10 ms·

The world of cheap produce and its consequences

101 points by Petiver 6y ago

sokoloff 6y ago
Tl;dr: Food consumers care about price. That’s been true since at least Victorian times. Selling items in a competitive market can be tough for vendors but good for consumers. Price matters.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Quality matters as well, but not for everybody so yes, price prevails for the majority. I choose to get better produce from an Amish market. The price is a bit higher but so is the quality. I don't find it more expensive in reference to the quality. One gets what they pay for excluding other factors such as an expensive neighborhood that adds to the price of everything.
- zwieback 6y ago
  The final point is a little more subtle: low prices for commodities are especially bad for producers in developing countries - farmers in those countries have a hard time making a profit competing with mechanized agriculture in developed countries. So it's good for consumers only if the overall development level is high.
  - ballenf 6y ago
    And the lesson there seems to be protectionist policies make sense for developing nations.
    - TimPC 6y ago
      It's very complicated, some of the greatest successes in catching up to 'developed nations' have relied on open markets and others have been far more protectionist. Protectionism has huge negatives in exchange for the benefit of being able to have a local industry in an area that's not disrupted by global markets. With a few exceptions, said industry is unlikely to become globally competitive and mostly competes for the market of the country it's in which may be a tiny portion of the global market. In contrast, industries honed by competition may be able to compete in the global marketplace, but are largely restricted by the practices that make them competitive there which tend to involve cheap labour for lower prices. If there were very clear answers here we would have seen far more countries following them to develop. Unfortunately, the truth is it's an extremely complicated case by case decision where it's very hard to know the right answer in general. We tend to see a strong bias for open markets on the right and protectionism on the left, which further complicates things as neither solution seems to capture the whole problem.
  - TimPC 6y ago
    I'd argue it's not mechanized agriculture that they have a hard time competing with but rather Western practices around agriculture subsidies. If agriculture subsidies weren't in place, much of food sales would be considered dumping as most prices reflect said subsidies and would be massive selling at a loss without them.
  - Tiltowait-- 6y ago
    So they need to retrain for another job. Technological unemployment is here to stay. If people in another country can make food that is better and cheaper, well that's globalism.
vorpalhex 6y ago
One of the points that debates about healthy vs processed miss is that processed food is selling convenience. A bag of spinach lasts about a week, fresh meat a few days. Meanwhile a retort pouch of chili or curry lasts forever and doesn't even need to be refridgerated. There are unprocessed foods that last almost forever like dried lentils, rice and oats but most people don't want to eat those things (or at least not for every meal). What do poor people tend to eat? Fast food burgers and other high calorie, low cost meals that are readily available. No prep/cook time, minimal cost (at least on the surface) and hot and palatable to most. As someone who cooks all my food from raw ingrediants, that's absolutely a luxury but it's not a money expensive one, it's a time/management/availability luxury.
- iagovar 6y ago
  Why don't people want to eat lentils? I'm pretty lazy, and I make lentils with chorizo, potatoes, onion, carrot and a mix of vegetables and some condiments all the time. It's very easy to make, cheap and tastes fantastic with very little effort. Same with rice. It takes a little bit more to master rice, but lentils man it's the lazy meal for me. I also buy frozen vegetables that lasts who knows how much, and it tastes as good as with fresh ones. Most of spanish cuisine is cheap and more or less easy to make. I'm not really sure that processed food is cheaper. A pot of (again) lentils can last a bunch of days and costs nothing.
  - casion 6y ago
    Can you expand on "very little effort". I think we may have very very different ideas of what that means.
    - iagovar 6y ago
      If you're super lazy, you just put everything in the pot, and wait. Lentils Vegetables of your choosing Maybe two potatoes One or two average sized chorizos A bit of salt A bit of olive oil (something else if olive oil is expensive in your area) A bit of cooking wine Little bit of curry If you don't have soup from previous stuff, you put one of this chicken soup pills, IDK how to translate to english, this how it looks: https://pepekitchen.com/articulo/nueva-presentacion-de-las-pastillas-de-caldo-de-pollo-avecrem/ https://pepekitchen.com/articulo/nueva-presentacion-de-las-p... Fill with water, fire and forget until it's done. You can make it way tastier and more elaborated but this is the most lazy and basic plate, and still tastes good. Well, you still have to cut stuff for a few minutes, if that's any effort.
newyankee 6y ago
I wonder if there is a resource that classifies most foodstuffs (raw and processed) by nutrient content, cost, degree of processing, growing condition etc. Something that is essentially the wiki of food but arranged in a way that makes SQL like queries possible across a range of variables.
- bluGill 6y ago
  The usda has one, though I'm not sure what format it is in. Several projects source it.
intrepidhero 6y ago
This wasn't the clearest argument I've heard but I agree with the conclusion: "In the end, cheap food is a symptom of a bigger problem: an economic system in which some lives are treated as less valuable than others." Now what I'd really like to see are more serious discussions of solutions.
- curation 6y ago
