The Price is Wrong

The price is wrong! Bob Barker, you know it! The price—the dollars and cents we pay when we buy animal products—is really wrong.  Meat, eggs, milk, cheese, and all other sorts of animal foods that so many Americans buy so regularly are, in general, shockingly less expensive than market trends would predict. The sorcery of factory farming, fueled by agribusiness subsidies, churns out astonishingly cheap meat.  In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes: “In the past fifty years, as factory farming spread from poultry to beef, dairy and pork producers, the average cost of a new house increased nearly 1,500%; new cars climbed more than 1,400 %; but the price of milk is up only 350%, and eggs and chicken meat haven’t even doubled.  Taking inflation in account, animal protein costs less today than at any time in history.” So animal protein costs less today than at any time in history, but eating animal protein costs more today than at any time in history.  The price Americans pay for eating animal protein—in terms of personal health, public health, environmental and ecological health, the health and safety of factory farm workers, and our moral health—is more expensive than ever. As to [read more]