Thanksgiving's Hidden Costs

By Christopher D. Cook, AlterNet. Posted November 23, 2004.

Picture yourself in the supermarket, loading up your cart on a last-minute Thanksgiving shopping spree. You're exhausted – you just want to get home, and your senses are pummeled by the brightly packaged bounty all around you. You are at once awakened and overwhelmed. What will you pick from this vast garden?

It's an astounding global selection that appears – at first glance – to be fairly affordable (assuming you've got a little money). Shiny, freshly waxed fruits and vegetables beckon from overflowing bins, hardly a bruise or nonconforming shape in sight. Broccoli, oranges, bananas, asparagus, melons and pineapples are piled high in the middle of winter. Crops hailing from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Argentina, every productive corner of America and elsewhere, display the terrific powers of industrial agriculture, seemingly boundless international trade, and rapid long distance transport of perishable foods.

A few quick swivels of the shopping cart reveal long fluorescent boulevards of packages and cans, each promising to save you time and enliven your taste buds. There are pre-cut and flavored fruits and vegetables (produce with "value added"), fully prepared kids' lunches, multi-colored chips, soups and stews, frozen dinners, a whole kingdom of precision-flavored cereals, sauces and powdered meals. Just add water and plug in the microwave. It's a bachelor's (or working parent's) paradise.

In today's American supermarket, there are no seasons, no limits. The world's harvests and manufactured meals are at your fingertips. The supermarket appears to symbolize the best of democratic capitalism, offering consumer choice and a largess born of amazing productivity. But how does all this food actually get here? Is it really as cheap and convenient as it seems?

In fact, this veneer of epicurean egalitarianism conceals a less glamorous set of realities. Our most basic necessity has become a force behind a staggering array of social, economic and environmental epidemics – pesticide-laminated harvests, labor abuse, treacherous science, and, at the reins, a few increasingly monopolistic corporations controlling nearly every aspect of human sustenance. The way we make, market and eat food today creates rampant illness, hunger, poverty, community disintegration and ecological decay – and even threatens our future food supply. Consider for a moment the other side of the ledger:

• The way this extraordinary bounty is made puts our future at risk – eroding topsoil and water supplies, poisoning the ground and polluting rivers and streams with roughly one billion gallons of pesticide and another billion tons of toxic manure runoff from huge animal factory farms.
• That meat and chicken in your cart is filled with growth hormones and pesticides, nothing likely to kill anyone, but enough to pose possible long-term health risks. What can – and does – kill is all the bacteria in the meat, a plague exacerbated by the way animals are "farmed" and processed in enormous warehouses and lightning-speed assembly lines. More than 5,000 people die each year from foodborne illnesses, and hundreds of thousands more require hospital care.
• Thanks in part to all that meat and dairy, and the proliferation of fat and sugar in processed foods, nearly one third of Americans are obese, and close to two-thirds are overweight.
• Those meat factories, by virtue of their intense speed and volume, maim and cripple tens of thousands of workers each year – many of them immigrants shipped up from Mexico and Central America, discarded and replaced every few months. Our meat supply, and much of our fruit and vegetable harvests, depend on this steady flow of cheap, highly exploited, disposable labor.
• The system that produces and transports this superabundance runs on oil and diesel. The average food item on your supermarket shelf has traveled at least 1,500 miles, and all that long-distance transport requires millions of gallons of diesel fuel. On today's industrial farm, giant tractors and combines spew diesel fumes and kick up dust pollution, while huge single-crop harvests are coaxed by 15 million tons of petroleum-based fertilizers each year. Experts such as Cornell University's Dr. David Pimentel have found that U.S. agriculture – largely through its reliance on petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides – uses some 400 gallons of fossil fuel a year to feed every American. That's more than 100 billion gallons of oil and oil equivalents used in the United States each year just to manufacture food.
• The bulk of the food in your shopping cart – especially the meat, dairy and packaged products – is owned by a handful of exceedingly powerful corporations that exercise increasing control over what we eat, how it is made, how much it costs, and who produces and profits from it. Just five corporations now control 42 percent of all grocery sales in America.
• Due to this intensifying corporate takeover, nearly 20,000 farmers go under each year (one every half an hour), the victims of market centralization by food corporations and supermarkets. When these farms disappear, the social and economic fabric of rural communities is shattered; whole generations of highly skilled producers of food are lost.

Christopher D. Cook is the author of Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us (New Press, November), from which this piece was adapted.

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