Hidden Costs of Our Current Food System

If you ask young people who have grown up in urban environments where food comes from, many would answer “The supermarket shelf.” Unfortunately, they might not be joking. As a society, we are disconnected from the experience of growing food. We also have little idea about the complex chain of events involved in getting food to the supermarket shelf, and the effects of those events upon our lives both now, and in the future.

It is commonly accepted that for most people, food is relatively inexpensive in the United States, including Petaluma. This is due in part to hidden costs with the current food system that don’t get counted within our current methods of accounting. Generally showing up outside the realm of agriculture, many of these hidden costs are already having significant affects on our country’s environmental health, economic stability and national security. To ignore these hidden costs is to risk far greater problems than the food insecurity of today. Recognizing and addressing these hidden costs, we begin to discover a network of previously uninvolved stakeholders who actually share a direct interest in transforming our food.

A short list of hidden costs of our food system includes:

 Diminishing viability of small scale family farms due to shrinking profit margins to the grower. Roughly 18 cents of the retail dollar price of food goes to the farmer, with the rest going to the processors, distributors, resellers and other resellers. This forms a vicious cycle in which small scale farmers are less able to compete with the high-volume, large scale (and often subsidized) factory farm operations that can compete, and dominate, in a commodity market.

 Increased risk of food shortage due to disease as a result of a diminishing variety of food crops worldwide – another consequence of increasing scale of agribusiness

 The non sustainable dependence upon increased use of fossil fuel in the food system, and its corollary of greenhouse gas emissions, especially as the best farm land is converted to urban use (principal uses include agrochemical manufacture, water pumping, food processing, packaging, and transportation)

 Loss of generative capacity of the soil/water system itself due to detrimental effects of industrial farming practices upon soil structure, microbial communities, and water quality

 The epidemic of obesity and other human health problems result, in some measure, from the prevalence of highly processed, commodity food items that are high in calories, fat and carbohydrates (and often sugar and sodium). These foods are usually the most affordable type of food available to lower income families and individuals.

The issues noted above are largely unintended consequences of our current food system. The system in place was designed to get high volumes of food to markets all over the country (and the world), as cheaply and quickly as possible. Many of the unintended consequences are only recently gaining attention. Considerable effort, much of it based in northern California, has been given to resolving these problems, beginning in part with the movement toward sustainable agriculture since the mid-1970s. Overhauling our food system is needed not only to produce higher quality food, but to address many of the other issues which will, if unchecked, eclipse the problems of hunger and food insecurity.

Two examples underscore this point. First, a report from the Funders Agriculture Working Group addresses the value of widespread adoption of sustainable agricultural principles in California.

“Consumers in the United States have long benefited from inexpensive and abundant food, but the cumulative effects of conventional agricultural practices are increasingly apparent and serious. Conventional agriculture, with its intensive use of chemical inputs and soil-depleting cultivation practices, is contaminating the environment, destroying natural resources, threatening human health, and compromising ecosystems. The farm crisis of the 1980’s, when scores of family-owned operations were forced to close, continues to wreak havoc in rural communities today. Farmers are often the only players that are held to task for agriculture’s ill effects on the environment. We all, however, must take part in the solution.

(Funders Agriculture Working Group, Roots of Change: Agriculture, Ecology, and Health in California, 2001: 83 pp.)

A second excerpt is provided from a report that considers the ecological cost of agriculture within a global perspective. At the time of the report, humanity’s total worldwide demand on nature was estimated to exceed the earth’s total biological capacity by 20 percent – with the food system alone requiring approximately half of the earth’s biocapacity.

“After air and water, food is the most essential resource people require to sustain themselves. These resources are provided by the layer of interconnected life that covers our planet: the biosphere. Yet the way the food system provides
food often severely damages the health of the biosphere through soil and aquifer depletion, deforestation, aggressive use of agrochemicals, fishery collapses, and the loss of biodiversity in crops, livestock, and wild species.

(Deumling, Wackernagel, and Monfreda, Eating Up the Earth: How Sustainable Food Systems Shrink our Ecological Footprint, ReDefining Progress, July 2003: 12 pp.”