This has been brewing for quite some time. The triggering moment was when I saw Jack in the Box advertising a "big" cheeseburger for $1. It sounds like a great deal, but if you really think about the situation in the US that enables a company to offer a cheeseburger to the general public for only one dollar, then you realize how backwards things are when it comes to our food policies. Let's assume that the margin of profit on fast food is 67cents on the dollar. That is probably very conservative, it is probably much more. (I know that they make a lot more profits on softdrinks and that is counter balanced by less profitable menu items, but just the point that they can make money on a $1 burger gets my point across, I think.) Think of all the disparate elements of a cheeseburger that have to come together, at a 33 cent cost. The meat is probably the most expensive, but let's not forget the bun, cheese, and condiments. Do you know what kind of scale this has to be carried out on to roll something out like this across the nation? Let's start with beef. How can you profitably raise cattle for hamburger and make a profit yourself when the retailer is paying less than 33cents per hamburger? First we need to have mass amounts of cattle, and we need to raise them and feed them in the cheapest manner possible. Cheap feed, and less square footage per cow. Probably as many square feet per cow as a cow takes up in fact. And we can use some of the offal after the slaughter to feed back to the cows. A factory of cows, penned in next to each other is best. Don't even bother to clean up after them, in fact, let them stand knee deep in their own waste, and let's just use oceans of antibotics and growth hormones, because that is definitely cheaper. They don't have to be happy right? And they just have to be healthy enough not to die on us before they reach a certain weight. And when we do do them in, we will do that like a factory, too. Let's hire the cheapest possible labor force, immigrants (don't check papers because they work for less that way), and subject them to inhumane, violent, body breaking conditions too (just like the cows). Since they don't stand up for their rights, we don't have to really give them out. The waste from these factories is probably more than a small town of humans. Thank god our waste disposal isn't regulated like a town or even a regular factory that deals in chemicals or steel or some other product. We will just dump it into the river out back. And if we call ourselves a "farm" then we are eligible for government funding, too. Sweet. Then we will ship all of this product across the U.S. and even the world, because that is cheap again. For a while gas was very expensive and it really cut into our profits, but just as people were changing their eating and driving habits, gas took a big dip in price (funny that...) and we are good again. (If we deal in chickens, we can go back to raising them in the U.S., killing them, and shipping them to China where they are processed and shipped back in pieces. It is that cheap.) Maybe we don't make a lot of money per pound of beef, but we deal in volume, and that keeps the price of our products low and so smaller companies just can't compete.

Imagine that mentality going into each and every part of a cheeseburger. And imagine how the U.S. subsidizes almost every step of the process. How? By farming subsidies going to these huge agricultural companies that farm millions of acres of corn and wheat. It is cheaper to buy corn than to grow it, and all that excess goes toward mass production of a variety of products. High fructose corn syrup finds it's way into everything, and we are making our diets less and less varied. Soda is so cheap, it is incredible. When the cheapest foods are full of crap, then that is what the lower class eats, and they reap all of the health problems, too. Diabetes, obesity, and malnutrition--sometimes all at once! Where will it end? Why is a pound of eggplant more expensive than a hamburger. And who knows what to do with eggplant anyway? Why cook when you can eat out at Applebees for roughly the same amount of money and supporting the same backwards system. What does that $1 hamburger really cost us as Americans? It costs $60,000 per year to treat someone with Diabetes, which is widely preventable (but not cureable) and our kids still have soda vending machines in the halls of their schools and tater tots in the cafeteria. You can't use food stamps at farmers markets. Agricultural subsidies are generally for mass production type farms, and not smaller, greener, farms that sell their products locally.

There is more, so much more to it as well. I am only really touching on some of the broader points. Maybe once preexisting conditions and the like are wiped off of the face of the health care industry, and these companies crunch some numbers, then they will realize how much profit they will make by preventing these types of diseases in Americans that they have to cover by law, and maybe they will throw their political and financial weight behind correcting the way Americans eat.

I do my best as a parent to introduce my kids to a wide variety of foods. They are five and two years old. They eat broccoli and edamame and lentils and asparagus. We can't stop them from picking and eating the tomatoes we grow in our back yard every summer. We raised chickens and ate fresh eggs several times per week. Once we are in a house we own, we plan on having an extensive garden and making the kids part of it. We go to farmers markets and try to buy organic. We want them to know where food comes from and how it grows. One of my proudest moments was when my daughter, overhearing a conversation two other adults were having, asked my wife what "McDonald's" was.

You can get more info on what I have mentioned above readily. A couple of books I read are "Fast Food Nation," and "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." I would like to read "In Defense of Food," by Michael Pollan and "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer," by Novella Carpenter. The second interests me a lot because it is supposed to be a very funny, intelligent book, and it takes place in Oakland where I lived until 3 months ago.

That's all for now. I have to get back to the tables.