The best part of this post is the heather in the photo. That's good looking heather!

As Michael Pollan wrote in the NYT:

More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these places life itself is redefined—as protein production—and with it suffering. That venerable word becomes “stress,” an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or beak-clipping. Our own worst nightmare such a place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a “production unit.”

Right on, Ezra! Higher meat prices would not only give the animals some relief, but also may greatly reduce the number of land animals we slaughter each year in America. I believe the number currently stands at over 9 billion.

Puh-leez, like Americans can countenance paying the actual price of ANYTHING, from a gallon of gas to that made-in-Lesotho t-shirt from Old Navy.

We all subsidize these purchases with our tax dollars. Lookit our military budget!

Ezra,

This is a good post, but people who have a privileged position in society should remember that what is "cheap" is not inexpensive to those just scraping by.

I've noticed that the majority of people using food stamps where I shop seem to buy an awful lot of beans and rice.

Just some food for thought.

When I buy some expensive boutique meat, it would make me feel that much more superior if I knew that poor people couldn't buy meat at all.

And isn't that what's really important here? Let's not lose sight of our real priorities: making affluent foodies feel better about themselves.

By the very nature of what it is--a living thing that you've killed and are consuming--there should be a reasonable price for that

this is moronic. All food can be described as this. To the extent that a cow has nerves, I care about the conditions it was raised in. But the idea that I should care more that we had to kill a cow for a hamburger anymore than I should care that we slaughter vegetables to make salads.

The reality is that Grains and vegetables are also expensive. If people are forced to eat less meat, they will be forced to eat processed foods and sugars, not grains and vegetables. This is a reality the people making this argument can't ignore. It would outrage some of us less if they even bothered to consider it.

I have an idea: Let's eliminate corn subsidies. That will achieve the two-fer of pissing off farmers AND raising the price of fast food hamburgers! We'll win election after election with that kind of thinking!

(Seriously. I've been a fishetarian for years, and even I know that a policy designed to increase the true opiate of the masses -- high fat, high salt, high sugar "food" available at $3.50 a pop -- is simply infeasible as a policy matter.)

Jon H, it appears so at times, yes.

People come first. This is hardly the most pressing need when it comes to our food distribution system. I treasure the idea that some day it will be. but right now, it's just not. School nutrition, subsidizing healthier foods, weaning the public off of processed sugars, and a whole lot of other things have to come first.

Let's see what Alice Waters thinks are reasonable food prices:

From her Berkeley, CA restaurant:

Grilled Laughing Stock Farm pork with stone-ground polenta, Brussels
sprouts, and tapenade, $24.00

Grilled Mary's Farm chicken al mattone with shoestring potatoes,
artichokes, snap peas, and sage, $23.00

Side orders: A plate of olives, anchovies, or Tuscan olive oil, $3.50 each

The problem with this whole argument is that you are presupposing that people care about the welfare of animals who are to be butchered. If you don't believe there is a moral cost or obligation associated with the meat industry, then you can't justify the extra expense.

Not taking a side in the argument, but I think it's important that people don't agree as to what extra "cost" would be justified to satisfy our morality, or that our morality is even implicated.

Just because something isn't a obvious political winner doesn't mean it's not right, or it shouldn't be talked about.

And meant is MASSIVELY subsidized. So too with corn, which helps make all those processed foods so cheap. Plow the same money into subsidies for healthier foods and you'd do everyone a lot of good.

Indeed, the human body doesn't need anywhere the amount of protein (especially animal protein) that Americans on average consume.

"The reality is that Grains and vegetables are also expensive. If people are forced to eat less meat, they will be forced to eat processed foods and sugars, not grains and vegetables."

Grains, insofar as they are primarily used to feed livestock rather than people, are expensive because of market distorting agricultural and energy (ethanol) subsidies. Along with sugar, we effectively subsidize foods that are really detrimental to human health, driving up our health care costs. Of course, ADM and Monsanto have much better lobbyists than, say, Flying Pigs Farm.

"The reality is that Grains and vegetables are also expensive. If people are forced to eat less meat, they will be forced to eat processed foods and sugars, not grains and vegetables."

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, in a few ways --

"Processed foods" *should* be more expensive than whole grains, in the sense that processed foods are whole grains + processing. To the extent that "whole grains + processing" are less expensive that whole grains themselves, it's a perverse effect of subsidies.

