Yesterday, we talked a bit about how transportation subsidies helped account for the relative comforts of air, rail, and highway travel. Over the e-mail today comes this great graphic showing how they help account for what you eat, too:
I wish the graphic gave you a sense of the numbers involved, but they're in the high hundreds of billions. Wikipedia has a breakdown here. If half of that cash was going to support the sort of sustainable, healthful agriculture society claims to want, the prices of fresh, nutritious food would plummet. For all the talk of the health costs, the most economically rational purchase on earth is a Big Mac. Or possibly a 99 cent double cheeseburger.
