“If price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.”
~ The New York Times
Are we really getting the best bang for our buck when we eat meat and dairy? On walking into a grocery store, $3.50 for chicken breasts, $1.50 for a pound of ground beef, or $2.60 for a carton of eggs seems like a fantastic bargain. Not even close. When it comes to meat and dairy products, price and value are not one and the same. These grocery store “bargain” prices are deceiving, because they do not reflect the enormous, external costs to society in health and environmental costs that are not directly paid for at the cash register.
Let’s take, for instance, that $1.50 for a pound of hamburger meat. To produce that meat under the factory farming system requires oil for fertilizers, abundant land to grow crops for animal feed, antibiotics to compensate for the unsanitary conditions and disease outbreaks, growth hormones to raise animals at faster rates, and waste management to truck away the billions of tons of manure generated by the animals. This doesn’t include the amount of destruction left in factory farming’s wake from the cost of cleaning up polluted water, the irreversible loss of biodiversity and beautiful ecosystems, air pollution, global warming, and the destruction of our natural environment as well as the staggering health-care costs to fix our bodies from eating unhealthy food.
Overall the meat and dairy industries impose the highest costs to our society among all industries across the board. Consider this: for every one dollar of animal product sold, it generates $1.70 in additional costs from environmental to health care.1 This is nearly $7.8 billion not reflected on our grocery bills. Yet we are still paying for these in health-care costs and environmental degradation. These impacts have measurable, financial consequences. The hidden costs of meat and dairy-centered breakfasts, lunches, and dinners include $314 billion in health-care costs, $38 billion in subsidies, $37 billion in environmental costs, $21 billion in cruelty costs, and $4 billion in fishing-related costs.2 To put the subsidies in to perspective, Big Oil only receives a meager $10 billion in subsidies.
In total, the final bill for production costs not paid for by agribusiness is at least $414 billion.3 This price includes higher taxes, health insurance premiums, decreased value of homes near factory farms, and loss of natural resources. Next time you are at the grocery store, realize that the true price of that gallon of milk is not $3.00 but $9.00. Those pork ribs should cost us $36.00, not $12.00. Factoring in the external costs of factory farming at $1.70 per one dollar of meat, dairy, eggs, and fish sold triples the prices of the goods. We need to start paying the true “value” and cost to society of these food products.
The US Meat and Dairy industries have the sweetest business deal in history. No other industry, including big oil and tobacco, has come anywhere close to this level of governmental handouts and gotten away without paying for any of the consequences. Each time the oil industry creates a spill, it is required to foot the bill. When the tobacco industry damaged our nation’s health, it had to pay Americans nearly $400 billion in health-care costs accumulated over five decades.4 For some reason we have exempted the animal agriculture industry from the same responsibility. As a society we are footing this staggering bill for any and all of the massive problems it is creating. We think our money can be better spent on less destructive practices. It’s time to realize that meat production is like the two-cent coin—it costs us more than it is worth to produce.
The High Price of the “Meat Maketh Man” Myth
Price is the most powerful determinant of how we act as consumers. The majority of us live on a budget, and so we tend to buy the cheapest food possible. Overall, the amount of money we spend on food has decreased since the 1990s. In 1990, we spent 2.4 percent of our gross incomes on food. As a society we only spend about 1.7 percent of our overall income on food today—the lowest percentage of almost every other nation. Since 1979, meat and dairy products have gotten progressively cheaper. Egg prices have decreased by 79 percent, butter by 57 percent, and bacon by 25 percent.5 Going back to Economics 101, when price falls, demand increases. Most of the food products we buy are meat and dairy, as we presume they are the cheapest “healthy” foods.
As the prices have dropped, we have been subsequently bombarded with messages from the industry and government to continue consuming these products high in saturated fat and cholesterol. This governmental push and support for meat and dairy products above healthier food options could have a little something to do with the millions of dollars that the industry shells out to Congress.
The most frustrating realization is that our government is subsidizing all of the wrong foods for our health. Since the implementation of factory farming and the $38 billion in government subsidies to factory farms, the meat and dairy industries have been able to secure some of the lowest retail prices in history for these products. To put this in perspective, this is nearly half of the total unemployment packages paid by all fifty states in 2012. By comparison, our healthiest foods available—vegetables and fruits—do not receive anywhere near the funding that processed foods and meat and dairy products receive in both direct and indirect subsidies.
