy system such that we encouraged both the production and consumption of sustainably grown, healthful foods. It wouldn't, as a matter of policy, even be very hard. But Big Ag wouldn't like it, and nor would the Iowans, and so we have a Senate, a Congress, and a presidential nomination process largely that prizes politicians who're pretty sure their main constituent is Monsanto. Image used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Altemark. AN APPLE A DAY KEEPS THE BANK ACCOUNT AWAY.
A new study shows that "healthy" foods have risen in cost by about 20 percent over the past two years, while core food inflation has only been 5 percent. And this isn't a study comparing the food "genre" of healthy, and so merely tracking the rise of organics -- it's comparing like items, at like outlets, over a two-year period. So eating health now not only requires knowledge of what healthy is, and not only demands access to retailers with healthful selections, but increasingly, you need a pretty substantial income to afford a nutritious, varied diet. As one of the study's authors says, "It takes three things [to eat healthy]. Education, money and time. If you have all three, you're home free. If you have two out of three, you can manage. But if you have only one out of the three, or zero of the three, you are pretty much screwed. And a lot of low-income people have zero out of three."Luckily, our tax dollars go towards subsidizing massive amounts of red meat and high fructose corn syrup, so we're ensuring the crap food stays cheap and doing nothing to broaden the availability of healthful options. And the really fun part is that we not only get to support this state of affairs through our subsidies, but through our health spending, as we pay for all manner of chronic diseases (like diabetes, heart disease, etc) that are direct outcomes of our eating habits. We could, of course, rework the subsidy system such that we encouraged both the production and consumption of sustainably grown, healthful foods. It wouldn't, as a matter of policy, even be very hard. But Big Ag wouldn't like it, and nor would the Iowans, and so we have a Senate, a Congress, and a presidential nomination process largely that prizes politicians who're pretty sure their main constituent is Monsanto. Image used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Altemark. 
