Fun With Numbers, Food Snobbery Edition
John Schwenkler June 12th, 2009
In lieu of a proper post on the subject, let me just state baldly that it’s because of data like these that I’ve got precious little patience for the common complaint about organic produce, pastured meat and animal products, etc. being “too expensive” for the American family:
Meanwhile, here’s where our money is going instead:
This is the richest country on the face of the earth in the most abundant period that the world has ever known; do people really want to tell me that the average American consumer – as opposed to the one who’s especially poor, out of a job, etc. – can’t trim back the cell phone plan and buy some grass-fed beef instead?
Filed under: economics, food
I wonder how much is spent on junk food.
Good question. One problem is that the category of “junk food” is obviously quite hard to define; I just did a quick search and couldn’t find any statistics.
John,
I am sure you and I are in agreement that there is something seriously skewed in our (U.S.) food culture. Whether it’s because we are too plularistic to actually have a practical food culture, or the culture itself is devolving, there is something terribly wrong.
However, I disagree somewhat with – what I think is – your premise. That chart you cite is not just indicative of increasing net wealth per se, but also indicative of cheaper food. In fact, almost all the data suggests we are buying and consuming more food, albeit cheap crap.
In fact, I’d bet most critical material goods for the household, as a percentage of net household income, are probably cheaper than they have ever been. While this is a good thing for many types of goods (e.g. clothes), it is a bad trend for food. Overconsumption of food, particularly cheap food, is leading the charge in our fight to all become diabetics.
I applaud your efforts though, and am in full agreement – spend more money on the good/healthy produce, downgrade from the Blackberry.
I agree entirely that the decline you see has a lot to do with the decreasing cost of food, whether due to government subsidies or to the efficiencies associated with globalization, industrialized agriculture, economies of scale, and so on. But does that invalidate my point? In the first place, organic food is also made cheaper by all the factors listed above except – perhaps – for subsidies; and secondly and more generally, my argument was just that the “food is too expensive” argument doesn’t do much when something in the range of 5-7% of the average family’s income is being spent at the grocery store. If people in the ’60s could handle spending 10% of their money on food, why can’t we?
I’m a bit of a Luddite myself. I avoided getting a credit card, cell phone and (have avoided getting) a laptop for as long as possible. I have sent one text message in my entire life and do not own a car. But my motivation is practical rather than ethical and, while I understand the reasoning behind buying grass-fed beef instead of from the factory-farm, I don’t quite think that it checks out. For one thing, it assumes that ethics are, to one degree or another, circumstantial (i.e. it is not wrong to purchase factory-farm beef if one cannot afford grass-fed beef, but it may be wrong if he can afford grass-fed beef and instead purchases grass-fed beef.) Another issue I take with this argument is that the ethical imperative to buy grass-fed beef seems like an arbitrary good. For instance, suppose I had the finances to consume grass-fed beef, but instead chose to buy the factory-farm beef because it was cheaper, allowing me to give the saved money to charity instead; would this ethical choice be more or less ethical than the prior imperative?
Hmm. Actually I think that there’s a pretty good case to be made that buying factory-farmed beef is immoral, period. That’s not to say that I never violate that maxim – it’s venial, not mortal – but given how cows (among many other animals) are treated in factory farms I’m quite strongly opposed to supporting that system. Plus, factory-farmed stuff just tastes awful …
I would say that you’re climbing a very slippery slope once you start assigning moral agency to actions performed in relation to animals; I do believe that it is immoral to act sadistically toward animals (i.e. torturing them for the sake of torturing them, withholding food just to make them suffer, etc.), but I would probably make the same case for the treatment of plants. There are some who make the case that animals have souls, which is one thing, but if we argue that animals deserve ethical treatment which is not privy to less autonomous entities, it becomes difficult to defend the dignity of humans who do not function autonomously. I.e. Peter Singer (following the logic of Jeremy Bentham) has no ethical problem with infanticide, but is a die-hard apologist for animal rights. There may be a middle way; I just don’t know what it is yet.
I don’t think so; it’s entirely possible to argue that non-human animals have a dignity of their own that entitles them to an appropriate level of respect. This doesn’t, I think, mean that they can’t be eaten or – say – kept as pets, but it does mean that the ways we go about such things should require treating them with care and kindness.
