Growing your own food and choosing the food that you buy goes beyond the price of what gets rung up at the register.
The thought of what went into or the production of the food in the stores doesn’t really cross our minds. Take these into consideration the next time you are making your food purchases:
This is one that is hard to swallow, but it’s the truth. The sticker price on the food is reflective of many things. Sadly, the poor treatment of women farmer workers is one of them that factors into the pricing.
You might be surprised that a quarter of the farm workers in the United States are female. In general, farm workers are treated poorly, but women get the worst of it.
They face daily threats of harassment, rape and wage theft.
It might be tough to stomach, but the cheap food that you are buying is supporting this practice. If you were to grow some of your own, you would stand-up against this practice in a way by not supporting it.
The USDA reports that only about 15% of each dollar spent on food actually goes to the food. That means the other 85% goes to other costs, with the majority of that being food processors and services.
The processors are the ones that process the food into food products that you see on the shelves. Services are the ones that handle distribution and labeling.
This means that when you are buying something that you are paying the middleman and not for the food itself.
If you grow some of your own, you cut out the middleman and the price of your food.
Federal Food Safety Programs are Facing Budget Cuts
Recently Congress proposed that they cut the budget for programs to protect our food safety.
With all of the outbreaks and recalls, do we really need to have these programs cut?
If you were to grow your own, this wouldn’t be as much of an issue.
I’m not saying that you should have a big ol garden and grow tons of food. I’m apartment gardening, so growing all of my own food would be really difficult.
I do believe that if you were to just grow on herb or veggie it will make a difference for yourself and for the environment. You will also not have to worry about supporting the practices mentioned in this post.
What are you waiting for?
Photo credit Kevin Dooley via Flickr