Second, we grow a massive quantity of grains in this country specifically so that we can feed it to livestock. I don't have numbers available, but I do know that we feed many times the amount of grain to livestock that we feed directly to human beings.

It's safe to assume that, as meat consumption goes down in response to increased prices, the *overall* market demand for grain would decrease faster, and therefore the price of grains (and potentially, vegetables grown on land previously dedicated to livestock support) would actually *decrease.*

"Not taking a side in the argument, but I think it's important that people don't agree as to what extra "cost" would be justified to satisfy our morality, or that our morality is even implicated"

I would submit that you shouldn't look to rich foodies whose customers are rich foodies for meaningful opinions on food policy if you're expecting anything better than 'let them eat cake'.

Yes, if America were a nation of affluent aging hippies in northern California, there'd be no problem.

But that's not the reality we live in.

"Plow the same money into subsidies for healthier foods and you'd do everyone a lot of good."

Or better yet, don't subsidize anything at all, and save the taxpayers money and end the rent-seeking that currently constitutes agricultural policy in the US.

"Just because something isn't a obvious political winner doesn't mean it's not right, or it shouldn't be talked about.

And meant is MASSIVELY subsidized. So too with corn, which helps make all those processed foods so cheap. Plow the same money into subsidies for healthier foods and you'd do everyone a lot of good."

The problem with this is twofold. First, farmland isn't fungible. Corn farmers in Iowa and Nebraska can't just start planting orange and apple trees on their land -- heck, I'm not a farmer, but I'd be surprised if they can even switch the land to wheat. So it's not going to be rents paid to the same actors for slightly different activities -- it's going to be rents paid to entirely new actors. That sort of thing tends to be unrealistic.

Second, and probably more importantly, there is a reason why people like fast food hamburgers vs. healthy alternatives. They taste better to your average person (I've heard -- I haven't had a hamburger since late 2004). People will no shit revolt if you take away their cheap junk food. My guess is that a mandatory homsexuality law would be more popular.

So talking about raising food prices for very popular foods strikes me as the height of wankery, especially given the more realistic options (better health education in schools, better menus in school lunchrooms, more focus by health professionals at recognizing and intervening in childhood obesity, more focus on delivering healthy food options to poor communities, etc.).

Ezra,
The word you are looking for is "externality" and it is the word that explicitly rejects any "strong" or absolute free market theorem. Externalities are the monkey-wrenches that prevent the optimal market output from being the optimal social output.
However, because of the Law of Unintended Consequences, you cannot 'solve' or eliminate externalities, but you can minimze them.

Joe, your comments have some merit, but really only in the very short run. For starters, habits change, and over not that long a period, both in response to changing tastes and health concerns.

Subsidies, as well, don't go out overnight, and the land doesn't have to be switched overnight. With a time horizon of over a year or 2, the idea that the land can, literally, only grow corn is just wrong.

You're essentially making a market argument for massive subsidies, and it sinks of its own accord.

The age expectancy of the rich vs. poor is rapidly increasing. Making "good" food more expensive will only exacerbate that. I think there have been enough studies to show that when people are poor, they substitute high fat, high sugar, highly processed foods. They will not switch to grains and vegetables.

Ending the corn subsidies is a major issue. The rise of fast food culture and the obesity epidemic can all be traced back to Nixon's policies towards corn.

Reinstating FDR's corn policy would probably be the wisest thing for the country, but as long as Iowa has that early primary, its politically suicidal for a candidate to say that. Not to mention the glorified place the "farmer" holds in american mythology despite the fact that most real farmers were replaced by ConAgra/Monsanto type corporations long ago.

This is a really awesome idea! It would be great if not only could we have stratification based on education, wealth, race, but also what people are able to eat.

Seriously, the fact that the lower end of the income spectrum can afford enough food to get fat is one of the greater achievements of the western world.

It's not healthy, and I'm all in favor of ending subsidized corn production, but in general, educated foodies (like myself) preaching about how it's great when food costs more sounds like douchebaggery

Pound-per-pound, I believe that humanely raised meat (grass-fed beef, for instance) is actually worse for the environment than factory farming. Factory farming is bad for the environment beecause of the immense production, but if production were attempted on a similar scale using less cruel methods, the environmental devestation would be even more severe. If environmental sustainability is the objective, either cutting back on meat production or some form of futuristic "vat meat" type technology is the way; free range, humane agriculture is only more environmentally friendly insofar as it's on a smaller scale.

