CHAPTER 1
THE TRUE COST OF FOOD—THE HEALTH, ECONOMIC, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND CLIMATE IMPACT OF OUR FOOD SYSTEM
Ninety-five trillion dollars—$95,000,000,000,000—is an almost unimaginable number. Yet this is an estimate of the burden that will be put on our economy by chronic disease over the next 35 years in both direct health care costs and lost productivity and disability. To put it in perspective, that is almost five times our nation’s gross domestic product of $20 trillion a year. According to the World Bank, in 2017, the entire world’s GDP was just $80 trillion.
For that amount of money, we could…
Provide free education
Provide free health care
Eradicate poverty
End food insecurity and hunger
Solve social injustice, income, and health disparities
End unemployment
Rebuild our infrastructure and transportation systems
Shift to renewable energy
Draw down carbon emissions and reverse climate change
Transform our industrial agricultural system, which is destructive to humans, animals, and the environment, into a sustainable, regenerative system that reverses climate change, preserves our freshwater resources, increases biodiversity, protects pollinators, and produces health-promoting whole foods
That $95 trillion is the total cost of chronic illness to the United States over the next 35 years (or 91 percent of the total tax collected by the US government), in both direct health care costs and the loss of productivity due to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, mental illness, and other chronic conditions.1 Imagine if we had a significant portion of those resources to spend on things that matter to all of us rather than preventable chronic disease. Most of those diseases are caused by our industrial diet, which means they are avoidable if we transform the food we grow, the food we produce, and the food we eat. The $95 trillion is just the start of the value to our economy if we fix all the broken parts of our food system. Clearly not all chronic disease will disappear, nor will all those who are chronically ill be able to go back to work. But if even a conservative fraction of that money, an estimated $15 trillion, is available, it would provide crucial resources to solve our most critical problems. And $15 trillion is still about four years of our total federal tax collections.
Eleven million people die every year from a bad diet. And more than a billion people in the world are overweight and sick from eating our processed, industrialized diet and not eating a healthy whole foods diet.2 In fact, the number one factor causing these deaths is the lack of fruits and vegetables in our diet. The sad thing is that in America only 2 percent of our farmland is used to grow fruits and vegetables, despite our government’s recommendations that 50 percent of our diet should be fruits and vegetables. Fifty-nine percent of our farmland is used to grow commodity crops (corn, wheat, soy) that get turned into ultraprocessed foods that we know are deadly. These processed foods make up about 60 percent of our diet!
Why does this matter? For every 10 percent of your diet that comes from processed food, your risk of death goes up 14 percent.3 That means a lot of extra deaths because we support agriculture that creates food that makes us sick and fat and harms the environment, and not the production of fruits and vegetables and whole foods that make us healthy.
The complexity of the problem prevents people from connecting the dots and taking action. And most of the true costs are not even recognized, limiting the motivation to change the system. Let’s take a journey through every aspect of the food system and connect those dots.
THE COSTS OF CHRONIC DISEASE
In 2018, the Milken Institute issued two major reports. The first, The Cost of Chronic Diseases in the US,4 and the second, America’s Obesity Crisis: The Health and Economic Costs of Excess Weight,5 map out the staggering impact of food obesity and disease caused mostly by our current food system. It’s overwhelming, but here are just a few of the key facts:
The direct health care costs for chronic health conditions was $1.1 trillion in 2016, or 5.8 percent of our US gross domestic product (GDP).
The indirect costs, including just lost income, reduced productivity, and impact on caregivers, but not including the impact of our food system on the environment, were another $2.6 trillion. The combined direct and indirect costs are $3.7 trillion, or one in five dollars of our whole economy. Every year!
Most of the diseases driving the costs are related to obesity and poor diet: abnormal cholesterol, osteoarthritis, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and kidney failure. It’s important to note that these costs do not include pre-diabetes, which affects one in two Americans and causes heart attacks, strokes, and dementia even if it never leads to full-blown type 2 diabetes.
In ten years 83 million Americans will have three or more chronic diseases, compared to 30 million in 2015. Today 60 percent of Americans have one chronic disease and 40 percent have two or more chronic diseases.
Seventy percent of Americans are either overweight or obese—that’s about 228 million Americans! Forty percent are obese, up from 3.4 percent in 1962.
Now let’s think about this globally. If 2.2 billion people around the world are overweight, the costs are beyond comprehension. If the burden of chronic disease will cost the American economy $95 trillion over the next 35 years, what might the global costs be?
Global per capita health care costs are one-tenth that of the United States and the global obesity rates are lower as well, but the global costs are also staggering. For argument’s sake, if you assume that there are 1,000 times (over 2.2 billion worldwide) as many people overweight in the world as there are in the United States,6 could the global costs be in the quadrillions of dollars? That’s a lot of zeros.
How does this impact us? While Democrats argue to create Medicare for All and Republicans argue to reduce entitlements to bring down our $22 trillion national debt, both are missing the obvious fact. Fix the reason why we have those costs in the first place. Stop the flow of sick people into the system and the harm to our environment and climate by fixing the cause: our food system.