The federal government is fostering economic conditions and policies that are destroying American lives. Due to “low” meat and dairy prices, as a nation, Americans consume more meat per person, a total of two hundred pounds per year, than anyone else on the planet. We pay for it too. This ridiculously high consumption of the wrong foods is making us extremely sick and our pocketbooks poor. Obesity is a national epidemic and costs the nation $147 billion dollars annually.6 The animal-food industry costs us $600 billion in health-care costs every two years.7 $600 billion. Think about that number. Of the 750,000 Americans who died in 2011, one-third of the deaths were attributable to cardiovascular disease. In 2010, the bill for cardiovascular disease totaled $273 billion in direct health-care costs and an added $173 billion in indirect costs from productivity loss and premature death.8 At our current rate of meat and dairy consumption, heart disease is only expected to increase. By 2030, experts are predicting that 116 million Americans will have their hearts broken and cost us a staggering $818 billion. What is the number-one, unanimously agreed-upon contributor to heart disease in scientific literature? Animal products.
The good news is we could save over 126,000 lives and $17 billion in health-care costs per year if we ate less meat and more veggies.9 Currently we are not even consuming half of the daily recommended value of fruits and vegetables. Just increasing our daily intake of fruits and vegetables by half a cup per day could save $2.7 trillion in health-care costs. That is just half a cup! Adding everything together, the value of lives saved would exceed $11 trillion dollars. Yes, simple dietary changes really are that powerful.
The Cost of Sh!tty Food
Our current production of meat and dairy gives us not only sub-quality and unhealthy food, but also adds significant health-care costs from foodborne illness. Food not regulated by the FDA is costing us $5.7 billion and, socially, thirty thousand years of life each year.10
Although we tend to focus on the top heavy hitters, such as Listeria, Campylobacter, E. coli and salmonella, a research team from the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute looked at just how much the fourteen most common pathogens in our food cost us each year. Here’s the breakdown by disease and cost per year:11
It seems like our national stomachache is proving more expensive than we thought. Contaminated chicken and turkey products alone cost an estimated $2.5 billion and fifteen thousand years of life per year.12 These costs don’t even include the continued cost of care resulting from failed kidneys and permanently impaired immune functions. Nor do they cover the true cost of losing a family member. Let’s not kid ourselves. The industry isn’t responsible for any reimbursement to cover health-care costs. At minimum, they should be required to fully disclose every ingredient that goes in to our food, particularly the antibiotics, chemicals, rocket fuel, etc. Although the meat industries claim it is apparently “too expensive” to make meat that isn’t contaminated, we think it is too expensive for us to eat contaminated food.
Adding to the cost of foodborne illness is the growing number of pathogens that are antibiotic resistant. Our abuse of antibiotics in livestock is costing us dearly. Back in 2000, antibiotic resistance was costing us $20 billion a year and affecting nine hundred thousand Americans.13 Today, more than two million Americans are affected, and antibiotic resistance is costing us more than $20 billion a year in direct costs and an additional $35 billion in indirect costs from lost productivity.14 Antibiotic resistance is killing about twenty-three thousand Americans per year despite being a completely avoidable cost. Even more frightening is this statement by Tom Frieden, the Director of the CDC, announcing in 2013 that “if we don’t act now, our medicine cabinet will be empty and we won’t have the antibiotics we need to save lives.”15 Imagine the health-care costs then.
The corporations will kindly tell us that jeopardizing our health is all done in the name of efficiency and profit. The net benefit of using antibiotics on animals to the producers is about twenty-five cents, which is too small to even be reflected in or impact retail sales prices.16 We are letting the industry offload enormous costs and threaten the future of medicine over twenty-five pennies. The very near future might not have cures at the rate superbugs are becoming resistant to antibiotics. It’s time to learn from history. Remember the Black Plague and influenza scares? We too are poised to let the next pandemics wipe out whole populations, thanks to antibiotics that no longer work. But not to worry because we got a bargain and only paid ninety-nine cents for that chicken sandwich. Weighing what’s important to you? Agribusiness is surely not.