  Yes - the technical term for this is Necropolitics. It really describes the system of power we are in.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  I disagree with the conclusion. Fast food is not actually cheap. If you go to a supermarket and get a bag of rice / lentils, it will be an order of magnitude cheaper, if not more. The problem is 1) culture and 2) taste. Burgers do taste better than lentils.
- Tiltowait-- 6y ago
  You're really going to say a professor at Harvard and a bucktoothed West Virginia hillbilly are of the same worth? https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/tharris00/rednecks/typical_couple.jpg https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/tharris00/rednecks/t...
  - intrepidhero 6y ago
    Absolutely.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
ballenf 6y ago
> Eggs were no longer a luxury and as the price of imported fruit fell, many in the cities started eating oranges and bananas for the first time. They could only afford to buy these foods because the costers who sold them kept the prices too low to allow themselves a decent life. By the same token, big shopkeepers kept food prices down by forcing employees to work long hours for low pay. This seems to turn cause and effect completely upside down. What shopkeeper would not have preferred higher prices? What "coster" was putting forth any effort individually to "keep prices too low"? Both of those parties were undoubtedly striving to sell for the maximum possible profit. And cheap labor in the large had nothing to do with the actions or power of any individual shopkeeper. There were just a lot of hungry people willing to work for next to nothing because next to nothing to eat is slightly better than nothing to eat.
aaronbwebber 6y ago
So, it's a fine article, with lots of interesting details about Victorian food supply....but you could write more or less the exact same article replacing "cheap food" with "cheap clothes" or "cheap mobile phones" or "cheap any consumer good" and the stories about Victorian costermongers with Vietnamese sweatshop workers, or Chinese electronics factory workers, or Honduran coffee pickers, etc., and the end of the article seems to be arguing for just paying more for food? I don't think talking about poverty in modern societies in terms of economic sectors instead of trying to address it at a societal level is particularly useful. The point of the article should not be "let's all pay more for food" it should be "give everyone a UBI and if that means food costs more because you have to pay people more to work as cooks or strawberry pickers, that's a _good thing_.
- curation 6y ago
  My takeaway is that is exactly what this article is about - food is one category along with clothing, phones, material culture - and he is not arguing about what we pay. Rather, he is describing a facet of the structure of Western Civilization that requires a de-humanized constantly replenished underclass to provide us with the cheap good food we want. The fact is we cannot have this infinite growth within a finite biosphere and his article explores the relationship between the West and the so-called developing world and how, though we seem opposite we are the same now, because the neocropolitics we practice is now burgeoning within the West and the shape of starvation just has a different mask depending upon context. The book and the article use a genealogical methodology, which is what is the norm now is this work. (I am a Critical Theorist).
  - dqpb 6y ago
    > de-humanized constantly replenished underclass This is not unique to "Western Civilization".
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    > requires a de-humanized constantly replenished underclass to provide us with the cheap good food we want You're going to get further convincing people to care about human suffering (the goal of the article) here by pointing out what a failure Soylent was. Why? First you'd have to anticipate that all people are going to talk about here is, "Economics. Costs. Pricing. What about if robots made the food instead? Then there is no underclass." Those people aren't even transhumanists i.e. inhabiting some far-off possibly impossible future. The kinds of foods you could conceive are harvested and processed entirely by robots, end to end, and thus involves no explicit human suffering, are actually really crappy, and no one wants, even when they were made by humans first. That's what Soylent was, it was one guy's algal flour product that probably, truthfully, could be totally automated. It sucked, let's be real. It's this sort of capitalistic argument, "if it fails in the marketplace it must be bad," that just gets through to people simpler, and clearer. That's the starting fact that gets people to listen. Not de-humanization. Not that there isn't a place for critical theory. But that you can just discuss facts, like yes, there is a dehumanized replenished underclass, and yet, here we are buying berries from Costco. Their brains turn off. And I wouldn't just brush that off as ignorance, or claim some conspiracy that people are conditioned to first ask if something does or does not make money, because capitalism. It's just tough to know which things to pay attention to, so if there's a simple framework that helps you, on average, pay attention to the right things and get through life, buying berries, you'll use it. Unless you're unfortunately born to pick berries instead. So personally, I believe the reason rich people actually frame regulators literally and John Rawls philosophically as the enemy, unequivocally, is that the veil of ignorance much more clearly threatens capitalism than perpetual human suffering through wage slavery (a factual thing!) ever did.
dempedempe 6y ago
What do you say to people who respond to stories about exploited labor with, "But they have a better life now than they did before!"?
- bluGill 6y ago
