The Real Cost of Cheap Food

Michael Carolan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351624411
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics
• Index: Economics

This thought-provoking but accessible book critically examines the dominant food regime on its own terms, by seriously asking whether we can afford cheap food and by exploring what exactly cheap food affords us. Detailing the numerous ways that our understanding of food has narrowed, such as its price per ounce, combination of nutrients, yield per acre, or calories, the book argues for a more contextual view of food when debating its affordability. The first edition, published in 2011, was widely praised for its innovative approach and readability.

In this new edition the author brings all data and citations fully up to date. Increased coverage is given to many topics including climate change, aquaculture, financialization, BRICS countries, food-based social movements, gender and ethnic issues, critical public health and land succession. There is also greater discussion about successful cases of social change throughout all chapters, by including new text boxes that emphasize these more positive messages.

The author shows why today's global food system produces just the opposite of what it promises. The food produced under this regime is in fact exceedingly expensive. Many of these costs will be paid for in other ways or by future generations and cheap food today may mean expensive food tomorrow. By systematically assessing these costs the book delves into issues related, but not limited, to international development, national security, healthcare, industrial meat production, organic farming, corporate responsibility, government subsidies, food aid and global commodity markets. It is shown that exploding the myth of cheap food requires we have at our disposal a host of practices and policies.

1 Introduction

It has been seven years between editions. The Real Cost of Cheap Food first appeared in 2011, on the heels of the Great Recession and during a time of near-record food prices according to the FAO’s (Food and Agriculture Organization) food price index (see Table 1.1). This was also a period of record gas prices. Shortly before its publication, the famed food journalist and frequent New York Times contributor, Mark Bittman (2010), declared, “The era of cheap, abundant food is over.” Two days later, the venerable magazine The Atlantic published an article titled “The End of Cheap Food?” (Fromson 2010). Headlines like this led a colleague to ask, just before the first edition came out, if the book was published ten years too late?

Hindsight is 20/20. In the years since the first edition, the issues covered in The Real Cost of Cheap Food have not gone away. If anything, they have become more pertinent as globalization and neoliberalism have strengthened the hand of transnational agribusiness.

What do I mean by cheap food? And why am I against it?

To begin, cheap food means exactly what you would think it might—rock-bottom retail-priced food. I can hear proponents of cheap food now: “What’s wrong with that? Cheap food, in this sense, enhances wellbeing!”

Does it?

I have actually done considerable research on the subject of the relationships between conventional (cheap) food policy and prosperity (Carolan 2013). The findings do not fit the narratives we are being fed on the subject. Here is a taste of what I discovered—you’ll have to read beyond this chapter if you want the full meal.

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is a prosperity metric that takes into consideration a country’s life expectancy at birth, general life satisfaction score, and ecological footprint. A high HPI score thus reflects a country with high life expectancy, high life satisfaction, and low ecological footprint. Figure 1.1 plots the relationship between HPI and average percentage of disposable household income spent on food (see Box 1.1). We are told that countries whose citizens spend the smallest share of their incomes on food also have the highest levels of prosperity, which I would expect to mean that they would have envious HPI scores. In fact, countries with the cheapest food report some of the lowest HPI numbers. There’s nothing to be envious of in that.

Table 1.1 FAO Food Price Index, 1961–2016

Year	Nominal Price Index (non adjusted)	Real Price Index (adjusted for inflation)
	(2002–2004 = 100)
1961	33.2	131.7
1962	32.8	128.0
1963	34.6	137.4
1964	36.3	142.2
1965	36.5	141.5
1966	37.0	138.2
1967	36.6	135.7
1968	35.0	130.8
1969	36.6	129.9
1970	38.4	128.3
1971	41.0	130.1
1972	44.3	128.8
1973	60.0	150.5
1974	86.2	177.4
1975	92.0	170.5
1976	79.5	145.5
1977	79.0	133.9
1978	87.9	128.2
1979	98.0	128.1
1980	109.1	129.7
1981	106.6	126.5
1982	93.8	114.8
1983	89.1	111.9
1984	91.9	118.1
1985	83.1	107.8
1986	82.4	93.0
1987	85.0	87.6
1988	95.9	92.8
1989	101.1	98.4
1990	107.2	100.4
1991	105.0	98.7
1992	109.2	101.1
1993	105.5	97.1
1994	110.3	101.3
1995	125.3	105.3
1996	131.1	113.7
1997	120.3	111.3
1998	108.6	105.6
1999	93.2	92.6
2000	91.1	92.4
2001	94.6	101.0
2002	89.6	96.2
2003	97.7	98.1
2004	112.7	105.0
2005	118.0	106.8
2006	127.2	112.7
2007	161.4	134.6
2008	201.4	155.7
2009	160.3	132.8
2010	188.0	150.7
2011	229.9	169.1
2012	213.3	158.8
2013	209.8	158.5
2014	201.8	152.0
2015	164.0	123.2
2016	160.6	118.9

Source: FAO 2017.

