The High Cost of Cheap Food



Nicolas Kristof scores again in his recent NY Times column. He tells how the chickens on his boyhood farm were raised, wandering freely, beset by foxes and dogs, but never by deadly salmonella microbes.

Caged chicken are not only more disease and stress prone themselves, but more likely to acquire and spread salmonella.

“Inspections of Iowa poultry farms linked to the salmonella outbreak have prompted headlines about infestations with maggots and rodents. But the larger truth is: industrial agriculture is itself unhealthy.

Repeated studies have found that cramming hens into small cages results in more eggs with salmonella than in cage-free operations. As a trade journal, World Poultry, acknowledged in May: ‘salmonella thrives in cage housing.’”



Kristof points out that “Industrial operations - essentially factories of meat and eggs - excel at manufacturing cheap food for the supermarket.” But he also reports that “this model is economically viable only because it passes on health costs to the public (italics mine) - in the form of occasional salmonella, antibiotic-resistant diseases, polluted waters, food poisoning and possibly certain cancers. That's why the president's cancer panel this year recommended that consumers turn to organic food if possible - a stunning condemnation of our food system.”

Seems that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a 2005 study, suggested that in 2000 there were about 182,000 cases of egg-caused salmonella in the United States, including 70 deaths. That’s more than death every week from factory eggs, folks.



On factory farms tight quarters, which are hard to disinfect and breed bacteria freely, chickens live out their lives in a space smaller than an 8 ½ by 11 sheet of paper, sometimes fed what is euphemistically called “spent hen meal” i.e. ground up chickens. How’s the thought of eating eggs from ‘cannibal chickens’ sit with you? I thought so.

And 70% of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are fed to livestock, which passes on to those who eat factory meat, and may make you less able to fend off the next infection.



Sure, food produced this way is cheaper at the grocery store. But it’s case of “pay me now or pay me later”. The high cost of cheap food is an increased risk of antibiotic resistant bugs, salmonella outbreaks, and eggs and meat produced by miserable, if not crazed, chickens.

So “shell out” (sorry) a little more for cage free eggs, or go all the way to free range organic. As my wife likes to say, it’s cheaper than salmonella.