“. . . it does mean that the ways we go about such things should require treating them with care and kindness.”
This is not a claim which I was trying to dispute; the problem I have is putting this imperative in the front seat with human concerns. If, for instance, we accept the claim that “buying factory-farmed beef is immoral, period” then we also need to accept that, for those people who are unable to afford grass-fed beef, eating beef is immoral, period. I also believe that animals should be treated “with care and kindness” but only up to the point at which this is feasible. The primary concern should be making those nutritions which are necessary for work affordable to all people.
Well in point of fact I don’t think that many of the people consuming factory-farmed beef would otherwise be on the verge of starvation; it’s primarily in industrialized countries that such, er, luxuries are available, and the vast majority – though perhaps not all – of us could make the necessary switch by eating a bit less meat and spending less on our Nikes. In any case I agree with the point about feasibility – it’s just that I find it very hard to believe that many people would end up malnourished if factory farming were to be abolished or seriously curtailed.
But does that invalidate my point?
Absolutely not, your point is as valid as ever. I just think there are multiple fronts that can be attacked to address this issue – and it is an issue. One is cultural: let’s get people to change habits and eat healthier. Another is economic/political: let’s stop the crazy policies that subsidize food production, let’s repeal the import quota on cane sugar, etc…
My point is only that it has to be both an cultural and economic change.
“Well in point of fact I don’t think that many of the people consuming factory-farmed beef would otherwise be on the verge of starvation;”
Maybe not, but without enhanced farming techniques it would certainly be a much different world we lived in, and, because of globalization, the land that went to feeding a greater number of free-range cattle or chickens or otherwise could not be used for, say, grain instead, which would mean that grain might have to be imported from overseas which means that someone overseas who otherwise would be eating it isn’t eating it. This is all conjectural, but the main point is that decreasing the potential for food-supply is never good news in a world in which some people are still starving.
This is what happens when philosophers try doing economics. I get similarly distressed when economists think they are ethicists (which happens much more often).
A decrease in the percentage of disposable income dedicated to food does not imply that households could have more money for food if only they made the right choices–which I gather is the claim made in this brief post. But that percentage decrease is just as much a function of the rising costs of other household expenses, like health care and housing, which we know have increased at a rate greater than inflation. We are not spending less on food, we are just spending more on everything else.
In fact, using inflation adjusted dollars, American spending per capita on household food has remained amazingly constant in the last 50 years (http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/data/table15.htm).
With organic and “grain fed” alternatives being about 20% – 40% more expensive than conventional foods, that difference in cost definitely would not be offset by simply cutting $10 off your $50 monthly cell plan. Of course you were being somewhat facetious with that comment, but we should note that for most middle class families, especially now, the economic pressure is to spend less for food, not more.
Even if we could shift more demand to organic foods, in the short term that would mean even higher prices until greater production lowered costs over the long haul. So unfortunately, the slow shift of consumers to organic goods will have to be just that–slow. I, too, wish it were not the case.
I agree with you that people should make good choices when it comes to healthy (and ethically sound) food choices. It does not follow that they can do so, however, simply from the oversimplified economic argument you make–despite the nice graphs.
I appreciate this point. But surely not all of the relevant non-food expenditures have been of this sort – and in the case of housing at least it’s possible to choose less expensive options (e.g. smaller homes) than the ones we often do. Moreover, as I doubt you’d disagree, the increasing costs of housing and health care have had a lot to do with bad government policies of the very same sorts that helped to drive the shift to industrialized agriculture(and, yes, cheap food) in the first place.
Well, what about cutting out the plan altogether? As I noted some time ago (http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/01/30/necessities/), there are lots of (quite expensive) things that we regard as “necessary” that simply aren’t that, and so to a considerable extent the question is one of priorities; moreover, that 20-40% figure you cite would hit a bit less hard if people also switched e.g. to eating less meat overall.
In any case these are helpful points, and I’m happy to agree that any conclusion drawn immediately from those graphs would be vastly oversimplified. But the real nub of my argument was supposed to lie in this observation:
… which still strikes me as pretty important in this context. If we’ve got the money to be “spending more on everything else”, then why can’t we find the money to spend more on food, too?