Yet most of our government’s policies promote the growing, production, marketing, sale, and consumption of the worst diet on the planet—billions in subsidies (known as crop insurance or other supports) for commodity crops turned into processed food and food for factory-farmed animals; $75 billion a year in food stamp payments that effectively reduce hunger but are mostly for processed food and soda; unregulated food marketing of soda and junk food; confusing food labels; industry-influenced dietary guidelines; and more. Its very policies also support agricultural practices that pollute the environment and worsen climate change.
The Congressional Research Service estimates that by 2025, 48 percent of our entire mandatory federal spending will be for health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.7 Bill Haslam, the former governor of Tennessee, shared with me that one in three dollars of its state budget is spent on Medicaid. This does not account for all the federal programs covering health care, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense, Children’s Health Insurance Program, and Indian Health Service, among others. All in all, our government covers 50 to 60 percent of health care costs in America. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) projects that by 2048, Medicare and Medicaid will account for $3.2 trillion in federal spending. To put that in perspective, our entire federal tax collections are only $3.8 trillion.8 There will be almost nothing left for the government as a whole—for defense, education, transportation, or anything else. Neither cutting Medicare nor creating Medicare for All will solve this problem.
HOW TO FIX HEALTH CARE: BEYOND CUTTING ENTITLEMENTS OR MEDICARE FOR ALL
In 2013 I spoke at the World Economic Forum, and at a big gathering of the world’s health care leaders from government, the pharmaceutical industry, insurers, and health care systems, I asked a simple question. It was after a distinguished panel focused on fixing health care by better health information technology, improved care coordination, reduction of medical errors, improved efficiencies, and improved payment models, all necessary but not sufficient. Their plan was akin to moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic.
Here was the question: Wouldn’t it make more sense to address the root causes of chronic disease that are driving the costs, rather than trying to clean up after the fact? The room of 300 people went silent. It was as if I had just revealed the meaning of life. Afterward the panel moderator, the dean of Columbia University’s School of Public Health, told me how profound this insight was and how all the health leaders were talking about it after. Really? I was shocked. This is so obvious, yet no one had thought of it.
The World Economic Forum estimated that between 2010 and 2030 the global health care costs for chronic disease will exceed $47 trillion9 (probably an underestimate given the new, more robust analysis of $95 trillion over 35 years for the United States alone). They declared this the single biggest threat to global economic development. General Motors spends more on health care than on steel, and Starbucks spends more on health care than on coffee beans!
Other analyses from global management consulting firm McKinsey put the global cost of obesity at $2 trillion a year, which is roughly equivalent to the global impact from smoking, armed violence, war, and terrorism combined.10 In addition, according to the McKinsey Global Institute report, obesity accounts for $2 trillion in lost productivity.11 Any way you slice it, the costs of obesity and chronic disease are weighing the world down.
We think of these problems as diseases of affluence, but the fact is that the greatest burden, or about 80 percent of obesity and chronic disease, is in the developing world, in low- and middle-income countries. They face what the World Health Organization (WHO) classifies as the “double burden of obesity and malnutrition” and are completely unprepared for this epidemic. There is little health care infrastructure, few doctors and nurses to treat these problems, and even less money.
The “cheap” food that causes disease is not so cheap after all. The hope and promise of the Green Revolution—to use agricultural technology to create abundant cheap food to feed the world—turned out to have horrible unintended consequences. In fact, cheap food turns out to be very, very expensive.
Yes, chronic disease is costly. And kills millions. But that is only a small part of the total cost driven by our food system. Add to these costs the real cost of our food system on the environment, economy, climate, social justice issues, poverty, education, national security, and so on, and this number grows dramatically. Let’s explore some of the costs.
THE COSTS WE PAY FOR FARMWORKERS AND FOOD WORKERS
Farmworkers and food industry workers are underpaid and exploited. They face high risks of injury and harm from agricultural chemicals. Most aren’t protected by minimum wage or overtime pay requirements. (However, New York State recently passed the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act.12) Many farmworkers live below the poverty line and have no health care, instead depending on emergency rooms and Medicaid. The truth is that the food system disproportionately affects the poor, immigrants, and people of color who actually work in the food system.
The average restaurant worker makes only about $10 an hour.13 That’s why we pay their salary through billions in tips and another $16.5 billion in food stamps. Their dependence on food stamps limits their food choices at the checkout counter, and healthy options are often not affordable enough or government approved.
For those who work on a farm—there are 1 million farmworkers in our country—they have one of the most dangerous jobs in America. They die at seven times the rate of other workers.14 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 10,000 to 20,000 farmworkers are harmed by acute pesticide poisoning every year, which doesn’t account for the long-term effects of being exposed to toxins day after day and year after year.15 The herbicides and pesticides that farmers use on their crops are neurotoxins, carcinogens, and hormone disruptors. Many of those used in the United States are banned in other countries. The government agencies (the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, and EPA) that should be regulating these chemicals for human safety are not doing their job.
