Food for Thought Friday: Pay the Farmer Now, or Pay the Doctor ... When, Exactly?

When well-meaning acquaintances mock us for spending more money than they do for food, those of us who take pride in buying, cooking, and eating whole, unprocessed, real foods are fond of saying, “Pay the farmer now, or pay the doctor later.” Meaning, if people don’t pony up a little extra cash for better quality food now, they’ll end up paying even more in the future, in the form of medical bills. But is this actually true? If people spend decades putting garbage down their pieholes and end up with some of the “diseases of civilization,” do they really end up all that much worse off, financially?

For the sake of keeping this post to a somewhat reasonable length, let’s stick solely to the financial burden of diet- and lifestyle-induced illness, and we’ll table the “cost” of missed work time, fatigue, illness, chronic pain, and overall reduced quality of life for another time. (But let’s go ahead and acknowledge that these other issues are arguably more important than one’s bank account balance.)

Financial Food Facts at the Farm

In some of the posts in my series on food labels, I’ve pointed out how expensive processed foods are. Manufacturers generally start with raw materials that are extremely inexpensive for them (thanks to our tax dollars, which subsidize corn, wheat, and soy), and after tinkering with these simple inputs—usually by adding sugar, corn syrup, and artificial colorings and transforming them into things like cereal, granola bars, protein shakes and bars, and the like—they jack up the price by multiple orders of magnitude. In other words, like I showed in the oatmeal post, they start with an input that they can sell for less than a dollar a pound, and after adding a ton of sugar and some spices, they turn around and charge over twelve dollars.

People who are unfamiliar with buying and preparing whole, unprocessed foods often use the excuse that foods like meat, pork, poultry, and seafood are too expensive. This can be especially true if we’re talking about very good quality foods, from animals that were raised humanely, on species-appropriate diets. (As I’ve pointed out in the past, this means cows eating grass or dried hay; chickens and hens eating grain-based feed but also pecking around in the grass for the grubs, worms, and insects that make egg yolks so nutritious; and pigs foraging for just about anything they can cram down their little piggy pieholes.) I would argue that compared to commodity crop-based processed foods, regular ol’ conventional meat, dairy, and other foods you can find at the supermarket are not expensive at all. I’ve seen red meat and pork chops on sale for as little as $2.99/pound, and boneless skinless chicken breasts regularly go on sale for $1.99/pound. (Not that you’re eating those, right? Talk about boring, bland, and blah.)

But for people making a transition to “the real deal” in terms of grassfed meats, pastured poultry and all that jazz, the prices aren’t quite that low. That said, they’re not as high as you might think, either.