  Well do they or not? If their life is better rejoice for them. Help their kids take the next step better. Someone who grows up in a mud hut with no education and no idea where the next meal comes from cannot be made into an engineer easily. But if you can get them enough to eat they can take their kids out of the child labor market and send them to school to learn. It might be a few generations, but that is normal. Me and my sister are the first to finish college in my family on either side, more cousins have since followed. We started on farms generations back, but have moved on as technology advanced.
devmunchies 6y ago
I was thinking this was going to be about mass produced fruits and vegetables and how they actually have less nutrients (vitamins, minerals) than generations past.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Big agriculture could learn something from lowly modern homesteads. I'm constantly surprised at the modern science (and old, forgotten science!) being deployed by regular homesteaders. In particular, employing the beneficial symbiosis of animals and plants. The pigs till and root up the soil and manure the land, the root crops go in next year, then grazing and rest. Digest plants as animal manure are healthier for the soil than simply composting them, according to many people. Sounds crazy but we have remember that animals and plants evolved together in the same space. The whole system becomes a closed loop where the inputs and outputs of the farm are closely monitored. Pest and disease are kept at by with careful rotation. Nothing is wasted, and the fertility of the soil and health of the animals (and humans) improve over time from this relationship. If you're interested in watching this first hand, I recommend "100 days of growing food" playlist by youtube homesteader Justin Rhodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpDm5OA-TZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpDm5OA-TZE
- bluGill 6y ago
  Small farms have a lot to learn from big ag. No till and cover crops increase soil organic matter. Modern Chemicals and genetics kill weeds without needed massive amounts of CO2 (fuel or human labor, either way the energy goes to CO2) emissions.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Agreed! I actually think the entire industry is moving forward in really amazing ways, and it's entirely science based. The amazing of science that goes into improving the soil on a modern farm is amazing.
dragontamer 6y ago
> At least the new cheap foods of Victorian times – such as fish and chips and imported oranges – added more protein and nourishment to the working-class diet. The cheap foods of today add mostly an excess of refined starches, oils and sugars. Anyone who visits the grocery store knows that the cheapest item is a can of corn. I just visited my grocery store yesterday. A 101 Oz. can of corn was on sale for $5. 101 Oz. of peas was $5. Etc. etc. The cheapest foods are canned vegetables, by far. 16 Oz cans are 60 cents (store brand) to $1 (brand-name) People eat refined starches, oils, and sugars, because its tasty. But if you actually were buying the cheapest thing in the supermarket, you'd be buying corn, peas, potatoes, green beans, kidney beans, tomato paste. By weight, corn and peas are cheaper than bread ($2 per pound of bread, $1 per pound of corn / peas / carrots). You can create a very sustainable, and healthy, diet off of $2 or cheaper food items.
- bluedino 6y ago
  People like to say the poor eat fast food because it's all they can afford, but the truly poor don't eat McDonald's, You're still spending $3-4 a meal at the least, if not $7-8. They have to do $0.50/meal, so they eat potatoes, rice, beans, etc.
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
If you want to see an example of the opposite approach, look at Norway. It is infamous for how expensive its food is, but that has meant, among other things, small farms are profitable.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
We get cheap food thanks to tractors, combine harvesters, selective breeding, insecticides, herbicides and fertiliser. Low wages are a problem but they aren't really related to how cheap our food is. The cheapest supermarket near me is Aldi but their pay is quite generous compared to their competitors.
- sumedh 6y ago
  You forgot govt subsidies.
11235813213455 6y ago
It's really a spirit, way of life, most people are consumerists sadly, if they own money, they 'need' to spend it On my side, I rarely think about money, I just buy what I need, that's not much (about 100€/month in total for everything)
troelsSteegin 6y ago
Related reading, on the social cost of cheap goods today: "The True Cost of Dollar Stores", in the current New Yorker [0]. What is the underlying system? In my interpretation, these low price vendors have succeeded in a market that is foremost cost-sensitive, both in terms of price and time. Eventually competition was priced out and now "dollar deserts" exist in poor neighborhoods. These vendors ignore "externality" accountabilities, in the Dollar cases in particular spending for customer and employee safety, in keeping with minimizing cost. The resulting situation, as illustrated in the article, I'll say is one of immoral public jeopardy. In these locales consumers and employees have no alternatives. It gets worse, because the vendors extract wealth from the communities without reinvestment. The margins, from a community perspective, are exploitative. What are the characteristics of this system? A subsistence market cannot price safety and dignity into the cost of its goods. Margin-maximizing vendors can ignore it. Regulation and policy processes act slowly and undervalue safety, not to mention dignity. And returns for new entrant competitors are too low to make these markets a priority. I think this illustrates an systems cycle with a very few "winners" and many, many more losers. The New Yorker article is an argument that the very least, Family Dollar and Dollar General, as businesses, should be ashamed of their conduct. That's a starting point. When you move onto interventions and incentives, to say specifically "what should the new policies be?", I don't know. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-true-cost-of-dollar-stores https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-true-cost-...

