CHICAGO—Like many thrifty-minded Americans, I’m always looking to score a bargain. However, one area where I feel I can’t skimp too much is food.
I didn’t always think this way. During college my dining decisions steered me more toward small prices than healthy fare. Burger two for one offers, $1.99 diner specials, or bargains on hot dogs spinning in a warming carousel next to the register—I didn’t care where the food came from; I was just looking for a deal.
A former roommate used to joke that he could “taste the savings” after consuming these low-priced, poor quality meals. They may be easy on the wallet but too much of this food can often be hard to stomach, in more ways than you might imagine.
Food journalist Michael Pollan is perhaps one of the best known figures to address the hidden price tag of cheap food, which he says has “significant costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture” in his article The Food Movement Rising published earlier this year in the New York Review of Books.
Our love of low prices is a big reason why so much of the food sold in our country is now imported. It is often cheaper to pay for food to be shipped from overseas than grow and pick the same products here. Over the last decade an increasing amount of these imports have come from China.
A U.S. congressional report from 2008 stated that China had become the third largest source of U.S. agricultural and seafood imports. The amount of food we receive from China continues to rise every year.
These imports can make for a smaller grocery bill, but not everyone thinks it’s such a great deal. Until this summer, the Whole Foods market chain carried about 30 organically certified products of Chinese origin under its private label. Now only edamame (immature cooked soybeans) remain. Although the company insists that their products are carefully inspected, years of consumer concern and complaints appear to have played a large role in limiting their offering of Chinese-grown foods.
We have been given good reason to be suspicious of Chinese products. Unconscionable cost-cutting measures in Chinese factories have brought about antifreeze in toothpaste, melamine in milk, toxic drywall, and deadly pet food. My friend’s otherwise healthy 8-year-old cat became a fatal victim of adulterated feline chow in 2007.
However, officials have vowed to improve food safety, with congressional committees holding hearings on, and launching investigations into, food imports. Legislation like the S510 to be voted on later this week is said to be part of this strengthened regulation, though the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund notes that this will have American taxpayers “subsidizing foreign governments in their efforts to improve food safety in their own countries.”
But even if food-screening methods were perfect, this low-cost food source still comes at a high price for some.
China is vast, but space is still limited. In order to support their growing foreign fiber and agricultural markets, the country continues to require more industrial farmland.
For several years this voracious appetite for land has often been fed by demolishing rural villages on the outskirts of Chinese cities. The poor farmers who live in these villages are frequently forced to leave their homes, receiving a small fraction of their land’s worth.
The business and economics public radio program Marketplace last week reported that Ding Zhongchu, a farmer outside the city of Wuxi in the Yangtze Delta, was forced to move from property that had been in his family for 38 generations.
Ding said the land his family has lived on for a thousand years had been stolen and his home destroyed by local government officials looking to make a profit.
Foreign companies may not even know that the property they use in China was illegally seized. In October, Voice of America reported on violent demonstrations in Guangxi Province when farmers discovered that thousands of acres of their land had been rented to a Scandinavian paper company without their consent.
As our dependence on imported Chinese food continues to grow, it might be wise to consider what the hidden costs of this cheap food source might be. I believe if we could “taste the savings” we receive from our grown-in-China imports, they’d actually be quite bitter.
Conan Milner can be reached at [email protected]
I didn’t always think this way. During college my dining decisions steered me more toward small prices than healthy fare. Burger two for one offers, $1.99 diner specials, or bargains on hot dogs spinning in a warming carousel next to the register—I didn’t care where the food came from; I was just looking for a deal.
A former roommate used to joke that he could “taste the savings” after consuming these low-priced, poor quality meals. They may be easy on the wallet but too much of this food can often be hard to stomach, in more ways than you might imagine.
Food journalist Michael Pollan is perhaps one of the best known figures to address the hidden price tag of cheap food, which he says has “significant costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture” in his article The Food Movement Rising published earlier this year in the New York Review of Books.
Our love of low prices is a big reason why so much of the food sold in our country is now imported. It is often cheaper to pay for food to be shipped from overseas than grow and pick the same products here. Over the last decade an increasing amount of these imports have come from China.
A U.S. congressional report from 2008 stated that China had become the third largest source of U.S. agricultural and seafood imports. The amount of food we receive from China continues to rise every year.
These imports can make for a smaller grocery bill, but not everyone thinks it’s such a great deal. Until this summer, the Whole Foods market chain carried about 30 organically certified products of Chinese origin under its private label. Now only edamame (immature cooked soybeans) remain. Although the company insists that their products are carefully inspected, years of consumer concern and complaints appear to have played a large role in limiting their offering of Chinese-grown foods.
We have been given good reason to be suspicious of Chinese products. Unconscionable cost-cutting measures in Chinese factories have brought about antifreeze in toothpaste, melamine in milk, toxic drywall, and deadly pet food. My friend’s otherwise healthy 8-year-old cat became a fatal victim of adulterated feline chow in 2007.
However, officials have vowed to improve food safety, with congressional committees holding hearings on, and launching investigations into, food imports. Legislation like the S510 to be voted on later this week is said to be part of this strengthened regulation, though the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund notes that this will have American taxpayers “subsidizing foreign governments in their efforts to improve food safety in their own countries.”
But even if food-screening methods were perfect, this low-cost food source still comes at a high price for some.
China is vast, but space is still limited. In order to support their growing foreign fiber and agricultural markets, the country continues to require more industrial farmland.
For several years this voracious appetite for land has often been fed by demolishing rural villages on the outskirts of Chinese cities. The poor farmers who live in these villages are frequently forced to leave their homes, receiving a small fraction of their land’s worth.
The business and economics public radio program Marketplace last week reported that Ding Zhongchu, a farmer outside the city of Wuxi in the Yangtze Delta, was forced to move from property that had been in his family for 38 generations.
Ding said the land his family has lived on for a thousand years had been stolen and his home destroyed by local government officials looking to make a profit.
Foreign companies may not even know that the property they use in China was illegally seized. In October, Voice of America reported on violent demonstrations in Guangxi Province when farmers discovered that thousands of acres of their land had been rented to a Scandinavian paper company without their consent.
As our dependence on imported Chinese food continues to grow, it might be wise to consider what the hidden costs of this cheap food source might be. I believe if we could “taste the savings” we receive from our grown-in-China imports, they’d actually be quite bitter.
Conan Milner can be reached at [email protected]
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