While I really LOVE having my four-wheel drive Subaru during the (seemingly interminable) winter here, I lament the fuel inefficiency when the weather warms up. I get about 23 miles to the gallon. I had a car that got 40 mpg once, but it was no match for the frost heaves in spring (anyone else getting seasick just driving to town lately?) and it often couldn’t get me all the way home during a snow storm. I have been waiting for years for news of a Hybrid Subaru, but none has come. With rising gas prices, I find myself daydreaming about a more efficient car.

Driving to the store to buy food is one burgeoning hidden cost of feeding yourself these days, but indeed, much of our food is trucked here from somewhere else. We live in a region where our recent ancestors would have been eating what’s left in the root cellar right about now– onions, squash, cabbages, rutabegas, turnips, parnips, wild burdock, purslane and perhaps some salted (preserved) meat. The milk would be taken by the kids and calves at this time of year, so none of that. Abysmal variety and forget about flavor. We are SO LUCKY to have the variety we have. I have been making it through the last few weeks by indulging in summer vegetables like zucchini and green beans. (They make me so HAPPY and I forget about the snowstorm that’s always in the forecast lately.) But I am aware that this is an indulgence and one that is subsidized by whomever is taking a hit on profit to buy the fuel to get it here. Our food prices are going up.

One one hand, that’s a real shame because fruits and vegetables are already too expensive for many Americans to buy LOTS of them, nevermind good quality and organic. This is frustrating when you realize that the US government is significantly subsidizing food products in our food supply IN ORDER TO make food affordable to working Americans. This is why you can get either 5 hamburgers or one salad at McDonalds for the same price. Only one of those products is created with subsidized commodities: wheat and beef fed on subsidized grain (which are, incidently, reared in horrid cattle cities called “CAFOs” that are not cleaning up after themselves, so the burger is also being subsidized by whomever is downwind and downstream of these places. The impact and the cleanup costs that SHOULD be added to the price of that burger are not.) So government is subsiding our food! But why the hell are they subsiding hamburgers instead of fruits and vegetables??! Right when I start getting worked up over that question, I remember that $1.5 BILLION goes to subsidize TOBACCO! (excuse my yelling, but someone should be yelling.)

Clearly, these policies that were originally designed to help working people have predictably reliable food supplies have long since been hijacked so that they now benefit corporations. Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland et al. are the real beneficiaries of the government subsidies. They are the ones who buy the below-market-price grain and spin it into the multitudes of “value added” food products that occupy the center shelves of the supermarkets. They are the purveyors of Industrial Commodity Food. This is food that is designed to be so shelf stable that it can travel long distances and eventually make someone some money. The health of the end user is of no concern. This is the cheapest, least healthy, highest calorie food that our lowest income citizens with the lowest “food security” opt for. These are the people who are the least likely to have health insurance and the least able to miss work due to illness, which they have in disproportionate levels. Thanks Uncle Sam. How about shifting some subsidies to fruits and vegetables!

So when I think about fruits and vegetables becoming MORE expensive because of fuel costs and more out of reach to people who actually need to have more of them, I get concerned. On the other hand, when I think about how “normal” it seems to be buying and eating tomatoes in the winter from Isreal or grapes from Chile, I think we could use a little perspective adjustment. Again, there is a hidden consequence to our nonchalance.

Many if not most of our fruits vegetables in out local supermarkets in the winter– organic and conventional– come from California and beyond and therefore have a significant “carbon footprint.” This means each head of broccoli or rutabega we buy has contributed in its own small way to global warming. The most absurd example is that for every one calorie that California lettuce provides our bodies, it takes 57 fuel-energy-calories to grow it and get it to the East coast. Wow, that’s completely crazy!

So a little “market correction” in this area wouldn’t be a bad thing. In fact, it would be a boon to the local food economy food system. My farmer, Tom Griffin, runs a CSA for the love of doing it. He has decades of education and experience and works 12+ hours a day during the growing season and he earns a salary from this endeavor that is… well…absurdly out of step with his effort and expertise. Our food system does not value people like Tom or give them incentives to keep up the good work. If the Chilean grapes shot up to a price that reflected their global warming impact (which they might well do soon) then the price of locally grown hardy mini-kiwis might start looking like the bargain that it is. I would welcome that.

In the short run, these changes will not be good for people’s health if if it means they eat less fresh food. Let’s hope this absurd situation (affordable food= unhealthy food + scary health care system) spawns legions of people who won’t eat processed food on principle (and here you have your choice of principles! Global warming, Government/Corporate back room dealing, Unsustainable current food supply system, it’s gross….) And then let’s hope that these clear-thinking legions of fresh-food eaters go knock on the doors of all policy-makers who have the power to shift government subsidies to healthy food so that everyone can afford it as well as to create incentives for local food growers to actually make a living.

Does this sound like wishful thinking? They did it in Finland in the 1990s. The government made changes in policy and farming incentives that made deaths from heart disease drop by 73 percent for middle-aged men. 73%! It’s do-able. Not only is it do-able, it’s the responsibility of our government to do it. If we leave it up to the corporations, they will get richer and we will all get sicker.

Feel free to sign up for my monthly newsletter to keep in touch.

Filed under: 1