The least patriotic food in America?
That’s the headline in the Washington Post and their answer is, yes, the hamburger. The article is in four parts: the burger itself, the bun, the fixings and equality.
The bottom line is that fresh, nutritious, real food has increasingly been reserved for the more affluent. The poor are left with the artificial, cheaper, processed food…dressed up with salt and flavorings, packaging, and advertising. It was a problem Thomas Jefferson worried about 200 years ago, noting that the wealthy ate vegetables and the poor did not.
The major points in the article:
- The burger. 85% of all the burger Americans eat come from just four giant food processors. They control the market and they control the farmers and ranchers prices. Since a cow needs to be slaughtered within a two-week window, the food giants can easily force the price down and force the farmer off the land.
- The bun. Walmart sells 25% of all the buns made in America. Simple economics has forced the consolidation of our food supply and, while that has kept consumer prices down, it has come at a cost of “cheapening” the food.
- The fixings. Just about everything we put on a hamburger has to be picked by hand. That means immigrant labor at near starvation wages. We often hear about how “expensive” vegetables are at a roadside stand. That’s because that farmer is trying to make a living and feed his family.
- Equality. It’s easy to deride the poor for the food choices they make…and their resultant obesity. But price does dictate their choices and they do unconsciously eat the volume they do and sugar drinks and salted chips to try to satisfy their body’s demand for nutrition. You can certainly be fat….and starving.
Jefferson wrote to Madison that “the small landholders are the most precious part of the state”. There, and elsewhere, he argued that democracy would only survive if small farmers survived.
As recently as 70 years ago, the small farmer’s annual income was just about the same as the average doctor or lawyer’s.