101 points by Petiver 6y ago

Tl;dr: Food consumers care about price. That’s been true since at least Victorian times. Selling items in a competitive market can be tough for vendors but good for consumers. Price matters.

tartoran 6y ago
Quality matters as well, but not for everybody so yes, price prevails for the majority. I choose to get better produce from an Amish market. The price is a bit higher but so is the quality. I don't find it more expensive in reference to the quality. One gets what they pay for excluding other factors such as an expensive neighborhood that adds to the price of everything.
zwieback 6y ago
The final point is a little more subtle: low prices for commodities are especially bad for producers in developing countries - farmers in those countries have a hard time making a profit competing with mechanized agriculture in developed countries. So it's good for consumers only if the overall development level is high.
- ballenf 6y ago
  And the lesson there seems to be protectionist policies make sense for developing nations.
  - TimPC 6y ago
    It's very complicated, some of the greatest successes in catching up to 'developed nations' have relied on open markets and others have been far more protectionist. Protectionism has huge negatives in exchange for the benefit of being able to have a local industry in an area that's not disrupted by global markets. With a few exceptions, said industry is unlikely to become globally competitive and mostly competes for the market of the country it's in which may be a tiny portion of the global market. In contrast, industries honed by competition may be able to compete in the global marketplace, but are largely restricted by the practices that make them competitive there which tend to involve cheap labour for lower prices. If there were very clear answers here we would have seen far more countries following them to develop. Unfortunately, the truth is it's an extremely complicated case by case decision where it's very hard to know the right answer in general. We tend to see a strong bias for open markets on the right and protectionism on the left, which further complicates things as neither solution seems to capture the whole problem.
- TimPC 6y ago
  I'd argue it's not mechanized agriculture that they have a hard time competing with but rather Western practices around agriculture subsidies. If agriculture subsidies weren't in place, much of food sales would be considered dumping as most prices reflect said subsidies and would be massive selling at a loss without them.
- Tiltowait-- 6y ago
  So they need to retrain for another job. Technological unemployment is here to stay. If people in another country can make food that is better and cheaper, well that's globalism.

