The soaring cost of food, 25 million Americans on food stamps, food pantries and soup kitchens unable to keep up with rising demand—all this made me begin to look for explanations. I wonder if readers are aware (I wasn't) of some of the strange—and often scandalous—things going on that must be at least partly responsible.
Take farm subsidies. Originally created to help small family farms during the Depression, they have become a boondoggle for special interests, and account for the waste of millions—if not billions—of our tax dollars. Subsidies are no longer paid on crops, or on crop failure due to adverse weather, but on the amount of land owned, which of course vastly benefits corporate agri-businesses. Documented subsidies have also been paid for: loss of cattle, (whether it happened or not) after bits of the space shuttle Columbia fell on fields in Texas; for drought where there has been no drought; and to a surgeon living in Texas who bought a farm in the Midwest but doesn't actually farm it. And if the new Farm Bill being debated in Congress is passed—I'm not making this up—owners of racehorses will also receive subsidies.
Then I started looking at the crazy journeys food takes to get to supermarkets around the world. I learned that England sends 20 tons of bottled water to Australia a year—and Australia sends 20 tons of different bottled water back to England; that lemons rot on the ground in Spain while Spanish shops are full of lemons from Argentina; that most of Europe's peas come from Kenya; and that Norwegian cod is sent to China to be filleted and packaged—and then shipped back to Norway.
Quite apart from the lunacy of these few tip-of-the-iceberg examples, with fuel prices bound to continue to rise, all this much-traveled food can only get more expensive as well. Look closely at labels in your own supermarket. "Shop locally" is getting hard to do, and the Mad Hatter's Tea Party seems to have taken on a whole new meaning.
Diana Fassino
Ketchum
