Time Gets Truthful

There’s something that isn’t right about the cost of food, and a recent Time exposé by Bryan Walsh gets to the meat of the problem: the meat industry. Pulling in readers with imagery of pigs packed so closely together “their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite one another,” Walsh explains that our industrial style of food production is making “food increasingly bad for us.” Walsh explores the cost of our food, saying that “not all food is equally inexpensive,” and supports this claim with evidence provided by an American Journal of Nutrition study. The study found that with one dollar, an American can buy 1,200 calories of potato chips versus only 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fruit. Additionally, along with chemicals and corn taking the blame for America’s poor health and high obesity rate, Walsh discusses the “food industry’s degradation of animal life.” He discloses the confinement of thousands of animals kept in concentrated animal-feeding operations, moving on to say that these are beings and keeping them in such confinement has consequences. The bottom line of Walsh’s argument is decidedly simple, yet awakening: “But what we eat—how it’s raised and how it gets to us—has consequences that can’t be ignored any longer.”