Food Freedom Day
Happy Food Freedom Day to our Canadian and American readers! You were all in my thoughts, even if I couldn’t find a card that said, “Hooray! You’ve probably earned enough in 2006 to cover your food costs for the year.” Maybe the Valentine’s Day cards pushed them out.
Food Freedom Day—when the average shopper has earned their annual food expenses—has moved earlier in the year for the last few decades. There are a lot of factors behind this, but primarily it’s because American and Canadian food companies keep prices low.
But they do it in a dangerous way. Food Freedom Day’s numbers don’t include the taxes you pay to fund the agricultural subsidies that farmers get, which they need because the small number of corporate buyers threaten to leave a farmer with an unsold harvest if that farmer won’t sell the crop at below-cost prices. The numbers don’t include the environmental damage we’ve wrought as farmers push the soil to short-term productivity at the expense of long-term sustainability. The numbers don’t mention the fact that our agriculture relies on a single strain for each major crop, a slumbering disaster waiting for the right pest to initiate it. And of course all the prices are artificially lowered because we pay minuscule wages to the laborers who harvest our food, whose legal status prevents them from fighting back.
Your food has lots of costs, and you pay those well beyond Food Freedom Day. So maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t find that card.
Inspired by a thread on eGullet
