Why Are We All Paying For Shit Food?

One thing I never truly understood until the end of my vegetarianism was that I was still paying for the practices that I am passionately against. I was under the impression that I was not participating in the “cruel food system” because I was abstaining from purchasing and consuming meat. Why are vegetarians’ tax dollars being spent on livestock subsidies and the grains to feed the animals? Why do people who want to be healthy, pay subsidies for food that is sprayed with toxic chemicals? Our representatives vote on the Farm Bill every five to seven years, yet our culture is ignorant to its contents and impact. We know there are subsidies, but we don’t acknowledge how they impact our food production and costs. My inclination is that this is on purpose; the government and Big Ag do not want The People to be informed about where our food comes from, how it is produced, and what exactly it is that we are consuming, that we pay for! We all work to make money to buy things such as food, but most humans are no longer directly responsible for obtaining what nourishes us. We have outsourced that need for many decades now, and I believe that that is one of the main problems plaguing our society. As I witness so many people being sick and feeling miserable, they are too busy and distracted to pay attention to what they are consuming. They don’t understand why the system is this way, let alone demand that it be better.

In my current omnivorous lifestyle, I seek out the highest quality animal protein I can get my hands on. This looks like pastured animals, preferably produced in a regenerative manner, who had good lives ruminating as they were designed to, eating their natural diet. I find local producers via farmers markets or family-owned operations, or companies with online stores who advocate for and practice methods that are ethical and beyond sustainable. With today’s food system, this type of food is noticeably expensive compared to what you’d find at the grocery store. Why are people misinformed that healthy food is less accessible? If you compare by weight, meat and produce are actually less expensive than highly processed foods, yet that is what so many people live on. We’ve been conditioned to believe that it is harder to be healthy from a financial perspective. This is just another scam within our society to perpetuate the cycle of abuse via our food system.

In the U.S., we, taxpayers, pay roughly $25 billion annually to subsidize and insure specific crops and livestock. This is why the price is so vastly different when, for example, you purchase meat from a local farmer, versus buying a name brand package from the grocer. It’s not small-scale farms that are relying on the government assistance, but larger operations that are expected and incentivized to focus on increasing yields, rather than producing nutrition: the purpose of food. People who abstain from purchasing the “big name” brands still pay the subsidies, as we don’t get to control where our individual dollars are spent, and this is what really infuriates me. A growing number of people are going outside of the system to get their food because the government-dependent farms are not producing food that informed consumers would prefer to eat.

Our mass-scale agricultural practices that have been implemented for the past century or so have now been proven to be degrading most soils across the globe. The use of pesticides (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides) and chemical fertilizers have continued to kill the microorganisms that inhabit the soil. These microorganisms, when in a functioning ecosystem, are responsible for transporting and providing nutrients to the plants, which then are consumed directly by us, or indirectly, by the animals who eat them, which we then eat. So when we rely on industrial agriculture to sustain life, but their practices literally degrade the life sources that are supposed to sustain us, it actually makes sense that people have more and more illnesses as time goes on. It’s a trickle-down effect that harms consumers, rather than helping us. The ecosystems that have helped us to evolve throughout time are being poisoned and therefore decrease in function, so down the line, we are being poisoned and becoming more dysfunctional.

I don’t want to live in a country where my hard-earned money is taken from me to be spent on something that I find harmful. The majority of the subsidies, about 75%, are spent on Nutrition Assistance Programs, yet we live in a malnourished society where the number of chronically ill people, not just adults, continues to rise every year. Clearly, these programs are not effective at what their supposed mission is. The government keeps pouring money into programs that do not address the issues that citizens are actually facing, such as heart disease or childhood obesity. They don’t even acknowledge how nutrition is correlated to the vast majority of chronic illness! Yet authorities can simply say they are trying to help by pointing to the billions of dollars and thousands of pages of legislation that is beyond comprehension for the average person, as a way to overwhelm and silence the population. They propagate these programs that bypass the cause of the problems in the first place, and because the modern person is so busy and distracted, most of us don’t even realize that this cycle exists.

My purpose here is to draw attention to these issues, as I see that they are incredibly important and fixable! The more we know, the more we can band together to push for changes to improve our lives overall, but it begins with each one of us making better decisions for ourselves. I witness people wanting the government to step in and take care of the problem, without acknowledging that they caused it to begin with. We shouldn’t be paying for poor quality foods, caused by toxic agricultural practices that we also fund. The government did it, but we allowed them to. The first step is to stop entrusting the government to be responsible for the health of each individual, and become conscious about what we are personally consuming. Throughout America’s history, they have increased the amount of earned income that they take from us, while they have failed to provide us with the safety and wellbeing that they propose. We need to move toward not asking them for assistance, as they’ve demonstrated over and over that they are ineffective at assisting us. I don’t know how much more clear it could be at this point that these government programs do more harm than good, and on our dime!