Figure 1.1 Relationship between HPI and average percentage of disposable household income spent on food.

Source: Adapted from Carolan 2013.

Let us pull on this thread a little longer and see what else from the conventional food narrative comes apart. As you will read in further detail in later chapters, conventional agrifood policy largely does not discriminate between calories. So: more is almost always better. To investigate the wisdom of this practice empirically, I plotted the relationship between a country’s daily average per capita consumption of oils, fats, and sugars and life satisfaction—Figure 1.2. (As we will discuss later, oils, fats, and sugars are exactly the foods that conventional practices and policies are best at making “cheap.”) As the image illustrates, the consumption of oils, fats, and sugars is positively correlated to life satisfaction in the left half of the figure. It is hard to feel well-off if you are starved, even from foods deemed “unhealthy,” though you do need some level of these elements to survive. However, at levels greater than roughly 900 calories per capita there is no positive bearing on life satisfaction. In fact, beyond this point the relationship turns slightly negative.

Now let us look at the relationship between daily average per capita consumption of oils, fats, and sugars and average percentage of disposable household income spent on food. We are doing this to help us better understand what we saw in Figure 1.1, where we are shown that really cheap food is actually negatively associated with wellbeing. As Figure 1.3 illustrates, as oils, fats, and sugars become cheaper—the very calories that become cheapest as food systems “modernize”—we tend to consume them at greater levels.

Box 1.1 Percent of disposable annual income spent on food—a figure worth celebrating?

Those of us in affluent nations spend less of our annual incomes today on food than any previous generation. The percentage of disposable income spent on food within the US has steadily decreased since 1947. Since 1970, the percentage of disposable income spent on all food in the US dropped from 13.9 to below 10 percent—the recent figure ranges anywhere between 6.7 and 9.9 percent, depending on who calculates it (see e.g., Barclay 2015; USDA 2016a). This decrease is even more remarkable given that more than half (50.1 percent) of what US consumers spend on food is spent eating away from home—30 years ago that figure was 34 percent and 50 years ago it was 25 percent (USDA 2016b). Let’s not forget, however, that this is an aggregate figure. The less you make, the bigger your food spending will be relative to your income. In 2013, the lowest income bracket in the US spent roughly $3,655 annually on food, or 36 percent of total income. Meanwhile, those in the highest income bracket were spending approximately $11,000 annually on food—only 8 percent of their earnings.

For some points of international comparison: residents of the Philippines and Guatemala spend about 40 percent of their disposable income on food, whereas the French and Japanese spend about 14 percent (Barclay 2015). To quote a USDA agriculture economist, after having presented this data to a reporter during an interview: “Food is still a good bargain for the American consumer” (ibid.).

We are not just consumers, however. We are also citizens, who have to live with, and pay for—sometimes even with our lives—the costs of cheap food. To quote Diep Tran (2017), a journalist and someone who comes from a family of restaurant owners, riling against cheap food lists that food critics like to pull together, especially those involving food from immigrant restaurateurs:

This view of people of color as sources of “cheap” labor bleeds into our restaurant culture: Immigrant food is often expected to be cheap, because, implicitly, the labor that produces it is expected to be cheap, because that labor has historically been cheap. And so pulling together a “cheap eats” list rather than, say, an “affordable eats” list both invokes that history and reinforces it by prioritizing price at the expense of labor.

That is what this book is about: all those costs we ignore when in search of cheap eats.

Figure 1.2 Relationship between daily average per capita consumption of oils, fats, and sugars (in calories) and life satisfaction.

Source: Carolan 2013.

Figure 1.3 Relationship between daily average per capita consumption of oils, fats, and sugars (in calories) and average percentage of disposable household income spent on food ($15,000 or greater GDP per capita).

Source: Carolan 2013.

A recently published analysis supports this point that conventional food policy really only makes certain foods cheap. Looking at ten different countries, the authors concluded that healthy food in all sites studied cost more than less healthy foods. In the authors’ words, “This meta-analysis provides the best evidence until today of price differences of healthier vs. less healthy foods/diet patterns, highlighting the challenges and opportuni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Lists of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Cheap food, globalization, and development
• 3 Cheap food and conflict
• 4 Cheap food, hunger, and obesity
• 5 Cheap meat
• 6 Cheap food and the environment
• 7 Cheap food … but at what price?
• 8 Cheap food, community, and culture
• 9 Cheap food: who wins?
• 10 Making food affordable
• Index