THE LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY IN NATURAL AND AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS: WHY IT MATTERS
While these chemical inputs damage human health, they also disrupt natural ecosystems, deplete the diversity of life in the soil, threaten the loss of most of the plant and animal species we have consumed for millennia, and severely affect pollinators, like honeybees and butterflies, we depend on for agricultural crops.16 (Chapter 16 explains these consequences in depth.) But the loss of biodiversity, the result of industrial agriculture, is a much bigger problem that threatens global food security. Not only are we threatening insects essential for agricultural production but we are also losing varieties of plant foods and animals at an alarming rate.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than 90 percent of plant varieties and half of livestock varieties have been lost to farmers (and the world).17 Most of our food comes from just twelve plant varieties and five animal species, threatening our food security. Thirty percent of livestock breeds are facing extinction, and six breeds become extinct each month. Just three crops (wheat, corn, rice) account for 60 percent of our food. This occurred because of the centralization of seed production (farmers can’t even collect, store, or breed their own plants) by corporations such as Monsanto (now Bayer) as part of the “improvement” of agriculture promoted globally through the Green Revolution and the industrialization of agriculture. Most farmers no longer grow local, resilient, genetically diverse and nutrient-dense varieties. They use only genetically uniform (or GMO) high-yield varieties that require intensive use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides—further destroying the organic matter and biodiversity of the soil that results in less nutrient-dense plants and increased need for irrigation and fertilizer. In all ecosystems, complexity is health; simplicity makes systems vulnerable. Think of monocrop corn (meaning it’s the only crop grown on a farm) compared to a rain forest. One plant dies in a rain forest, no problem. One plant dies on a monocrop corn or soy megafarm—no food.
How do we even measure the costs to human health and the threats to our pollinators and the loss of biodiversity? No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals—no more humans.
BEYOND JUST THE HEALTH CARE AND SICKNESS COSTS
Before we get too deep into all the additional costs and harm of our food system, the good news is there are solutions that can solve all these problems. In other words, a food fix! It is a complex set of related strategies for citizens, businesses, philanthropists, and governments to fix our food system that can occur on a global level. It will not be easy, but it is necessary for our survival as a species, for the economic and political stability of national governments, and for the health of the planet.
The costs of the food system are not borne by the companies that cause these problems. Nor are they paid for at the grocery store or restaurant. They are paid for by all of us indirectly through the loss of our social capital (human happiness, health, productivity, etc.), our natural capital (health of our soil, air, water, climate, oceans, biodiversity, etc.), our economic capital (our ability to address economic disparities and social, environmental, educational, and health care problems), threats to national security, and more.
The silver lining in Food Fix is the potential for “the fix” to be an enormous driver of economic growth and innovation. Billions of dollars in investment are flooding into the food and agriculture sectors, creating new businesses, jobs, and national and global economic growth for innovations in farming, food manufacturing, retail, restaurants, health care, and wellness that improve the health of people and the planet. And the side effect will be significant economic growth and jobs from entire new industries and trillions in cost savings by addressing chronic disease; restoring ecosystems that include soil, water, and biodiversity; and reversing climate change. The countries that get this right will not only help humans and the earth, but leap ahead in the twenty-first-century economy for jobs and economic growth.
In Food Fix we will unpack how all these factors contribute to suffering and lack in the world. We will learn how we as citizens, businesses, philanthropists, and governments can begin to restore the health of our people, our communities, our economies, and the environment. There is a Jewish concept called tikkun olam, which roughly translates to “repair of the world.” That is what our work must be, and the hope of this book.
THE INVISIBLE COSTS OF OUR FOOD SYSTEM
All of us pay the invisible costs. The true costs are not paid for by the food system that generates the costs. We must have a true accounting for this cascade of unintended consequences of our food system, including climate change; depletion of fresh water, forests, and soil; damage to our oceans; loss of biodiversity; pollution; and chronic disease and its economic burden.
Understanding these complicated and diverse effects of human activity and how they destroy our human, natural, social, and economic capital is not an easy task. Yet it is essential to our survival. Shifting our thinking from seeing health care, disease, social justice, poverty, environment, climate, education, economics, and national security as separate problems—in other words, connecting the dots, thinking of the interdependencies and the systems nature of this problem—is critical to solving it. It will require collaboration and action by governments, businesses, nonprofits, and citizens to solve. But the first step is to understand these connections.
There is no way I can create a comprehensive catalogue of all these impacts and all the solutions (and there are many) in this book, but giving examples and mapping out the big picture I hope will stimulate a new wave of thinking and actions to solve this problem. Sometimes I feel like I am standing on a beach watching a tsunami approach while everyone around me is sunbathing and playing in the water, oblivious to the implications of what is about to happen.
ACCOUNTING FOR SUSTAINABILITY AND CONSEQUENCES OF OUR FOOD SYSTEM
The true cost of food is not on the price tag. If the true price of food were built into the price we pay, or if Big Ag and Big Food had to pay for the harm caused by the food they produce—the pollution, the loss of biodiversity, the loss of soil and cropland, the depletion of our water resources, chronic disease, the loss of intellectual capital due to harm to our children’s brains from ultraprocessed food, farmworker and food worker injustices, the threat to national security, and other damaging outcomes—then your grass-fed steak and organic, regeneratively grown produce and food would be much cheaper than industrial food. Sometimes it takes litigation to hold these companies accountable. For example, over a 30-year period General Electric dumped 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River. Eventually they were held to account and were forced to pay more than $1.7 billion to clean it up. All the costs of food need to be quantified and measured. What gets measured gets managed.
