An Extraordinarily Important Article
Cheap food may be killing us…
Bryan Walsh writes an extremely taut and compelling Time magazine article in this month’s Time Magazine about how cheap foods may be contributing to rampant obesity and disease as well as the ever quickening degradation of our environment.
In actuality, cheap food may be the most expensive thing on our plate.
You’re likely to hang on his every word as he describes the factory farm to fattening fork process that yields tremendous high profits for food manufacturers but debilitating heath problems for consumers.
This cheap, filler food, or, Cheap Killer food as some may want to call it, can be said to contribute mightily to the onset of obesity, heart disease, hypertension and much, much more.
Children often subsist on sugary cereals, antibiotic laden milk products for breakfast, high salt, sugar and preservative laden convenience food for lunches, fatty and high salt entrees for dinner.
Rates of obesity and allergies have become epidemic, especially in less affluent areas. In the end, it hurts us all.
Many farmers are reportedly seeing “bankrupting” of the earth occur right in their own backyards, within the limited scope of their own lifetimes.
The huge amounts of toxic chemical and fertilizer runoff from mass producers rather than family farmers flow right back into the water tables, rivers and streams and eventually right back onto our plates.
Soils are becoming depleted, ocean dead zones growing in ever increasing numbers (over 400) killing fish and sea life, antibiotics flood our animal products. Human and animal suffering are incalculable.
Low cost food? Not really, considering…
“Once you factor in crop subsidies, ecological damage and what we pay in health-care bills after our fatty, sugary diet makes us sick, conventionally produced food looks a lot pricier.”
There’s a deep quandary here. People have limited budgets, mass produced processed foods are cheap and abundant. Only the well heeled have the means to afford the most natural, nutritious and delicious foods.
In the end, we all end up paying.
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