Food Rules #10: Avoid foods pretending to be something they are not

Real food. I believe that real food tastes better, that it's better for you, that you eat less of it. But real food costs more. Preservatives and processed foods/ingredients are cheap: they've been designed to be produced in large quantities and to be cheap. That's why you can spend $1 on a burger at many drive-thru places. That way, there can be food that sits on store shelves for unknown amounts of time and still be edible. We can feed a family of four with a big pan of lasagna from the frozen aisle for around $7. I read that prior to World War II Americans spent close to 30% of their income on food. Now, the average is something like 6%. I'm well above the average. Yes, I love food, but I make a point to buy local, real food w/o preservatives, HFCS and other ingredients. I don't buy margarine, but rather real butter. It tastes way better, doesn't it?

But it's funny: so "real food" (that is, food w/o preservatives, chemicals and sugar/corn syrup) is more expensive on our grocery shelves, BUT we pay the cost later: health problems, money spent on research to create a pill to cure the symptoms caused by eating fewer fruits & vegetables, factory-farmed beef & chickens full of antibiotics & corn, subsidizing farms growing corn that will be used to make HFCS and go into countless "edible foodlike substances", money spent to clean up environmental waste & water-supply runoff...are there hard statistics that show us what we REALLY pay in the end? I honestly don't know, but I do know that as a nation we are faced with these issues & I know that a lot of dollars that end up being spent on them.

So, with regards to the 30% vs. 6% of income being spent on food: I think the intent of the Nixon administration to deal with rising food costs was good...it obviously was on the minds of people enough to be made national policy. But it got away from us. We as a nation have a very distant relationship with food. But it's changing. More people are getting to know their farmers, are asking about the provenance of what they are consuming, attendance/sales at farmers' markets continues to grow (oh, and big companies like Monsanto are changing their marketing strategies, which really doesn't count...). People are starting to demand change. They are talking with their dollars and their questions and I think we and our local economies, our small farms and our health will all be the better for it.