A movement is underway to truly account for the real costs—to humans, to the environment, and to the economies of our current industrial food system. It is called true cost accounting. Some costs are easy to measure, like direct health care costs. Some are harder to measure, such as the damage to climate and environment, or social justice impacts. But many groups are working hard to assess all these factors and map out an honest view of the consequences of how we grow food, what we grow, and how it affects those who grow it and eat it, as well as the impact on governments and economies. Changes in our food policy to account for these costs and leveraging taxes and incentives can have a profound impact on and improve the overall health of humanity and the planet.18
In their report The True Cost of American Food, the Sustainable Food Trust details exactly how seemingly unrelated silos in health care, policy, environment, climate, agriculture, and the food industry are all connected. The UN Environment’s TEEBAgriFood (the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food) group and their recent report Measuring What Matters in Agriculture and Food Systems also help define the problems and solutions. We need to analyze all the impacts of our food system, good or bad, and their costs or savings to create a new economic model that reflects the true cost of food and build the business case for a sustainable, regenerative food system.
A TALE OF TWO FOODS: AN INCONVENIENT AND INVISIBLE TRUTH
Let’s take a journey with your average hamburger or steak and a can of soda. It’s a powerful mental exercise to track the entire path of the food we eat. We don’t typically think of the life cycle of anything we eat; we happily chomp along without much thought to how our choices affect all the things we care about. It’s easier just to enjoy and stay oblivious. But we cannot afford to be unconscious anymore. The stakes are too high.
The story starts in Iowa or maybe Brazil. And it winds its way through the food chain to your plate. If the corn that fed the factory-farmed cattle came from Brazil, the only added baggage is that you helped cut down ancient rain forests, which are essential to suck up carbon from the atmosphere and keep our planet cool. The two main products of soy are soy oil (the building block of processed food) and soy meal, used for chicken, pig, pet, farmed fish and dairy cow, and processed human food like plant-based burgers. Corn and soy monocrop megafarms and CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) or factory farms in Iowa and Brazil all create the same problems. Here’s how:
THE MONOPOLY OF THE SEEDS
First the GMO seeds are sold to farmers by Big Ag seed monopolies. Four big companies, Bayer (which recently purchased Monsanto), ChemChina and its subsidiary Syngenta, Corteva, and BASF, formed by giant mergers over the last few years, control most of the seeds in the world, including 60 percent of the vegetable seeds. These companies burden farmers with less choice and higher prices, making them dependent on their seeds and their chemicals. These companies produce the seeds but also the pesticides and herbicides that are used on the crops. The consolidation and centralization of seed production means that we have less food biodiversity and resiliency, which threatens our food security. It also means the loss of autonomy to save and collect seeds for farmers, especially for the 2.5 billion small farm holders across the globe. They have to buy their seeds only from the seed monopolies.
Only 1 percent of corn grown in America is sweet corn actually consumed by humans. The rest is dent corn, used for food oils, animal feed (for cattle), ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS; for your sugary soda), biodegradable plastic, alcohol, food starch, and food additives (for your hamburger bun). Soy is increasingly used for biodiesel, which will drive the price up. Soy and corn monocrops account for 53 percent of all farmland. Much of that food goes to feed animals on CAFOs or factory farms, which in many places in the developed world are now the main way we produce animals for human consumption. It varies globally, but in the United States only 27 percent of cropland is used to grow food for humans, while 67 percent is used to grow food for factory-farmed animals.19 According to the UN FAO, worldwide, 70 percent of total agricultural land is suitable only for grazing animals (and not suitable for growing crops) and, as we will see in Part 5, is a key part of the solution for climate change.
THE DESTRUCTION OF SOIL AND RAIN FORESTS: CLIMATE CHANGE AND DESERTS
The problem is not only that portions of the crops are grown for feedlot animals (including the cattle for your burger) and HFCS for your soda. How those crops are grown also creates massive destruction. The crops are grown through intensive industrial farming that leads to massive soil erosion and loss of soil carbon, worsening climate change. In Iowa, we lose 1 pound of topsoil for every pound of corn grown. The cost of soil erosion from industrial agriculture is $44 billion a year. We lose almost 2 billion tons of topsoil a year.20 That’s about 200,000 tons every hour. We have lost a third of all our topsoil—which took billions of years to create—in the last 150 years. The UN projects that in 60 years we may completely “mine” all our topsoil, making it almost impossible to grow food. Soil gone. No food. No people. That’s sixty more harvests. What will your grandchildren eat?
Soil erosion and the loss of carbon in soil lead to the massive global problem of desertification, the decline of farm- or rangeland into deserts. Twelve million hectares of land, an area the size of Nicaragua or North Korea, are lost every year to desert. The land we lose every year could produce 20 million tons of grain.21
And this is not just in developed countries. There is a big demand for palm oil (even used in “health” foods), which comes from cleared rain forests in Southeast Asia. This drives soil erosion, river and air pollution, and climate change. It destroys habitats for wildlife and threatens extinction of animals such as orangutans.