Marketing Money Talks
Knowing what we know about meat and dairy’s health claims, it’s distressing to learn that the federal government is one of the main financiers behind the marketing campaigns that push the wrong nutritional messages on the public. In fact, the government has created check-off programs that directly subsidize the marketing for meat and dairy products. The goal of these programs is to influence us to buy more animal products than we would otherwise. These check-off programs are mandatory, tax-like programs that take 1 percent of the wholesale price of food products and collect these funds to pay for research and marketing that in turn boosts animal-based product sales.17 These funds are given to councils such as the Dairy Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association that then come up with the witty slogans we know so well. “Beef, It’s What’s for Dinner” and “Milk: It Does a Body Good” both benefit from these check-off programs. Most Americans have absolutely no idea that these programs exist.
These check-off programs provide about $557 million in research and marketing money for animal products.18 Although forty cents of every one hundred dollars might not seem like a lot, according to the USDA the money is well spent. The return on investment from these programs has been about $4.6 billion in sales. If we add in job creation, it brings us to a whopping $8.2 billion in return.19 For every one dollar of check-off funds spent on advertising, it can boost sales by about eighteen dollars.
Dairy has been the biggest winner of the check-off programs, resulting in an additional $7 billion worth of milk sold. That is an extra forty-seven servings of dairy per person in the United States. The check-off program even helped the Dairy Board team up with Domino’s to offer pizzas to two thousand schools. That is clearly healthy. It’s not like we don’t have a childhood obesity and diabetes problem. Teenagers already consume 78 percent more saturated fat than recommended. While the industry is winning from these programs, friends, we are losing. Dairy is one of the most contaminated and toxic substances that provides this industry with one of the largest bank accounts devoted just to marketing, which does not serve the public sincerely. This is just wrong. The National Dairy Promotion and Research Board boasts $389 million in check-off funds annually. No other industry comes close to having these resources. It spends $58 million a year convincing consumers that dairy is healthy.20 Their budget is three times bigger than that of vegetable and fruit producers’, which provide the delicious foods we should be eating anyway.
Although the industry is benefiting from these programs, the one at fault here is the federal government. Did you know the “Pork, the Other White Meat” slogan is actually a government-marketing campaign? That’s right, the Supreme Court established in the Johanns v. Livestock Marketing Association case that these check-off programs and their resulting marketing campaigns are actually government speech.21 The government decided to get involved to make the programs mandatory. In fact, every single marketing campaign is passed through the USDA for approval. While the National Pork Board might be telling us that everything is better with bacon, the overarching voice behind that slogan is our very own government.
While government and industry applaud these programs, they might want to go back and look at the numbers. Let’s add in external costs and see how well these programs pay off. Since every $1.00 spent on meat, eggs, fish, poultry, and dairy generates $1.70 in external costs, that means there is an external cost of $7.8 billion not reflected in retail prices.22 Basic mathematical comparison says that this $7.8 billion dwarfs the $4.2 billion generated in industry sales. Even including the job creation, the external costs and revenue are almost equal. The question then is, are these programs that support unhealthy practices and destroy our environment still worth it? We think not.
Survival of the Fittest
In 2011, the US government agreed to buy $40 million worth of unwanted chicken products. Apparently the demand for chicken products remained far below the number of chickens produced that year. This buyout, along with a similar purchase in 2010, gave “producers an extra $86 million in government chicken purchases above the roughly $100 million the USDA buys in scheduled chicken purchases for a year.”23 Apparently the National Chicken Council was all too thrilled with this federal bailout, stating, “At a time when the industry is under great stress due to the high cost of feed ingredients and the general economic slowdown, we appreciate USDA’s willingness to step forward and acquire additional chicken.” Excited? We’re not smiling.
Under normal circumstances, when demand for a product declines, business has to adjust to the changing landscape and market forces. That is a basic tenet of capitalism. Instead, our government decides to prop up an industry and isolate it from market forces. Why can’t we let the market regulate supply and demand like it does for other products and commodities? What is even more annoying is that the poultry industry already receives billions and billions of dollars in subsidies to pay for almost every aspect of its business. Then on top of it all, the government buys millions of dollars’ worth of unwanted product and pushes this onto our children’s lunch plates. It’s no wonder our children’s health is failing as we continue to feed them what is considered the most contaminated meat product. We are also setting our children up for failing health; chicken is high in cholesterol and saturated fat that contribute to weight problems, heart disease, and diabetes, as well as some cancers. Remember, the first ten years of a child’s life directly impact his or her risk of developing a chronic disease later in life, so establishing healthy childhood eating habits is crucial.
