The Real Cost of Cheap Food

By Joanne Levesque, Registered Holistic Nutritionist

You get what you pay for.  This phrase applies to many things like cars, electronics, housing, spas, almost everything.  However, people in general seem hesitant to pay a higher price for higher quality food.  The same people that think I am crazy for spending $6 on a dozen pastured organic eggs from a local organic farmer might easily spend many times that amount on soda pop.  Yet there is more nutrition in a dozen clean eggs than there is in a warehouse of Coca cola.

A family of four can easily spend more than $30 at a fast food burger joint for burgers, fries and soda pop.  For under $30, they can buy a chicken, some potatoes, vegetables, salad fixings and milk and cook at home.  Which meal is more nutritious?  Obviously the latter.

The challenge is that the cook at home option requires organization, cooking skills, time and determination.  Before the age of highly processed foods, people with limited budgets would often grow their own food, eat very little meat and add very little sugar (sugar used to be expensive).  Today, a low budget diet most often involves highly processed, fast-food which combines cheap with convenience and desirability.

The desirability component is a combination of both snazzy marketing and addiction of highly processed foods.  A study published by the Scripps Research Institute in 2010 indicates that over consumption of fast food can "trigger addiction-like neuroaddictive responses" in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine.  In other words, the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us the same pleasure.  Thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.

Junk food, processed food, and fast food companies are not about nutrition or sustenance, they are about entertainment and recreation.  They entertain the kids with little toys and play rooms and advertise their product using superstars or by sponsoring sporting events.  They provide a short term feel good hit even as you consume their destructive calories.

The real cost of cheap junk food and processed food is chronic disease, obesity, mood and behaviour disorders, skin disorders, headaches and the list goes on.  Our health care system cannot support these costs.  We as individuals cannot support these costs.  We end up paying in the long run: time away from work to deal with illness, early retirement, extra medical care, nursing care, and lower quality of life.

Mark Bittman, a New York Times columnist, proposes that both cultural and political changes are needed to turn this around.  On the political front, it would mean limiting the marketing of junk food, forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production, recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behaviour manipulation of addictive substances, and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone.  The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.

Cultural changes are easier but still require discipline and effort at an individual level.  Celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don't program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.

No-nonsense cooking and eating like roasting a chicken, making a sandwich, scrambling an egg, and tossing a salad can become popular again.  Let's focus on cooking as a joy rather than a burden.  Cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbours that it is not so hard to choose the better way and the more fun way.

Joanne Levesque is a Registered Holistic Nutritionist at Pure Med Naturopathic Centre.  You can reach her at Joanne@puremednaturopathic.com