Slow Rising

When my habits, my upbringing, and the reinforcement of my culture all collude, I can be slow to figure some things out. In this case, decades.

As I was paying $36 for some groceries this evening, I stopped to calculate how much less I could have paid if I'd shopped in a different part of the store. I'd spent my entire visit in the organic aisle, selected some costly tree-hugging stuff, and then found a loaf of bread for $5.49. If I'd been willing to confine my grocery shopping experience to the middle part of the store, I could have bought other items generally regarded as equivalents and exited the store with $10 more in my pocket.

But I was glad I hadn't. The other evening I'd watched the documentary "Food Inc.," which moved me in many ways. One thing I remember especially clearly is a question posed by a farmer who raises his animals and other products in a traditional manner. "Why do you want inexpensive food? Do you want the cheapest car?"

The revolution in American agriculture since World War II has drastically lowered the percentage of income we spend on food. This change occurred not because farmers, shippers, wholesalers, and grocers realized efficiencies in bringing us the same food. Instead, what we were convinced to regard as food changed. The efficiencies all resulted from producing things that had never existed before but which we were persuaded to put in our mouths and stomachs because they were stocked in grocery stores, advertised relentlessly, and sold cheaply.

These items come to us primarily because corn has been made so cheap, and secondarily because fossil fuels have remained a relative bargain (there would be no way to replenish soil exhausted from the overproduction of corn without man-made fertilizers from natural gas or oil). So we get corn shoved at us in thousands of superficially varied ways. Corn sweetens soda and many processed foods, and is the basis of lots of ingredients not directly labeled as corn on the sides of packages. Corn has transformed beef into a staple, but it's not a beef previous generations would have recognized. There's now so much fat marbled right into the animals' muscles from their eating corn in place of the grasses they'd evolved to consume that the gustatory experience for human diners is much different.

So when I bought my hippie groceries this evening, I entered a time machine taking me back to the era of my parents' youth. I was spending freely, but I'd bet it wasn't more (inflation adjusted) than my grandparents paid for their food. In the intervening decades, "bread," "vegetables," and "meat" have been made much less expensive, but at the cost of putting quotation marks around them. The least expensive varieties of each of these in my grocery store have been raised or processed in some way to reduce the costs dramatically while maintaining the facade that they are still "food" (again, quotation marks are obligatory). For instance, if you pick up a package of tortillas from the shelf and try to read the entire list of ingredients, I'm guessing you'll give up from boredom, irritation, or exhaustion long before you come to the end. Seems like they ought to simply have corn (or wheat) and some salt and water in them. Obviously I don't understand "food science." Maybe, though, I'm getting closer to understanding actual food.