Adam Roberts spent the weekend at a farmer's market and found himself at a stall with partivcularly pricey meat. He writes:I'd purchased a pork shoulder from [Flying Pigs Farm] last summer and was delighted with the results (if not exactly the price). But things have changed for me; after attending the child obesity seminar in South Beach (see video) I was particularly moved by Alice Waters' insistence that "good food SHOULD cost more money." Diana, my friend, also hammers this point: meat shouldn't be cheap. By the very nature of what it is--a living thing that you've killed and are consuming--there should be a reasonable price for that. A $1 hamburger at McDonald's is not a reasonable price. $24 for a pork shoulder, which seemed exorbitant at the time, now makes much more sense.Part of the problem with price signals is that we're not always sure what they're signaling. Cheap meat signals, to many, a good deal. But the cheaper your meat, the more brutal the conditions the animal was raised in. It's cheap to raise chickens in boxes, cheap to cut off their beaks so they can't peck themselves. It's cheap to never let your cows roam, cheap to feed them corn feed, cheap to force them to adapt to a fattening, subsidized diet that their bodies reject and deal with the consequences through antibiotics.It's pricey, by contrast, to give animals room to roam, to feed them a healthful diet that doesn't force early maturity, to raise and slaughter them humanely. It's pricey to raise food on things that are recognizable as farms, and to make your energy and transportation practices sustainable. In the same way that gas is too cheap because the price doesn't include the associated environmental harm and long-term costs, meat is too cheap, in that the price ignores the environmental harm, the land-use opportunity costs, and the cruelty that often goes into "cheap" food. More expensive, but more humanely and sustainably raised meat, would be good for the environment, good for the animals involved, and good for our diets. A situation in which meat were a bit costlier and we were thus forced to eat more grains and vegetables would not exactly be a tragedy.(Flickr image used under a Creative Commons license from Tricky.)