There is a difference between dirt and soil. Dirt is lifeless and dead and cannot hold water or carbon. Dirt contains very few microorganisms, fungi, or worms, all of which are needed to extract nutrients from the soil to feed the plants. So dirt requires massive inputs of fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and water just to grow our food. This further ruins soil. In the United States we use more than 1 billion pounds of pesticides a year, and globally we use 5.4 billion pounds of pesticides and over 200 million pounds of fertilizers, both of which destroy soil life.22 Healthy soil, on the other hand, is alive, teeming with microbes. Just 2 square centimeters of soil have more life and microbial diversity than anything else in the universe. Soil can hold hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per acre, protecting against droughts and floods. Soil is the biggest carbon sink on the planet. Think of it as the rain forest of the prairies; it can sequester more carbon and do more to reverse climate change than all the rain forests in the world. Restoring all our dirt on the planet to soil could completely draw down carbon in the environment to preindustrial levels. Healthy soil reduces or eliminates the need for pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Healthy soil extracts nutrients from the earth, making them available to plants and humans. Over the last 100 years mineral levels in our food have dropped dramatically.23 Soil feeds plants by making micronutrients and macronutrients available to the plants; dirt doesn’t—it requires chemical inputs to grow plants.
THE LOSS OF THE WORLD’S FRESH WATER
Now back to the GMO corn used to feed the beef cattle. We have to irrigate these crops because soil that has been depleted can’t hold water (which of course leads to the increased number of floods and droughts we have seen in recent years). Seventy percent of the human use of the world’s fresh water is for agriculture.26 Significant portions of it are used for growing food for animals rather than humans or for ethanol. The thing is, these animals are supposed to eat grass, graze on rangelands, and drink rainwater or eat grass grown with rainwater, not eat corn irrigated by fresh water from precious aquifers and rivers.
Water is a limited resource. Only 5 percent of water on the planet is fresh water. Lake Baikal in Russia contains 1 percent. We are depleting our ancient aquifers faster than rainfall can replenish them. The biggest one in America, the Ogallala Aquifer in the Midwest, is being depleted by more than a trillion gallons more a year than can be refilled by rain.27 Irrigation of crops is the main cause. Dirt can’t hold water. Soil can. If we switched to range (grass)-fed regenerative livestock production, we would restore soils, draw down carbon (reversing climate change), and store massive amounts of water, which can prevent floods and droughts. No water, no food, no humans. The solution is soil, not oil. According to a 2019 UN report, $300 billion invested in regenerative agriculture would be enough to restore 900 hectares of the 2 billion hectares (5 million acres) of degraded land in the world, build soil, and slow down climate change enough to give us more than 20 years to innovate climate-change solutions.28 That is the total global military spending in just 60 days, or less than one-tenth the annual cost of obesity and diabetes in the United States.
FERTILIZERS: DESTROYING LAKES AND OCEANS
The nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides used to grow the plants that in part feed the beef cattle that becomes your burger all come from fossil fuels—and one-fifth of fossil fuels are used for agriculture and our food system.29 That’s more than all transportation from cars, planes, and ships combined. There are 10 million tons of fertilizer used just to grow corn in America. There are 200 million tons of fertilizer used across the world every year.30
The nitrogen fertilizer runs off these megafarms into rivers and down to lakes. Recently Lake Erie in Cleveland was suffocated by algal blooms, killing the fish and creating a big dead zone in the lake and toxic drinking water for Toledo, Ohio. Lake Erie is dying partly because of your hamburger or feedlot steak. Toledo alone spent $1 billion just to address the polluted water for its residents.31
The nitrogen-rich fertilizer also dumps into rivers that run to the ocean. When the runoff from Midwest industrial farms hits the Gulf of Mexico, it creates an 8,000-square-mile dead zone—that’s the size of New Jersey. In the Gulf of Mexico alone, it kills 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year.32 That’s a boatload of sushi and gumbo! There are almost 400 similar dead zones around the world, collectively the size of Europe. We produce massive amounts of soy and corn used to make factory-farmed meat, ethanol, biofuels, cooking oils, and ultraprocessed food, and the “side effect” is destroying one of the healthiest protein sources in the world—seafood. The cost of nitrogen pollution is estimated at $210 billion a year.33 And there are other unintended consequences. The nitrogen runoff ends up in our tap water, resulting in increased cancer rates and birth defects, preterm labor, and low birth weights.34
Raising animals through managed grazing and regenerative agriculture will protect our waterways and save millions of tons of fish. (More on this in Part 5.) We will also produce meat that is healthier for humans and the planet and more humane for the animals and farmworkers.
It’s not just big soy and corn operations that cause the problem, but giant beef, hog, and chicken factory farms that dump massive amounts of waste (full of more nitrogen) into giant lagoons that run off into rivers and lakes too. Remember Hurricane Florence in North Carolina, which swamped these operations? More than fifty hog lagoons overflowed and flooded local waterways.35 Guess what happened to all that waste.
Depressed yet?
It gets worse. I am not going through this to depress you—but to help you connect the dots so we can solve this problem as a whole, not piecemeal. Telling Americans to eat less and exercise more only blames the victim. The food industry produces that addictive burger and soda that override willpower, driving your body to gain weight.36 Toxic foods like that create an astounding amount of secondary consequences for humans, the environment, and the economy.
