Picture yourself doing something you have probably done hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of times: you are driving along a busy suburban street, listening to the radio when suddenly a sharp pang of hunger hits you. ‘Whoa – that wasn’t there before,’ you think. You check the time – it’s an hour or so before dinner. ‘I can wait,’ you tell yourself and press on towards home. You drive for a few more minutes, singing along with the radio when that sharp pang hits again. You fight it, tell yourself that it’ll only be a few more minutes, and sing even louder – hoping that doing so will get your mind off your stomach. This performance manages to stave off your hunger for a full 30 seconds before you finally break down and reason that one tiny hamburger isn’t going to ruin your appetite. You look around, for that one place that you know won’t let you down in your time of need. There it is, right up ahead on your right – McDonald’s.
Those familiar Golden Arches
McDonald’s – that one place that served you well as a kid and will serve you even better so now, considering your present condition. You signal right and turn off into the parking lot with those familiar golden arches looming above. You park, scramble out of the car, and head into the restaurant. However, something is off – you can feel it in your empty gut. You look around. Everything seems right: a spoiled chubby kid climbing around the outdoor playground, the plastic seats and greasy floor, and the acne-ridden teenager with cracked voice asking if this is for here or to go. You stand there trying to shake whatever this strange feeling is and the gawky teenager looks at you as if you are the strange one. He speaks a little louder – “is this for here or to go” – and you finally come back to reality. “Big Mac, to go,” you tell him. Just saying the words ‘Big Mac’ seems to have an instant soothing effect on your hunger. You think of that microwaved delicacy and your mouth begins to salivate; you drift off once more. The teenager is beginning to worry about you as you enter into another trance, and he looks as if he wants nothing more than to get you out of the store before you break down and make his job any more difficult than it already is. He pokes you in the chest, raises his voice a bit more and says, “That’ll be two-hundred dollars.” “Wait, what?!? Two-hundred dollars – how can that be,” you demand. “New town ordinance – we have to charge the ‘true cost’ of food.” “’True cost’ – what’s that???”
True Cost
It has become more widely known in recent years that what we pay at the grocery store or at the local fast food place is not what our food really costs. And this cost goes beyond the government subsidies that get passed on to us in taxes and an ever-growing government debt: forests are cut down to make room for more cattle feedlots and corn fields, large amounts of excessive nutrients runoff and choke our rivers and bays, pollutants are produced that promote climate change.
Flowchart showing the effects of factory fed cattle
Locally, this environmental damage wrecks havoc on the Chesapeake Bay. During the 1970s, the Bay was discovered to have a marine dead zone (one of the first ever identified), where waters are so depleted of oxygen (anoxic conditions) that they are no longer able to support life. This results in massive die-offs of many bottom-dwelling organisms, which, in turn, causes damage to the higher trophic levels of the food web, including the iconic blue crab. These dead zones are in part the result of agricultural and industrial runoffs – particularly the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus, which lead to the formation of large algal blooms. These blooms consume oxygen and block sunlight, leading to the dead zones. Sedimentation caused by urban/suburban construction and devegetation are also leading culprits.
Beyond environmental effects, our society also suffers with an expanding waistline, higher medical costs, the consolidation of farms and businesses, and ‘super bugs,’ among other things.
So, what do we do to fix this? The answer seems clear and easy – stop whatever practices we are currently doing that are destroying the Earth and our society. But, is it really that easy? Even more important questions than this, though, are: how expensive will it be and are we willing to pay it? It should be obvious by the substantially increased costs of organic and sustainably raised foods in the grocery store that it will not be cheap. So, are we willing to pay the costs? So far, we have said no. The argument that is a hamburger that only costs a couple of dollars has won out. But, it’s not only the price of a hamburger – Americans have never had food so cheap. Never in our history have we paid so little and gotten so much food in return. This apparent abundance allows us to spend our money on more leisure items and to focus our time on other diversions.
In this website
In this website, I present information on the conventional vs. sustainable agriculture debate and attempt to allow the reader to weigh the pros and cons of each and come to their own conclusion. For the purposes of the Bay Game, these pages will contain information that is more pertinent to the roles of animal and crop farmers and their regulators, but the overarching theme of evaluating the economic, social, and environmental aspects of life and trying to find that perfect balance for the individual (‘life balance score’) is important for all of the roles.