04 Jun The Hidden Cost of Food

Last month, the City published a first-of-its-kind report on “The State of the Food System” in Austin. The report presents a complex, but digestible, picture of how Austin gets and uses its food. It also details the serious challenges the city faces in pursuit of a sustainable future. This week, I sat down with Edwin Marty, Austin’s Food Policy Manager, to discuss the report and what he calls “the hidden cost of food”.

Edwin Marty was hired as the City’s Food Policy Manager, a new position in Austin, in the spring of last year. “New York City, Portland, and San Francisco all have food policy managers,” says Marty. Municipalities haven’t really played a big part in the local, sustainable food movement until recently. “But we are starting to really align what the cities work on toward these bigger, broader movement goals,” Marty says.

Despite a great deal of prior experience as a farmer all over the world and as a food policy leader in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, Marty says, “Most food policy managers, like me, have gotten their job and thought, ‘Huh, what do I do? There’s no template for this.’” A big part of his first year on the job has been taking stock of what’s going on in Austin and Central Texas and generating the kind of usable information contained in the State of the Food System report.

“This report touches on 18 different departments in the City that are working on Food Systems,” says Marty. “We’re trying to frame the conversation around what the city is doing to develop a local, sustainable food system,” he says. So, what is our “Food System”? And what is the state of it?

“I think a lot of people, including people who work in the City, didn’t really understand what a food system was,” Marty tells me. To simplify the concept, Marty and his team use a paradigm that divides a “food system” into four processes: Growing Food, Selling Food, Eating Food, and Recovering Food. In Austin, a lot of activity happens around Food – according to the City’s numbers, about $4 billion worth of activity. According to another study, Austin spends more money per capita on food and drink than any other city in the U.S. Standing in contrast to those numbers is the fact that less than 1% of the food we consume is produced locally. Additionally, despite being one of the wealthiest cities in the country, a quarter of our children in Travis County are “food insecure” – meaning that they don’t always know where their next meal will come from. And all that spending on food? Some of it is contributing to a 23% obesity rate, and a rate of diabetes that is at 7% and rising.

“I don’t know if you’re an 80’s British Pop fan,” says Marty, “but I liken the report to a Smiths song… Very cheery music, and then pretty bleak lyrics.” He is, of course, making a joke here, but in the face of some pretty tough statistics, Marty finds a lot about which to be hopeful.

“Our food system works the way it does because as a society we have created it that way,” says Marty, in large part by placing higher value on cheap, convenient food than on local, sustainable food. “Now, that hasn’t been intentional,” Marty says, “and this is one of the things I love to talk about.” Just as Austin hasn’t had a Food Policy Manager until last year, we as a society haven’t had a leadership that critically analyzes our food system and plans for a sustainable future. “What the local, sustainable food movement has started to do is ask those questions like: Is this the way we want it to be? And when you start asking those questions, you start to realize that the priorities that drive our food system aren’t really what we truly value,” says Marty.

“Just because we can have really cheap food doesn’t mean that’s what we should have,” Marty tells me. But it is from this line of thinking that the sustainability movement gets a lot of push-back. Just as developing countries at environmental summits don’t want to give up their cheap fossil fuels for expensive solar panels, local citizens don’t want to give up their “Whole Paycheck” for a filling meal. Why should they pay more? Marty tells me it’s because a large part of the cost of cheap, convenient food is “hidden”.

“When you go to the grocery store, what you pay for a piece of food doesn’t even come close to actually representing the true cost,” says Marty. “About half of the cost is hidden,” he says, subsidized by federal, state and local governments. And that hidden cost is counted in more than just dollar signs. It is economic and environmental, philosophical and physiological.

The most significant way in which the cost of food is hidden is through fuel subsidies. According to a recent estimate by the International Monetary Fund, global fuel subsidies total more than $5 trillion a year – that’s $10 million a minute – with $700 billion of that figure being generated in the United States. Cheap fuel means that one of the biggest costs to food producers, and consumers, is significantly reduced.

Another cost that is hidden from consumers is farm subsidies. The Environmental Working Group reports that two crops, corn and soy, were subsidized to the tune of more than $100 billion during the years 1995-2012. These so-called “commodity crops” are found in the ingredients lists of a staggering number of common grocery items, many of which are lacking in nutritional value. The great irony here is that so-called “specialty crops”, which the rest of us call fruits and vegetables, receive nothing like the largesse that commodity crops get. The National Agricultural Law Center estimates that specialty crops receive less than $1 billion annually – less than 10% of what commodity crops get. And so, healthy food is expensive and unhealthy food is kept artificially cheap.

However, with that small grocery bill comes a different kind of cost. The Texas State Comptroller’s office has estimated that Texas businesses lose $10 billion annually due to “obesity-related costs”. And while numbers are hard to find for the environmental impacts of food grown for profit rather than for people, we know that 9.3 acres of farmland are lost each day in Central Texas. We know that a diminishingly small amount of the food we eat comes from our own farms to our own tables, and we know that losing local control of our food system is bad for everybody. In Austin, at least, people like Edwin Marty are working to build a local, sustainable food system.

Marty doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, though. We truly don’t know what a sustainable future might look like, because it would be so very different from the present in which we live. But, with the publication of this report, we understand that present better, and we have a sense of the direction toward which we must move in order to improve the future. Edwin Marty seems to think it starts with our young people.

“Making sure that your children are involved in food production” is remarkably important, Marty says. At present, 73% of Austin schools have their own gardens, and those gardens do more than attract butterflies and rainwater. A study by the UT School of Public Health shows that school farm stands increase the likelihood that kids eat fresh, healthy food. They get to grow it themselves, sell it themselves, and eat it themselves.

But don’t let the kids have all the fun.

“Growing your own food is still the most powerful, radical thing you could possibly do,” says Marty, because what could be more local than your backyard? And what better way to exert control over your own environment, your own food, and your own health? If you don’t have a backyard, consider joining one of Austin’s 52 community gardens, or visit one of Austin’s 23 urban farms. (I can tell you from personal experience, they’re happy to have a hard-working visitor.) Additionally, the Office of Sustainability provides some great resources for Austinites to get engaged in each step of the food system. But whatever you do, don’t wait.

“We are at an incredibly critical turning point in our food system,” says Marty. There are a lot of good things going on in Central Texas, but the time for action is now. In Marty’s words, “It all comes back to: How do we as a community decide what our values are, and how do we express those values?”