Cheap Food Is The Only Option

In August, Vijaya Ramachandran and I wrote an essay pointing out the incredible myopia of New York Times coverage of food and agriculture. Reporters and columnists at “the gray lady,” we argued, were blinded by their own privilege and misunderstood elite tastes and preferences as challenges to the global food system.

Early in the summer, I wrote a separate essay on the burgeoning field of “true cost accounting” for food systems. True cost accounting frameworks seek to determine the full cost of a commodity—combining the retail cost of a good with the external costs associated with its production and consumption. The food we’re all buying, according to the proponents of true cost accounting, is drastically too cheap. Such a framework implies the burden of improving our food systems must be placed on the individual by paying the “true cost” for their food—a price determined by emissions accountants, true cost gurus, and the United Nations.

In September, these two pieces were married, but not by my hand. New York Times reporters Lydia DePillis, Manuela Adreoni, and Catrin Einhorn published a fawning profile of “true cost accounting” for food, with some neat graphics suggesting that the U.S. consumer ought to be paying up to 5 times more for beef, twice as much for chicken and cheese, and even about 1.5 times more for chickpeas. The New York Times, once again, expressed its food elitism, but, this time, wed to a radically immature framework of “true cost accounting.”

At its core, “true cost accounting” (TCA) seeks to “fix” our food systems by placing the onus on the consumer to make different, supposedly better choices. But, if TCA were to be taken seriously as an alternative to the status quo, the average consumer would likely be forced to spend upwards of twice as much for their food—making true cost accounting a political nightmare. In response to this problem, proponents of TCA consistently argue that they are not actually in favor of increasing the price of food. The analysis, they insist, serves to better align priorities about how to fix our food systems.

But, true cost accounting is not just politically braindead, it’s also just fundamentally wrong about what is and isn’t sustainable. Instead of adopting funky accounting schemes to make low-productivity agriculture look better, groups looking to improve the sustainability of our food systems need to focus on making cheap food more sustainable. The only way to do that is to embrace high-productivity agriculture.

The Braindead Politics of Raising Food Prices

The last few years have seen increasing prices for food in the United States and around the world. Rising prices have been caused by a multitude of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, weather impacts of crop production, livestock exposure to highly pathogenic avian influenza, and corporate decision making. The overarching trend of increasing food prices has, thankfully, cooled, but the fast-approaching U.S. presidential election remains influenced by the fact that consumers feel they are paying more and more at the grocery store.

The New York Times has covered this consistently. A recent article highlighted how food inflation has slowed in recent months, but prices remain higher than in previous years which continues to strain budgets and sow discontent for the political party in power.

While American food prices have declined over the past century—thanks to massive increases in agricultural productivity—food prices remain a sticking point for many consumers in the United States. In 2022, America’s lowest quintile of income earners spent approximately 30% of their income on food while the second-lowest quintile of income earners spent close to 15%. Because food is an everyday and immediate necessity, high food expenditure means sacrificing spending on other crucial needs like housing, transportation, or education. But for many households—up to seventeen million of them in 2022—high food prices don’t just mean trade offs, they also mean hunger.

Outside of the United States and other wealthy countries, rising food prices are even more serious. Despite decades of declining hunger rates, 2023 saw 280 million people face severe food insecurity. Advocating for increasing food prices for environmental concerns rings farcical to the millions of people struggling to find their next meal today.

This is likely why the advocates and proponents of “true cost accounting” claim that they are not actually proposing to increase food prices. The TCA framework, then, serves as something like an exercise. Or just another way to point out the challenges of sustainable agricultural production. But there are a plethora of other ways to measure the environmental harms of food production—examining biodiversity impacts, quantifying emissions intensities, tracking land-use and deforestation, to name a few. Why measure these impacts as a price for consumers?

Nudging You to Feel Bad

There are hundreds of academic and independent researchers tracking agricultural sustainability metrics. Life-cycle assessments of various food production systems are available from a number of academic journals, and research centers around the world produce highly technical analyses of various commodities’ environmental footprint. The majority of this work is relatively clear: some foods are more environmentally destructive than others (meat, but mainly beef). And yet, the world continues to eat meat and live in much the same way it would’ve if there weren't reams of research papers explaining those environmental impacts.

That’s where the TCA proponents believe they can make a difference. By reframing the metrics of environmental harm as a dollar value, TCA advocates believe they can better nudge consumers to choose the food product that has a lesser impact on the environment. If grocery stores were to just label products with the actual price and the “true cost,” these proponents argue, consumers can make more informed decisions.

