Food for thought/thoughts on food

So let’s get started.  First question: are we paying too much for our food?  The Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation thinks we do. Or at least some of us are paying too much. According to their numbers, 47% of Canadians are foregoing some of the basics such as fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy products, and meat and fish at least some of the time because of cost.  A recently-released study showed a wide discrepancy in grocery costs nationwide. Whole wheat pasta, for example, ranged from a low of $2.00 in Barrie, Ontario to a whopping $11 in Dawson, Yukon.  Meanwhile, prices for such staples as potato chips, soda pop, and packaged cookies were about the same everywhere.  What gives?

And yet, food guru Michael Pollan argues that North Americans are paying way too little for food.  It’s a hard sell – after all, who really wants to fork over more money to the supermarket giants, who already seem to be doing quite nicely on our dime, thanks. But, argues Pollan and others, food prices are kept artificially low by government subsidies to Big Agriculture, with its heavy reliance on monocultures such as corn and soya production,  and don’t reflect the true costs of producing high-quality, diversified food stuffs.  On the surface at least, this sounds like the elitist complaints of someone who spends too much time at Whole Foods, comparing prices for organic arugula and too little time feeding the family every night from the less esoteric options at Costco. But Pollan points out that, without these massive subsidies, responsible for such modern miracles of nutritional alchemy as high fructose corn syrup, Coca Cola, for one example, would become much more expensive, hence less desirable as belly filler, thus freeing up both valuable money and appetite for other, better options. 

So how much is too much? Surely no one should have to pay nearly six times the going price for a pound of pasta, just because of geography. But just as surely in a sensible world a litre of nutritionally valueless Coke would cost more than a litre of milk.