What is a loss for our nation’s children is a huge win for the chicken industry. According to the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, the chicken industry alone saved nearly $1.25 billion in feed costs from 1997 to 2005.24 Feed is the most expensive capital cost of producing chickens. So who paid for the feed? Taxpayers. The report also found that society is currently absorbing environmental costs ranging from $2.55 to $4.00 per hundred pounds of manure for waste treatment beyond lagoon storage. If the amount of water it takes to make hamburgers was not subsidized, Americans would pay thirty-five dollars a pound instead of the enticing dollar menu they are currently paying.
Friends, this practice is the epitome of wasteful and reckless spending of government dollars. Government handouts and bailouts are an extremely contentious political issue. We argue over bailing out the banks and the auto industry, but why, when it comes to agribusiness, are we silenced and complicit in funding a clearly failing venture? Not to mention that when the auto industry received its bailout, it still had to return the money. We highly doubt the chicken industry is about to make good on its IOU.
In fact, the only reasons factory farms have survived and profited are from the expensive government handouts in the form of direct and indirect subsidies and through their ability to escape responsibility for any environmental and health problems. As taxpayers we spend a total of $38 billion each year directly subsidizing meat and dairy. By comparison, actual healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables receive a meager $17 million.25 Fruits and vegetables don’t impose the health and environmental costs that animal products do; they reduce them.
The biggest subsidy that factory farms depend upon is the crop subsidy. The government gives subsidies to grain and soybean growers when prices fall below the price of production. “Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” says Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at the Union for Concerned Scientists.26 It is expensive to feed animals that have been shifted from a natural diet of grass to grains. This is why it is no surprise that factory farms like to use disgusting fillers, such as crap, dead animals, contaminated food, and even newspaper for the animals’ food.
How much money are we really talking about in subsidies? Consider this: taxpayers paid $161 billion in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.27 But two-thirds of American farmers never saw a cent. The lion’s share of these subsidies goes to factory farms. Government subsidies are skewed to promote big corporate farms rather than aid the smaller farmers who would need the most help. And let’s be honest, they probably are producing healthier versions of meat and dairy products.
This “free” money results in big-time savings for the factory farms. For instance, between 1997 and 2005, the pork industry saved $947 million per year, or $8.5 billion over eight years.28 Since grain comprises 60 percent of factory farms’ capital-input costs, this subsidy makes factory farming profitable.
But wait, the government gives more. Another direct subsidy is the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) payments to help with waste-management costs. EQIP was originally designed to help small farmers. Yet the 2002 Farm Bill opened up payments to livestock production. Big mistake. These factory farms suck up most of the EQIP payments. In a four-year time frame, one thousand factory farms received, at minimum, $35 million in EQIP funding. Today the estimated amount in EQIP funding is between $100 million and $125 million a year. To be clear, this federal subsidy that we pay for is to come up with better waste management procedures for the volumes of sh!t the animals produce.
Obviously these payments are not serving their purpose, because animal sh!t continues to seep into our water sources. Manure has damaged about one-third of our waterways. So not only are we paying for the factories to improperly manage the waste, we have to pay for the cleanup. Doesn’t seem fair or even financially feasible, now does it? By subsidizing grain prices and directly subsidizing CAFOs with EQIP payments, the government is propping up an industry that costs more than it is worth.
Selling Lies
One of agribusiness’s most misleading claims is that it helps stimulate rural economies. Factory farms love to claim that they create jobs. The reality is far from the truth and actually the opposite. Factory farms destroy jobs, homes, and health all in one fell swoop.
In a time when the United States wants to improve economic growth and create jobs, factory farms are not the stimulus this country needs. Economic growth in communities near hog-factory farms is actually 55 percent slower than the rest of the country. Factory farms have the highest rate of turnover due to poor working conditions. The turnover rate is 100 percent—the highest for any industry. This is after they have booted all of the local farmers out of business who are unable to compete with big industrial business. For many people, farming has been in their families for centuries. That is their livelihood. But animal factories, which clearly aren’t farming, are destroying one of America’s quintessential figures.