vorpalhex 6y ago

One of the points that debates about healthy vs processed miss is that processed food is selling convenience. A bag of spinach lasts about a week, fresh meat a few days. Meanwhile a retort pouch of chili or curry lasts forever and doesn't even need to be refridgerated. There are unprocessed foods that last almost forever like dried lentils, rice and oats but most people don't want to eat those things (or at least not for every meal). What do poor people tend to eat? Fast food burgers and other high calorie, low cost meals that are readily available. No prep/cook time, minimal cost (at least on the surface) and hot and palatable to most. As someone who cooks all my food from raw ingrediants, that's absolutely a luxury but it's not a money expensive one, it's a time/management/availability luxury.

iagovar 6y ago
Why don't people want to eat lentils? I'm pretty lazy, and I make lentils with chorizo, potatoes, onion, carrot and a mix of vegetables and some condiments all the time. It's very easy to make, cheap and tastes fantastic with very little effort. Same with rice. It takes a little bit more to master rice, but lentils man it's the lazy meal for me. I also buy frozen vegetables that lasts who knows how much, and it tastes as good as with fresh ones. Most of spanish cuisine is cheap and more or less easy to make. I'm not really sure that processed food is cheaper. A pot of (again) lentils can last a bunch of days and costs nothing.
- casion 6y ago
  Can you expand on "very little effort". I think we may have very very different ideas of what that means.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    If you're super lazy, you just put everything in the pot, and wait. Lentils Vegetables of your choosing Maybe two potatoes One or two average sized chorizos A bit of salt A bit of olive oil (something else if olive oil is expensive in your area) A bit of cooking wine Little bit of curry If you don't have soup from previous stuff, you put one of this chicken soup pills, IDK how to translate to english, this how it looks: https://pepekitchen.com/articulo/nueva-presentacion-de-las-pastillas-de-caldo-de-pollo-avecrem/ https://pepekitchen.com/articulo/nueva-presentacion-de-las-p... Fill with water, fire and forget until it's done. You can make it way tastier and more elaborated but this is the most lazy and basic plate, and still tastes good. Well, you still have to cut stuff for a few minutes, if that's any effort.

newyankee 6y ago

I wonder if there is a resource that classifies most foodstuffs (raw and processed) by nutrient content, cost, degree of processing, growing condition etc. Something that is essentially the wiki of food but arranged in a way that makes SQL like queries possible across a range of variables.

bluGill 6y ago
The usda has one, though I'm not sure what format it is in. Several projects source it.

intrepidhero 6y ago

This wasn't the clearest argument I've heard but I agree with the conclusion: "In the end, cheap food is a symptom of a bigger problem: an economic system in which some lives are treated as less valuable than others." Now what I'd really like to see are more serious discussions of solutions.

curation 6y ago
Yes - the technical term for this is Necropolitics. It really describes the system of power we are in.
bufferoverflow 6y ago
I disagree with the conclusion. Fast food is not actually cheap. If you go to a supermarket and get a bag of rice / lentils, it will be an order of magnitude cheaper, if not more. The problem is 1) culture and 2) taste. Burgers do taste better than lentils.
Tiltowait-- 6y ago
You're really going to say a professor at Harvard and a bucktoothed West Virginia hillbilly are of the same worth? https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/tharris00/rednecks/typical_couple.jpg https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/tharris00/rednecks/t...
- intrepidhero 6y ago
  Absolutely.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

ballenf 6y ago

> Eggs were no longer a luxury and as the price of imported fruit fell, many in the cities started eating oranges and bananas for the first time. They could only afford to buy these foods because the costers who sold them kept the prices too low to allow themselves a decent life. By the same token, big shopkeepers kept food prices down by forcing employees to work long hours for low pay. This seems to turn cause and effect completely upside down. What shopkeeper would not have preferred higher prices? What "coster" was putting forth any effort individually to "keep prices too low"? Both of those parties were undoubtedly striving to sell for the maximum possible profit. And cheap labor in the large had nothing to do with the actions or power of any individual shopkeeper. There were just a lot of hungry people willing to work for next to nothing because next to nothing to eat is slightly better than nothing to eat.

