The Real Cost of Food

Cheap food is bad for the economy and our health. Why we should pay more.

By Andrew Heintzman

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Suppose you were in the market for a car, and you heard about a company selling new cars for $10,000. Would you buy one? It sounds like a good deal, but you’d probably want to know a thing or two first, like its size, fuel economy, safety record and equipment options. You might even choose a more expensive car with exactly the features you want.

That makes sense. There’s no correct price for a car but rather a range of prices that depends on what you’re looking for. When it comes to shopping for our four-wheeled friends, most of us have realized that “you get what you pay for.”

There are other areas of our lives, however, where we’re not so discerning. Take food. From direct marketing at big-box grocery stores to discount meals at fast-food outlets, price is king. I believe that the commoditization of food and our inclination to buy it based on price alone has clouded how we think about what we eat. Instead of focusing on the quality of what we consume, we often focus – too much I think – on its price.

The reality is that the cost of food, in North America at least, has dropped drastically over the past 50 years. In the middle of the last century, we spent about 20 percent of our disposable incomes on food. Today we spend only 10 per­­cent. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, the nutritional value of food has declined along with its price. The irony is that the people who should benefit the most – those with lower incomes – can afford to buy more food, but it is likely to be less healthy. These factors help explain the reports of growing obesity rates in North America, which now cost the Canadian economy alone an estimated $4.3-billion a year, including direct health costs as well as secondary costs due to lost productivity from illness. Or think of it this way: We’ll lay down a chunk of money on, say, hockey tickets, nice clothes or a day at the spa, but when we’re wandering the aisles of the grocery store, we often choose cheap food over good food.

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