After their livelihoods are destroyed, those living in rural communities have a hard time moving away. Across the country, families are imprisoned, unable to move away from the stench of manure, because their property values have greatly declined. This comes to a $26 billion reduction in property values in total.29 It isn’t hard to understand why this happened. Who would want to move next to ten thousand smelly hogs by choice?
To add insult to injury, factory farms impose huge health costs on surrounding rural communities. The health-care cost associated with ammonia pollution is $36 billion a year. This doesn’t even take into account the diminished quality of life. The stench is so bad people cannot breathe. Ammonia poisoning directly related to factory farming kills about 5,100 people per year.30 We can all agree that factory farms would win the worst neighbor award every year.
How Much For Another Earth?
We learned at a young age that when we make messes, we clean them up. Yet factory farms are allowed to create environmental disasters and let the public foot the bill. Their messes are not cheap either. In total, from manure remediation to soil erosion, pesticides, and fertilizers, as well as climate change and property devaluation, agribusiness costs us $37.2 billion in hidden external ecological costs. Think about adding that to the price tag. That chicken, beef, and pork is actually expensive.
Let’s consider the environmental price tag of the over one billion tons of animal crap from factory farming:31
When it comes to our environment, it is hard to quantify all of the external costs. The value of nature cannot always be monetized. While we can use money to remedy some of the consequences, some of the destruction is permanent and irreversible. How can you put a price on losing an entire river or species? There are priceless losses that have a ripple effect on our environment. We are fooling ourselves if we think meat and dairy are a bargain. Clearly, the industry selling points of efficient and progressive means of producing food fall flat on their face when we look beyond the grocery store price.
Reaping Real Rewards
We don’t need to be math geniuses to see that the numbers just don’t add up. Meat and dairy masquerade as value meals but in reality are financial (and health) disasters. As Professor Eschel so aptly stated:
Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. When you look at environmental problems in the US nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly—even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag—the entire structure of food production will change dramatically.34
What would happen if meat and dairy internalized their costs? For one, most factory farms would not survive. Their profit margins are actually so small that they would be forced to revamp their business. While agribusiness howls that this would be pushing America back about fifty years, we don’t think that sounds like such a terrible alternative. Back then, American citizens never had the chronic health problems we do today, and they ate less meat. We don’t need factory farms, and we shouldn’t be supporting them. Imagine how much real improvement we could make in the government if we freed up the billions of dollars supporting them?
The benefits of shifting our nation’s dollars away from agribusiness and toward supporting healthy ventures are astounding and range from financial to health and environmental. For example, by reducing American consumption of meat by 44 percent, we could directly benefit from:35
Consider this: two-thirds of our government spending on food goes toward animal-based products that the USDA and doctors around the world are saying we should eat less of. Not to mention that their production destroys our environment on a local, national, and international scale. Comparatively, our government spends less than 2 percent supporting fruits and vegetables that are known to reverse and protect against heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, osteoporosis, and diabetes, to name a few.
In order to achieve significant changes, the policy of handouts to meat, dairy, and processed-junk food has got to end. Unfortunately, the passage of the 2013 Farm Bill that gives $7 billion in crop subsidies does not bode well for our future.36 It’s time the cost of the industry be reflected in the price. Just like any business, meat and dairy need to internalize their costs, change their prices, and let consumers drive demand. Maybe if we step back, we can see more clearly that the focus should not be on how to sustain our current level of destruction, but on consuming less for a better-quality product. Adding up these costs, it is clear that factory farms are not an answer to feeding the nation but a costly and, we might add, smelly burden.
Know your Sh!t Solutions:
1) Understand that your ninety-nine-cent bucket of wings costs a lot more than it is worth. Ask yourself how much you value your health before buying the cheapest meat and dairy possible. Remember, you are so worth it!
2) When you grocery shop, triple the price of the meat and dairy products that are in your hand. That three-dollar gallon of milk is nine dollars, friends! That’s the real price. Still want it? You are paying for it with your tax dollars.
3) Substitute meat and dairy with lentils, whole grains, nuts, veggies, and fruits. So delicious and less expensive. It isn’t just factory-farmed meat that is unhealthy; all meat and dairy is unhealthy. Think it is too expensive to eat fruits and vegetables? Check out the book Eating Vegan on $4.00 a Day by Ellen Jaffe Jones to get you started.