aaronbwebber 6y ago

So, it's a fine article, with lots of interesting details about Victorian food supply....but you could write more or less the exact same article replacing "cheap food" with "cheap clothes" or "cheap mobile phones" or "cheap any consumer good" and the stories about Victorian costermongers with Vietnamese sweatshop workers, or Chinese electronics factory workers, or Honduran coffee pickers, etc., and the end of the article seems to be arguing for just paying more for food? I don't think talking about poverty in modern societies in terms of economic sectors instead of trying to address it at a societal level is particularly useful. The point of the article should not be "let's all pay more for food" it should be "give everyone a UBI and if that means food costs more because you have to pay people more to work as cooks or strawberry pickers, that's a _good thing_.

curation 6y ago
My takeaway is that is exactly what this article is about - food is one category along with clothing, phones, material culture - and he is not arguing about what we pay. Rather, he is describing a facet of the structure of Western Civilization that requires a de-humanized constantly replenished underclass to provide us with the cheap good food we want. The fact is we cannot have this infinite growth within a finite biosphere and his article explores the relationship between the West and the so-called developing world and how, though we seem opposite we are the same now, because the neocropolitics we practice is now burgeoning within the West and the shape of starvation just has a different mask depending upon context. The book and the article use a genealogical methodology, which is what is the norm now is this work. (I am a Critical Theorist).
- dqpb 6y ago
  > de-humanized constantly replenished underclass This is not unique to "Western Civilization".
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  > requires a de-humanized constantly replenished underclass to provide us with the cheap good food we want You're going to get further convincing people to care about human suffering (the goal of the article) here by pointing out what a failure Soylent was. Why? First you'd have to anticipate that all people are going to talk about here is, "Economics. Costs. Pricing. What about if robots made the food instead? Then there is no underclass." Those people aren't even transhumanists i.e. inhabiting some far-off possibly impossible future. The kinds of foods you could conceive are harvested and processed entirely by robots, end to end, and thus involves no explicit human suffering, are actually really crappy, and no one wants, even when they were made by humans first. That's what Soylent was, it was one guy's algal flour product that probably, truthfully, could be totally automated. It sucked, let's be real. It's this sort of capitalistic argument, "if it fails in the marketplace it must be bad," that just gets through to people simpler, and clearer. That's the starting fact that gets people to listen. Not de-humanization. Not that there isn't a place for critical theory. But that you can just discuss facts, like yes, there is a dehumanized replenished underclass, and yet, here we are buying berries from Costco. Their brains turn off. And I wouldn't just brush that off as ignorance, or claim some conspiracy that people are conditioned to first ask if something does or does not make money, because capitalism. It's just tough to know which things to pay attention to, so if there's a simple framework that helps you, on average, pay attention to the right things and get through life, buying berries, you'll use it. Unless you're unfortunately born to pick berries instead. So personally, I believe the reason rich people actually frame regulators literally and John Rawls philosophically as the enemy, unequivocally, is that the veil of ignorance much more clearly threatens capitalism than perpetual human suffering through wage slavery (a factual thing!) ever did.

dempedempe 6y ago

What do you say to people who respond to stories about exploited labor with, "But they have a better life now than they did before!"?

bluGill 6y ago
Well do they or not? If their life is better rejoice for them. Help their kids take the next step better. Someone who grows up in a mud hut with no education and no idea where the next meal comes from cannot be made into an engineer easily. But if you can get them enough to eat they can take their kids out of the child labor market and send them to school to learn. It might be a few generations, but that is normal. Me and my sister are the first to finish college in my family on either side, more cousins have since followed. We started on farms generations back, but have moved on as technology advanced.

devmunchies 6y ago

I was thinking this was going to be about mass produced fruits and vegetables and how they actually have less nutrients (vitamins, minerals) than generations past.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

