There is an argument made by large scale food processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson Foods, along with big retailers like Walmart and Costco, that our industrial food system, with it vertical integration and enormous scale, benefits consumers by enabling Iowans to spend less money on food, as a percentage of income, and thereby spend remaining income on things to improve lifestyle. Agribusiness producers weigh in on this as well, touting how Iowa “feeds the world” with low cost food. It is a specious argument which progressives should challenge when we hear it.

It is true that for Iowans, food is cheap. Based on a recent trip to the grocery store, the author could make a meal of Ramen noodles (10 cents), a pouch of tuna (89 cents), canned peas or corn (55 cents) and a piece of chocolate cake made from a box mix (40 cents), all washed down with a soda (17 cents) and the cost would be $2.11 plus or minus a few cents. That is pretty cheap.

However, there are health costs related to such a diet, especially if it were how we ate regularly. Compared to other countries, Iowans have lower cost food, but a higher incidence of food related illness like obesity, type II diabetes, heart disease and stroke. To get a true picture of what industrial food does for us, we must consider not only the food costs, but the downstream health implications of diet when evaluating improved lifestyle. Lifestyle starts to get lousy when we can't run the bases at a softball game because of our weight, have to have an amputation because of our diabetes or when we suffer a stroke and are immobilized.

These food related health problems come with a monetary cost. The United States has one of the highest health care system costs in the world. We pay for that health care through insurance premiums, taxes, co-pays and out of our bank account. We also pay for it in the price of consumer goods, like groceries, durable goods and utilities, where suppliers have built employee insurance premiums into their pricing. This has been one of the concerns of the auto industry, that legacy health care costs made them non-competitive in the global automobile market. That extra $750 we add to the cost of a new car for auto-employee health care benefits derives partly from the health consequences of low cost food.

If we leave consideration for the cost of environmental degradation caused by industrial agriculture and food processing out of the equation (not that we should), food and health care costs can take a bite out of a person's budget, more than what countries with higher food costs pay for these two items in aggregate. As health care costs continue to escalate, and employers seek to push a larger share of health care costs to employees, the premise of the argument for “cheap food” seems flawed. There is nothing cheap about food when we consider the consequences of food related illness and its associated monetary cost in the health care system and built into consumer goods.

We live in a country where the rich get richer and the rest of us see diminished economic opportunities. As George Carlin said, “the reason they call it the American dream is because you have to be sleeping to believe it.”

In Iowa, unemployment continues to be high and while there is plenty of work to do in society, much of it does not pay a living wage. Combine that with the cost of food and health care, and we can see the face of Reagan's trickle down economy looking at us, wondering if we will work for less income, able to afford it because our food budget is so low and global competition for jobs is so high. Progressives should not accept the argument that food is cheap in Iowa when we hear it.