The argument that "meat should be expensive" is a bit poorly phrased, I think. If you believe that farm animals should be humanely treated, that humane treatment increases production costs, and that higher production costs will be passed on to the consumer, then logically you believe that "if nonhuman animals are treated as they ought to be, meat will be more expensive," but I'm not sure that that's the same as "meat should be more expensive."

I think that what a lot of people don't realize is that food animals are essentially beyond the purview of any state or federal regulation. The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 defines the word "animal" to exclude farm animals used for food, fiber or production purposes (also excluded from the AWA's definition of "animal" is anything not warm-blooded, birds, horses not used for research purposes, and -- an amendment from Jesse Helms in 1996 (I think) -- rats of the genus rattus and mice of the genus mus. The Humane Slaughter Act is federal law, but it only applies to slaughter and isn't enforced anyway. Meanwhile, at the state level, state animal welfare laws in most states include customary exemptions which put any customary agricultural practice beyond the purview of the law. In effect, so long as a practice is widespread, it is by definition legal; cruelty is no object.

There is always a full price and it always gets paid. If you don't pay for it at the cash register, it gets paid somewhere else. It might be paid in animal misery; it might be paid in labor conditions; it might be paid in human health; it might be paid in environmental degradation. But it always gets paid.

When you say that you want your part to be artificially cheap, you are transferring your costs on to something else. You should be very conscious about who or what that is. If you decide to push your costs on to something weaker or poorer or more vulnerable than you are, you should live with the knowledge of what kind of person that makes you.

"You're essentially making a market argument for massive subsidies, and it sinks of its own accord."

I'm doing no such thing. If only I could go back forty years in my time machine, I would pester all of the Congressmen at the time with my arguments on why corn subsidies are an awful idea. After dropping a ton of money on the Jets to win the Superbowl, or course.

The fact is, we find ourselves in a situation where awful corn subsidies drastically reduce the price of really counterproductive (i.e., unhealthy and inhumane) "food" products -- but the farmers who receive the subsidies are a powerful interest group, and the cheap hamburgers that meat factories turn the corn into are hugely popular, largely because the price is so low. We have to deal with both of those facts, and wishing them away takes us to the land of ponies.

My solution would be to educate children (and their parents) that junk food is really a bad thing, and then make sure poorer communities have access to healthier alternatives. Over the course of a generation or so, we may get to the point where it is feasible to take measures to increase the price of meat -- but the idea that it could happen now is utter foolishness.

The problem with raising the price of food is that, with the current extreme and increasing degree of income inequality, price rises that will affect the behavior of the wealthy have to be large enough to cause real pain to the poor.

"It would be great if not only could we have stratification based on education, wealth, race, but also what people are able to eat."

We have that already. Rich person X can afford any number of things that I can't. What makes the "stratification" so bad is that the food that lower-income people can afford is generally horrible for your health.

Niman Ranch.

This all sounds very nice until you have a few kids and need to feed them.

Every additional dollar that meat costs is one dollar less you have to save. It's bad enough that chicken is more expensive than beef in relative terms. It would be even worse if both were more expensive, even if their cost per pound were closer.

Increasing income taxes on higher brackets to deal with the environmental consequences of mass production of meat and to study more friendly ways of doing it is a worthwhile progressive tax. Making the cost of food more expensive is regressive and hurts the bottom lines of families.

First off this often points to "fast food" but what has been made really cheap isn't beef, its pork and poultry, you know the healthier foods. Please explain how making poultry more expensive than beef, like it was up until about 30 years ago will make us healthier.

Poor people will eat what's both cheap and readily available, because that is the only reasonable option available to them.

If that $1 hamburger becomes $3, they'll eat whatever is $1.

When was the last time anybody here actually tried to buy a week's worth of groceries in a really poor neighborhood? Good luck finding anything fresh or healthy in those crappy corner grocery stores and 7-11 knockoffs that far outnumber anything resembling the supermarkets of the middle classes.

'"You're essentially making a market argument for massive subsidies, and it sinks of its own accord."

I'm doing no such thing ... Over the course of a generation or so, we may get to the point where it is feasible to take measures to increase the price of meat -- but the idea that it could happen now is utter foolishness.'

The measure on the table is to reduce or eliminate corn subsidies now, there being no actual time machine. So you're either making a market argument for (continued) massive subsidies, or a nihilistic, 'whaddya gonna do' argument that we can't fight them, aren't you?