This “nudging” technique may work to change the behavior of food-flexible consumers with the necessary income to purchase a range of foods. But, the dollar value that “true cost accounting” assigns to food products is falsely specific and, as it’s been proposed so far, does not account for the difference between different production techniques for the same product.

TCA frameworks need to have far more information than is possible in order to correctly “price” agricultural commodities across the range of impacts they are trying to place a value on. They will need to be able to correctly source produce and meat, have detailed analyses of land-use patterns where those products are sourced from, and a complete understanding of the production techniques used.

Take for example, two equally sized ribeye steaks. One ribeye comes from Marin County. The other ribeye comes from a conventional feedlot in California’s central valley. The Marin steer spent its entire life on pasture, eating grass and other forage. The central valley steer spent around half of its life on pasture before moving to a feedlot, where it ate a mix of feed that was primarily made up of corn and alfalfa.

Under the simple TCA frameworks—like the one produced by the New York Times—both of these steaks have the same “true cost.” But, when you take into account the emissions, land-use, and other impacts of each steak, the difference is significant. A fully grass-fed steak will have generated 50-75% more emissions and used upwards of 8 times more land than the conventionally produced steak. According to the New York Times, about 85% of the hidden costs for beef stemmed from “using land to grow food for cattle.” Shouldn’t a TCA assessment for beef production take into account the vast differences in land-use for different beef production systems?

Similar, albeit less extreme, uncertainties abound across food systems. And these uncertainties grow as soon as other “harms” are accounted for—such as public health costs. As I argued in my first piece on “true cost accounting,” the science of nutrition and the field of “food as medicine” are contested and complicated. Making decisions about what studies influence the “true cost” of certain foods would necessarily require fudging boundaries and making assumptions.

Fortunately, some of the logic of the TCA framework already exists in the market today. Marin-raised grass-fed beef is significantly more expensive than the feedlot beef, thanks in part to the fact that raising cattle purely on pasture is massively less productive compared to a feedlot. That difference in productivity—combined with the massive upcharge of specialty goods like grass-fed beef—dictates the relative price, and reflects the relative ecological impacts of both.

Flour, chickpeas, potatoes, onions, and other vegetables grown on high-productivity farms require fewer inputs, have less impact on the environment, and also cost less than those grown on lower-productivity organic farms. And yet, the proponents of true-cost accounting systems advocate for us to alter the economics of cheap food so that their preferred products—organic alternatives with higher land-use impacts, and worse emissions—are cost competitive.

Cheap Food Is The Only Option

Accounting for the “true cost” of food serves to make consumers feel bad about their decisions and make different ones that align with the preferences of the authors of the TCA reports. What the proponents of TCA do not understand is that for many consumers, their food choices are dictated by a wide range of factors, often already including conceptions about sustainability, but for the majority, affordability takes precedence.

The overarching trend of food systems around the world to reduce the cost of food by improving agricultural productivity, raising yields, and lowering land and labor inputs has been massively beneficial to the billions of people that can now live in relative comfort. Nudging consumers to spend a little money on one commodity and not another will do little to reshape the large economic forces that drive the agricultural and farm sectors.

In the New York Times coverage of “true cost accounting,” one line stands out: “Roger Cryan, chief economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, a group that represents farmers, faults true cost analyses for undervaluing the benefits of affordable food.” Affordable food has allowed for the continued growth of the global population and economy. It has reduced hunger, decade-over-decade. And, it provides a legitimate pathway for real improvements in our food systems.

But in the New York Times story, Cryan’s line is a throwaway. Affordability is an illusion, according to the TCA proponents and their fans.

But, affordable food, and its main driver, agricultural productivity growth, remains the key for reducing hunger, limiting deforestation, and improving the environmental impacts of agriculture. Productivity growth on U.S. farms over the past 60 years has reduced the land footprint of U.S. agriculture by a fifth and has significantly reduced the emissions intensities of American food products. Improving agricultural efficiency through the adoption of best practices and continued technological innovation is likely one of the largest levers to reducing the greenhouse gas and land-use footprints of agricultural production, at least until real breakthroughs can reduce emissions from livestock production or replace them.

The advocates of “true cost accounting” and other demand-side interventions in agriculture will continue to try to muddy the economics of cheap food. They will continue to place the onus of, and in effect, the blame for, environmental problems on consumers, and balk at a food system that can affordably feed the world. When, in fact, the only way we can feed the world and reduce the ecological footprint of agriculture is to continually improve the high productivity systems that give the world cheap grains, dairy, and meats.