The True Cost of Food: A Case for Supportive Local Food Policy
The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on the food system, as shifts in demand resulted in supply chain challenges and job losses brought about dramatic increases in food insecurity. These consequences illuminated the fragility of a very complex system, and heightened awareness of how poorly our food system serves so many communities and how integral it is to our environment and our economy.
Much of the conversation has focused on the cost of food. Many families discovered that they were just one paycheck away from needing food assistance, and disruptions to the supply chain caused fluctuations in food prices and availability. These weren’t new problems, but their growth made them much more visible and tangible for many.
But food is actually less expensive than ever before, in relation to average income. Advances in technology have played a role in that affordability, particularly refrigeration that helps keep food from spoiling, but also more sophisticated processing practices that make food shelf-stable and even longer-lasting. Improvements in transportation allow food to be shipped long distances, allowing production to be consolidated where land is less expensive and climate is suitable.
The corporatization of much of the food supply chain has also created efficiencies that keep prices down. Large, vertically integrated companies with business models that encompass everything from growing the crops to processing them to distributing them have created economies of scale that significantly reduce the costs of production.
Despite that emphasis on reducing cost, people are still food insecure—more than 8% of Massachusetts households experienced hunger prior to the pandemic, and that number shot up to 17% at the height of the crisis. Paradoxically, those efficiencies meant to drive down costs are part of the cause. Farmers receive less than 15 cents of every retail food dollar spent in the United States. The food system employs 10% of the U.S. workforce, and has a higher percentage of workers who rely on federal food subsidies like SNAP than any other industry. The people who feed us can’t afford to eat. And as such a large industry, those wages help depress what other sectors pay their workers as well, further exacerbating food insecurity.
Meanwhile, agricultural management practices that rely on monoculture and tillage have dramatically depleted topsoil and soil nutrients in the industrialized agricultural regions of the country. This harms water quality, increases the need for chemical additives to continue food production on that land and reduces the soil’s ability to capture carbon, hastening the impacts of climate change.
And as seen in the early stages of the COVID crisis, the supply chain itself is vulnerable because of many of these so-called efficiencies. The delicate balance created by a system where local stores are stocked with little more than a few days’ supply, and where as much as half of the food produced is distributed in ways that are accessible only to food service buyers such as restaurants, can be upended in ways that suddenly leave millions without access to food, while tons of food spoils because the supply chain can’t adapt quickly enough to get it to where it is needed.
These efficiencies result in costs to public health as well. The rapid growth in many preventable, diet-related diseases can be traced to increases in sugars, sodium, fats and other additives that are used in the processed foods that have moved consumers away from home cooking and a diet more heavily based on fresh, whole foods. Exacerbating this further is the fact that federal food policy subsidizes food commodities such as corn, soy and wheat, which are commonly used as fillers and supplant many Americans’ consumption of healthier foods.
And the drive for efficiency in the food system has led to dramatic inequities in who is well-served by it. Nutrition insecurity tends to be highest in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, where financial challenges are compounded by a lack of physical access to healthy foods. Not only do these areas often lack full-service grocery stores with fresh produce and proteins, the smaller stores that do sell food tend to stock primarily less healthy, shelf-stable products, usually at higher prices.
The need for policy interventions to address these concerns is particularly acute here in MA, not only to improve food access but to ensure local farm sustainability as well. In relation to the industrial agriculture cited earlier, farmers here are smaller-scale, more diverse, sell more of their products directly to consumers and generally use practices that are more environmentally sustainable. But they do so with the additional challenges of higher costs for land, energy and labor, and regulatory burdens that are often more appropriate for larger-scale operations elsewhere. For every dollar that MA farmers spend producing food, they earn 96 cents.
Though MA farmers are national leaders in direct-to-consumer sales, where farmers markets and CSAs allow them to capture more of the retail dollar and sell their products at a fairer price, the fact that we have more eaters than local growing capacity means we must still rely on larger supply chains. And local foods often remain financially or physically out of reach for many. A system where the only way for farmers to survive is to charge prices that make their nutritious food accessible only to those with more disposable income is unacceptable.
The way to ensure food and nutrition access for all is not to further artificially depress the costs of food at the expense of farmers, workers, public health and the environment. Solutions require a combination of public policies and investments that support a food system that is attentive to these issues, and consumers who recognize the value of food and are willing and able to pay prices that reflect its true cost of production. Efforts toward these solutions can begin with policies and programs that support local and regional food systems, where the supply chain is shorter and economic and decision-making power is kept close.
This means programs that protect farmland and keep it affordable, and paying farmers for environmental services they provide, such as carbon sequestration. It means investments in local food system infrastructure and in sustainable food production practices. It means valuing nutrition as an integral part of the public health system and supporting healthy eating as an essential medical intervention. It means subsidizing and incentivizing healthy eating for households for whom fresh foods are out of financial reach. And it means educating consumers about nutrition and the food system and the impact of their eating choices on themselves, their communities, the local economy and the environment.
The retail price of food belies its cost. The pursuit of inexpensive food has led to conditions that threaten farm sustainability, exploit natural resources and make it more difficult for many to access nutritious food. None of this has happened by accident. Public policies have produced these conditions. Comprehensive, thoughtful state policy can begin to address these issues, and can serve as a model for systemic change beyond our borders.
This op-ed appeared in the Summer 2021 issue.