THE TRUE COST OF YOUR FOOD: JUST A FEW MORE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
I hope you are getting the picture of all the additional costs—the ones you don’t pay at the grocery store or restaurant. What if the real cost of food and our food system was actually built into the price? What if farmers who provide ecosystem services (building soil, improving water use, and biodiversity) were paid for those services, while Big Ag, seed, chemical, and fertilizer companies that use up ecosystem services (depleting organic matter in the soil, overuse and pollution of freshwater resources, destruction of biodiversity such as pollinator species, and the contribution to climate change) were charged for their impact and ecosystem destruction? Maybe the factory-farmed burger should cost $1,000 a pound. Maybe the can of soda would be $100. Maybe the cost of grass-fed steak would be only $3 a pound. On Amazon, Smartwater (made by Coca-Cola) is 9 cents an ounce. Pepsi is 2 cents an ounce (in a 2-liter bottle). When water is more than four times the cost of soda, we have a problem.
Here are some of the rest of the costs hidden in your feedlot steak or burger (or pretty much any food grown in our industrial agricultural system):37
Pesticide poisoning and related illnesses cost $1 billion a year.
Other pesticide costs including death of birds and insect pollinators (bees and butterflies), loss of biodiversity, crop loss, and groundwater contamination are about $7 billion a year.
Cleanup of manure from CAFOs costs about $4 billion a year. There are millions of these animals, and they produce more than 300 million tons of manure a year, which is held in open pits or manure lagoons and contaminates land, water, and air. This cost doesn’t account for all the illnesses, like asthma, in nearby communities from aerosolized toxins caused by this pollution.
Declining property values around CAFOs are $26 billion a year. Who wants to live near a stinky, polluted hog, chicken, or beef operation?
Taxpayer subsidies for these factory farms from our Farm Bill are about $13 billion a year.
Fast-food employees make so little money to serve up your burger (and fries and soda) that they need food stamps to buy their own food. That costs us about $7 billion a year.
Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere acidifies the oceans, killing phytoplankton, which produce 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe. Cost? What is the price of losing 50 percent of our oxygen?
Antibiotic use in animal feed to promote growth and prevent infection from overcrowding is a big contributor to antibiotic resistance in humans, which kills 700,000 people a year and costs trillions globally every year. The antibiotics also end up in manure and slurries that are spread on fields (including organic crops) and destroy the soil microbiology.
This is not a complete list. But you get the point. The global cost is not in the billions or even trillions but in the quadrillions. Much of it is hard to measure. How do you measure the loss of biodiversity or the destruction of coral reefs, or the decimation of phytoplankton, which produce so much of the oxygen we breathe? Who is paying that cost? You are. I am. We are. The planet is. Natural habitats and oceans are. Even the historical diversity of seeds used to grow our food is suffering. We are losing our nutritional heritage due to seed monopolies. And the list goes on. If you get that feedlot burger (or any food), you may not finish it but may toss the remains in the trash, contributing to the massive problem of food waste. Another $2 trillion in costs!
FOOD WASTE: WHAT A WASTE!
Food waste is enormous. Up to 40 percent of our food is wasted in the field, in transport, in the retail environment, in restaurants, by food service companies, or in our homes and sent to landfills.38 Think of all the resources that go into growing, transporting, distributing, and buying the food: seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, labor, and financial capital wasted. Mind-boggling. We have more than enough food to feed all the humans in the world and more (up to 10.5 billion people) with our existing food supply. Yet 800 million go to bed hungry and 2 billion are malnourished. The waste of all that food, the additional farmland and farming practices used to grow it, the need for deforestation to grow more food because so much is wasted, and the rotting of that food in landfills, producing toxic methane that heats up our climate, make food waste the third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet, after the United States and China. (More on this in Chapter 17.)
But there are solutions. Some cities such as San Francisco mandate composting. France made it illegal for supermarkets to throw out food and instead requires them to send it to food banks, compost companies, or farms for animal feed. Nonprofits such as Feeding the 5000 have had forty global events feeding 5,000 people entirely from food waste. Even top chefs like Dan Barber showcase gourmet meals made entirely of food scraps—for example, carrot peels, ends of celery, and stems of mushrooms.
These solutions are just the beginning, but solving this problem will reduce hunger, reduce the need for croplands and deforestation, and reduce CO2 in the environment by 70.53 gigatons, making it the third-most important solution for drawing down carbon and reversing climate change, according to Project Drawdown.
THE UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE FOR PUBLIC HEALTH
The 2018 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Shaping the Health of Nations for Centuries to Come39 documents the human health impacts of climate change. Climate refugees are real, displaced by natural disasters and extreme weather events. The UN projections estimate that by 2050 there will be 200 million to 1 billion climate refugees.40 That was the entire population of the world in 1820. To put it in perspective, the Syrian refugee crisis, which was in part due to climate change and drought, amounted to just 1 million refugees.
Vulnerable populations around the world are exposed to weather extremes, increased infectious disease, and threats to their food security. In 2017, 712 extreme weather events resulted in $326 billion in economic losses, triple the economic losses from just a year earlier.41 Heat waves resulted in 153 billion hours of labor lost because it was too hot to work. Higher temperatures increase disease—cholera, malaria, and dengue fever, among others. The heat also worsens health and increases the demand for limited health care services for those with heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and lung diseases. Agriculture is also in turn affected by climate change and increasing temperatures, with downward trends in yields in thirty countries threatening food security. This is clearly not all about our food system, as other factors drive climate change, but since our food system is the single biggest contributor, if we fix it, it would be the single biggest solution. In 2019 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a landmark report entitled Climate Change and Land, an IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems.42 This report lays out the imperative of reimagining our agricultural system as a key solution to climate change and food and political security.