"The measure on the table is to reduce or eliminate corn subsidies now, there being no actual time machine."

I guess I would be in favor of this hypothetical measure that has no possible chance of being enacted (or seriously proposed, really) in the real world.

I would also be in favor of a similarly unlikely hypothetical measure that would require all women between 20 and 45 to prospectively agree to sleep with me upon request, AND for my wife to prospectively consent to this arrangement.

If you think that the political situation is intractably hopeless, you could consider going veg*n and working with some form of veg*n outreach organization to promote others doing so. After all, this is a political issue, but it's not an exclusively political issue like ending the Iraq war where there's basically nothing we can do at a personal level other than not enlist in the military to end the war. It's something where we can, at least a little bit, do an end run around politics and try to engage these issues through direct personal action.

I'm not sure how hopeless and intractable the political issue is. Corn subsidies, of course, are very much entrenched. However, the absence of any meaningful animal welfare regulations for farmed animals -- I don't know. I feel like I've never seen a politician mount a publicized campaign for better AW regulations, so I don't know whether it would strike a populist chord with average American folks who don't like the way non-human animals are treated but have never had the opportunity to express that greivance politically, or whether it would crash and burn and most average Americans folks would regard the poltiician as a ridiculous, sanctimonious, bleeding heart elitist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soy#Uses

I checked. I was right. You use different types of soybeans for soymilk/tofu ("garden" beans) than you do oil ("field" or "oil" beans). So the types of soybeans being grown in the US wouldn't even be suitable for use as tofu.

I guess this means that there should be penalty taxes on leather shoes and belts.

Processed food is cheaper because it is processed. No one is going to by a container of chicken/beef bits and gristle, but they will buy hot dogs and chicken nuggets and TV dinners and pizza pockets, etc.

The breath-taking landscape photo reminds me of the best endorsement ever for oatmeal:

Samuel Johnson once criticized James Boswell for the Scottish habit of eating oats for breakfast: "In England we wouldn't think of eating oats. We only feed them to horses."

Boswell replied, "Well, perhaps that's why in England you have better horses, and in Scotland we have better men."

Better men, better oats, and better meat too, damn it all.

Shorter Jon H: "I'm so desperate to look faux-populist, I'll gladly dine on the fresh turd of a Cargill executive, nomnomnom."

This is the sort of lefty stuff that makes lefties like me cringe. "Let them eat cake" comes to mind. Americans, for the most part, don't like tofu. They do like meat. That doesn't mean I'm in favor of factory farms; as a farmer of a small family farm I abhore what they do to the animals and what they do to small family farms.

You've put the cart before the horse, to say the least. You want to change dietary habits for the better, and help animals? Start with supplying the stuff for poor people to eat healthy before cutting them off of their favorite foods. Subsidize vegetables and fruits so they have an even break with subsidized meat at the grocery store, and increase the acreage going to those crops. Start regulating out the worst of the factory farms practices, like the leaking lagoons of commercial hog farms and the worst mistreatments of the animals in those farms. Spend money advertising good food instead of the bad stuff. Advertising works, folks. We spend billions on advertising every year because it works. But when it comes to fast food and other bad stuff for you, we blame the obese person who simply succumbed to the advertising, the way the people who spent millions crafting the ads desired.

A quick way to help with the commercial farms and agribusiness is to limit the acreage that can be subsidized. Million acre farms wont be growing and taking out more and more small scale farmers who do humanely raise meat when they don't get subsidies for that last 800,000 acres.

To answer a question above, midwest farmers (I'm in southern Illinois) can switch from corn to wheat or soybeans; they are the three staple crops of my area. But corn prices are so good now, largely because of ethanol, that it has become by far the most planted crop. And of course I know how bad an idea getting your ethanol from corn is; but a side effect is that corn subsidies aren't as important to farms now because prices are high.

So, while there are constructive things to do, making poor people quit eating meat while more well-heeled people still eat meat sounds elitist and wrong. Especially since poor people (again I know this, family farms aren't lucrative; I could make more income working at a 7-11) shop at grocery stores that predominantly carry the same pre-packaged stuff you get in the city and produce is only cheap at harvest time. So for one month a year we eat better around here, unless you grow your own veggies as we do. Greatly increasing neighborhood veggie gardens is an idea long overdue as well.

I'm sure I could go on, but I don't have time.