Alright, one more quote from the Harper's article on milk:I asked Stoker if he’d ever considered returning to a smaller, healthier style of farming. “If I had a way to provide for my six kids and have a comparable standard of living I would do that,” Stoker said. “The way it is now, I’m more stressed, the animals are more stressed, our crops are probably more stressed. There’s nothing I would like more than to go back to that, but I’m too stupid to figure out how.”The problem isn’t Stoker’s intelligence; it’s what he calls the “dishonesty of the market.” Advertisers promise that consumers can have the healthiest possible food from happy animals in idyllic settings at current prices. This obviously is a lie, but it’s a lie that most people accept. Although American consumers are periodically outraged by the realities of modern agriculture, they never stop demanding cheaper food. Stoker doesn’t mind playing the hand he’s been dealt. He’s good at producing cheap food. But, he acknowledged, “cheap food makes for expensive health care.”I made this point a few months back, but cheap meat often has a lot of costs built into it that the customer isn't directly paying, or even being made aware of. The obvious cost is to the animals: Consumers can pay more to ensure that animals are treated humanely, or pay less and shift that cost onto the animal, who's then kept in a cage and fed an unnatural diet and hyped up on growth hormones and antibiotics. The secondary cost comes in our health: Animals that exercise more, and have a more varied diet, produce healthier and more nutritionally varied meat (and dairy) then animals who don't exercise and are fed a diet meant to fatten at the maximal rate. Additionally, there are environmental costs and consequences, transportation issues, and a variety of other diffuse costs. Then there's the simple fact of dietary substitution. When meat is cheaper -- particularly when it's subsidized and passing all sorts of costs onto payers other than the consumer -- people eat more meat than they would otherwise. They eat more meat than fish, and more meat than fruits, and more meat than vegetables, and more meat than grains. If meat were pricier they'd swap in some of these other calorie sources. And these other calories sources are, by and large, healthier than meat -- they are less calorically dense, and have less saturated fat. If our diets were, by economic necessity, less meat-heavy, it would be better for our health. (Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Law_Keven.)