In Chapter 17 we will take a deeper dive into climate change and how our food system and innovative agricultural solutions can help us solve this unprecedented crisis, which is worse than we think.
We also have a co-opted government. When I asked Ann Veneman, the former secretary of agriculture under George W. Bush, why we couldn’t have science guide our policies for food and agriculture, or why we don’t stop the marketing of junk food to kids, or have more transparent food labels, or stop subsidies for commodities turned into processed food, or create subsidies for fruit and vegetables, she told me that it was the food and agriculture industry’s influence on Congress and the administration.
The Farm Bill, which controls most of our food and agricultural policies, is heavily influenced by lobbyists. Over 600 companies spent $500 million to influence the 2014 Farm Bill to get what they wanted.43 Almost 73 percent of the members of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry and 90 percent of the House Agricultural Committee receive donations from Monsanto (Bayer) and Syngenta. If you add in all the other food and agriculture companies, 100 percent of the members would have received donations.44
SODA AND SUGAR-SWEETENED BEVERAGES: THE WEIGHT OF CORN
The soda and sugar-sweetened beverage story is pretty much the same as that for your burger or steak—damage to the environment, huge costs to society, and massive economic consequences from drinking the high-fructose corn syrup that sweetens your soda, energy drinks, teas, and coffees. But there is one big difference. Feedlot meat isn’t great for you. But eating it doesn’t kill people except through the downstream effects we just reviewed. Sugar does! Especially high-fructose corn syrup, which is used for sugar-sweetened beverages. These kill 186,000 people a year from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer caused by drinking sugar-sweetened beverages.45 The risk goes up with every additional soda.46
A recent study found that your risk of death from heart disease was 31 percent higher if you consumed two sugar-sweetened beverages a day.47 Every extra drink caused the risk to go up by another 10 percent. I was recently shopping at a convenience store in Utah and at the checkout counter was a very overweight woman buying two 2-liter bottles of soda while she sucked on the straw of her 40-ounce Big Gulp Mountain Dew. I wish this was an aberration, but it is a common practice in America.
The other big problem with the soda industry is that as taxpayers we pay for 31 billion servings of soda to the poor through SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), or food stamps. That is $7 billion a year, the biggest line item in SNAP, which accounts for almost 10 percent of the “food” purchased by SNAP recipients. You can do the math yourself. If a 2-liter bottle of Coke is $1.79 at Target, that’s 22 cents per 8-ounce serving, and that’s 31 billion servings. Soda is one of the very few things that has been proven to cause obesity.48
THE REAL PRICE OF CORN
We actually pay four times for our corn.
First, we subsidize the growing of corn to the tune of about $250 million a year. About 8 percent of that corn is used to make high-fructose corn syrup. The rest is used for feed for factory-farmed animals, ethanol, cooking oil, alcohol, industrial products, and processed-food additives.
Second, we pay for the environmental consequences of modern corn production. Modern chemical-intensive till farming causes compaction and loss of topsoil. This causes an increase in greenhouse gases because industrial monocrop, chemical agriculture depletes organic matter in soils. Then we pay for all the damage from the nitrogen runoff to waterways and oceans, the harm from the pesticides and herbicides, and the depletion of our water resources.
Third, through SNAP we pay for a lot of the junk food and sugar-sweetened beverages made from corn syrup—that’s about $75 billion a year. In fact, money earned from SNAP makes up about 20 percent of Coca-Cola’s annual revenue in the United States. That doesn’t include any revenue from noncarbonated sugar drinks like Powerade or Vitaminwater. That makes Coca-Cola a billion-dollar welfare recipient.
And fourth, we pay for all the health care costs of obesity and chronic diseases (caused mostly by diet), or about $3.7 trillion a year.49 Sadly, there are other costs to our children. We are overfed but undernourished. Obesity, food insecurity, and malnutrition occur in the same people. In the United States, 7 percent of our children are stunted, which causes permanent developmental, neurological, and long-term economic impacts for them and for society.
So, what should that can of soda cost? A lot more than 22 cents for an 8-ounce serving! Maybe it should be $100 a can or more.
Turns out that your fast-food burger and soda are far more expensive than a grass-fed steak and a glass of water when the true cost is taken into account.
And we pay for it all through our government supports for industrial agriculture, including the euphemistically named crop insurance, which mostly go to large, multimillion-dollar industrial farms, and most of those dollars end up in the pockets of the chemical, seed, and fertilizer companies that supply those farms. Taxpayers fund the SNAP program. Weirdly, the USDA won’t disclose where those dollars are used, saying it is protecting the privacy of big retailers like Walmart and Kroger. A South Dakota newspaper decided this data should be public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and has filed a lawsuit to make the data public. The case has gone to the Supreme Court.50 Shouldn’t the government protect citizens, not corporations? What are they hiding?