Big agriculture could learn something from lowly modern homesteads. I'm constantly surprised at the modern science (and old, forgotten science!) being deployed by regular homesteaders. In particular, employing the beneficial symbiosis of animals and plants. The pigs till and root up the soil and manure the land, the root crops go in next year, then grazing and rest. Digest plants as animal manure are healthier for the soil than simply composting them, according to many people. Sounds crazy but we have remember that animals and plants evolved together in the same space. The whole system becomes a closed loop where the inputs and outputs of the farm are closely monitored. Pest and disease are kept at by with careful rotation. Nothing is wasted, and the fertility of the soil and health of the animals (and humans) improve over time from this relationship. If you're interested in watching this first hand, I recommend "100 days of growing food" playlist by youtube homesteader Justin Rhodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpDm5OA-TZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpDm5OA-TZE

bluGill 6y ago
Small farms have a lot to learn from big ag. No till and cover crops increase soil organic matter. Modern Chemicals and genetics kill weeds without needed massive amounts of CO2 (fuel or human labor, either way the energy goes to CO2) emissions.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Agreed! I actually think the entire industry is moving forward in really amazing ways, and it's entirely science based. The amazing of science that goes into improving the soil on a modern farm is amazing.

dragontamer 6y ago

> At least the new cheap foods of Victorian times – such as fish and chips and imported oranges – added more protein and nourishment to the working-class diet. The cheap foods of today add mostly an excess of refined starches, oils and sugars. Anyone who visits the grocery store knows that the cheapest item is a can of corn. I just visited my grocery store yesterday. A 101 Oz. can of corn was on sale for $5. 101 Oz. of peas was $5. Etc. etc. The cheapest foods are canned vegetables, by far. 16 Oz cans are 60 cents (store brand) to $1 (brand-name) People eat refined starches, oils, and sugars, because its tasty. But if you actually were buying the cheapest thing in the supermarket, you'd be buying corn, peas, potatoes, green beans, kidney beans, tomato paste. By weight, corn and peas are cheaper than bread ($2 per pound of bread, $1 per pound of corn / peas / carrots). You can create a very sustainable, and healthy, diet off of $2 or cheaper food items.

bluedino 6y ago
People like to say the poor eat fast food because it's all they can afford, but the truly poor don't eat McDonald's, You're still spending $3-4 a meal at the least, if not $7-8. They have to do $0.50/meal, so they eat potatoes, rice, beans, etc.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

If you want to see an example of the opposite approach, look at Norway. It is infamous for how expensive its food is, but that has meant, among other things, small farms are profitable.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

We get cheap food thanks to tractors, combine harvesters, selective breeding, insecticides, herbicides and fertiliser. Low wages are a problem but they aren't really related to how cheap our food is. The cheapest supermarket near me is Aldi but their pay is quite generous compared to their competitors.

sumedh 6y ago
You forgot govt subsidies.

11235813213455 6y ago

It's really a spirit, way of life, most people are consumerists sadly, if they own money, they 'need' to spend it On my side, I rarely think about money, I just buy what I need, that's not much (about 100€/month in total for everything)

troelsSteegin 6y ago

Related reading, on the social cost of cheap goods today: "The True Cost of Dollar Stores", in the current New Yorker [0]. What is the underlying system? In my interpretation, these low price vendors have succeeded in a market that is foremost cost-sensitive, both in terms of price and time. Eventually competition was priced out and now "dollar deserts" exist in poor neighborhoods. These vendors ignore "externality" accountabilities, in the Dollar cases in particular spending for customer and employee safety, in keeping with minimizing cost. The resulting situation, as illustrated in the article, I'll say is one of immoral public jeopardy. In these locales consumers and employees have no alternatives. It gets worse, because the vendors extract wealth from the communities without reinvestment. The margins, from a community perspective, are exploitative. What are the characteristics of this system? A subsistence market cannot price safety and dignity into the cost of its goods. Margin-maximizing vendors can ignore it. Regulation and policy processes act slowly and undervalue safety, not to mention dignity. And returns for new entrant competitors are too low to make these markets a priority. I think this illustrates an systems cycle with a very few "winners" and many, many more losers. The New Yorker article is an argument that the very least, Family Dollar and Dollar General, as businesses, should be ashamed of their conduct. That's a starting point. When you move onto interventions and incentives, to say specifically "what should the new policies be?", I don't know. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-true-cost-of-dollar-stores https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-true-cost-...