We indirectly support the food industry’s marketing of junk food to children, the poor, and minorities by allowing it to deduct $190 billion a year in advertising costs,51 while absolving it of the responsibility to pay for the chronic disease caused by that food. Taxpayers pay for all the sickness caused by eating this food, through Medicare, Medicaid, and all the other medical coverage the US government provides for more than 50 percent of the population.
This simply isn’t just, ethical, moral, or right. It must be fixed. We need full transparency and honesty about the costs of our current food system on each one of us and on our communities, society, economy, and environment.
FOOD FIX: THE TRUE COST OF FOOD
There is not one simple solution to the challenges of farming, diet, public health, the economy, the environment, the climate, workers’ rights, education, national security, social justice, health, income inequities, health disparities, and more. But they are all connected in one way or another by one thing.
Food.
We need to think about these issues as one interconnected, intersecting set of challenges that we can and must address if we are to reverse the crises we now face and avert the disasters just over the horizon: rising global temperatures, loss of all our topsoil, depletion of our freshwater resources, loss of the earth’s biodiversity, increasing desertification, hunger, malnutrition, and obesity, the burden of chronic disease, and the instability of governments and economies, to mention just a few. Many of these problems started as unintended consequences of good intentions and policies:
Food stamps (SNAP) started as a way to address hunger and malnutrition but now drive obesity and disease for 46 million Americans. While it effectively addresses food insecurity, SNAP is not leveraged to improve the nutrition or health of its recipients.
Agricultural policies historically protected farmers from weather and price fluctuations and supported increased crop production, but now these same policies and agricultural practices are the number one cause of climate change, deplete global water resources, and drive environmental destruction and the production of cheap ingredients that are mostly turned into processed disease-promoting food-like substances.
Fertilizers were created to increase crop yields and help farmers around the world produce more food.
The discovery of vitamins, the Great Depression, and World War II focused the nation on producing inexpensive and vitamin-rich shelf-stable starchy calories. The food system we have is not an accident but is mostly the result of good intentions and conscious goals that were mostly met. Though 800 million around the world still suffer from hunger and many more from food insecurity, the efforts of the mid-twentieth century food system were very successful. According to Tufts University’s Dariush Mozafarrian, “the unintended consequences were the focus on a few staple commodities, the hyper-processing of foods, which led to the erosion of land, soil, water resources, and climate, and the failure to increase protective minimally processed foods, all leading to the chronic disease and sustainability crises we see today.”
This juggernaut is linked to things seemingly unrelated: the $22 trillion US national debt, chronic disease and obesity, destruction of our environment by pollution, climate change, poverty, social injustice, loss of our children’s ability to learn and develop, political instability, and the destruction of our communities. Food connects them all. How we grow it, process it, produce it, distribute it, consume it, and waste it affects almost everything that matters in our world today.
Yet this is a fixable problem. Taking a step back, looking at the problem holistically, as one system out of balance, will help us reimagine the world we want, the world we can create by addressing the overall dysfunctions in our food system. We can solve these problems. Solutions exist. They will call on multiple sectors and stakeholders—from citizens and consumers, businesses and farmers, and policy makers in every level of government, including city and state, to nonprofits, philanthropists, and scientists—coming together in global agreement and efforts to transform our food system.
Think of it as the Paris Accord, where 195 countries came together to create voluntary agreements to address climate change, but this will be an accord for food, or for the UN Sustainable Development Goals for our food system (which in part already address these issues). Imagine if opposing groups come together to fight a common problem, like the various kingdoms in Game of Thrones who come together to fight the army of the dead, because the survival of them all depends on it. Imagine if aliens came to threaten our planet; we would form a global effort to fight back. This is what we urgently need right now. This affects every single one of us. And it is the defining problem of our time.
Throughout each part of this book, I will share some of these solutions. Some are well-formed programs that already exist. Some are proposed solutions by experts. Some are easy to implement, others more difficult. They are meant to highlight what is needed and what is possible, rather than be a comprehensive set of solutions. Citizens, farmers, businesses, investors, nonprofits, and governments all must play their part. This is a starting point for a deeper exploration as a society, a road map for the change that is needed to address these challenges together. These ideas are meant to inspire, educate, and motivate individuals, businesses, and government policy makers to innovate and think differently about these issues—to see the linkages, the need for systems thinking, the need for thoughtful integrated solutions.
In 2018, Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, dean of Tufts School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and I met with Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio and suggested that all of our government’s various policies on health, nutrition, agriculture, and food were not integrated, often working at odds with one another, and overseen by eight different agencies, without any awareness of their effectiveness, influence on public health, or economic impact. That led to a request by Congress for the Government Accountability Office, the government’s independent assessors of the effectiveness and cost of government policies, to examine these issues in detail and report on recommended actions to fix them. We each can make a difference.
We need new ideas, strategies, policies, and business innovations to fix these problems and bring diverse groups together to solve them. It is possible. Solutions exist. They are achievable, and we need the push from the grass roots and from the top down to shift public opinion, to create a movement that forces legislatures and policy makers to take notice and take action. We can use the power of our forks and our collective behaviors to move in the right direction. Throughout Food Fix we will explore the specific ways in which citizens, businesses, and policy makers can solve the biggest problem we face today—our broken food system and all its consequences.