Hey you, in the supermarket line — yeah,
you, the one with the stuffed cart. Are you ready to
pay up for those groceries?

You’d better be, pal. That’s the message from Bill Lapp, former chief
economist for the food giant Conagra. “I think [U.S.] consumers are
more prepared than we realize to accept higher prices on food and I
think that’s part of our future,” Lapp recently declared. “It’s largely been set in stone for us already.”

For decades, average Americans have spent just 10 percent of disposable
income on food — the lowest proportion in the world and almost surely
the lowest in the
history
of the world. Of course, that means well-off people pay considerably
less than that — and low-income people pay considerably more.

Indeed, as we head into this future that’s been “set in stone for us
already,” it’s important to note that 10.9 percent of U.S. households,
representing 12.6 million families, already qualify as “food insecure”
by USDA standards. For these folks — and for people in the global south who have been rioting
in response to being priced out of the food market — spiraling costs
may be impossible to accept, no matter what the former Conagra guy
says. They will be forced into wrenching decisions — what to eliminate
from their budgets to keep the food coming.

Perhaps with this demographic in mind, Burger King recently ran an ad campaign
in Bay Area subway stations featuring giant images of sausage biscuits
and sweet rolls. “Now you can pay rent and eat,” the text declares,
heralding “10 items available for $1 each.”

As I’ve written before, such cheap, unhealthy food
plays a key role in our economic system, sustaining a low-income
service workforce in an era of falling wages. Now, even as prices rise
for corn and soy — key inputs in the industrial-food system — the
Burger King ad may herald the shape of things to come: a scramble to
keep supplying cheap food amid elevated raw-material costs.

Giant corporations like Burger King have the economies of scale and
market power to hold prices down, mostly by leaning on their suppliers
(i.e., farmers). In Florida, source of the fast-food industry’s winter
tomatoes, Burger King has steadfastly refused to pay farmworkers an
extra penny per pound picked. According to Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser,
the penny-per-pound raise would double the wages of thousands of
workers now mired in poverty and cost Burger King about $250,000 — a
fraction of annual profits, and even less than an average executive’s
salary.

McDonald’s and Taco Bell had agreed to the raise in the last couple of years, but Burger King threatened
to shift its tomato buying to Mexico rather than pay up. Burger King’s
refusal scuttled the deal, and now tomato workers make the same old
poverty wage. Evidently, in this new age of pricier food, corporations
will literally pinch pennies to keep costs down.

Looking Beyond the Sticker Price

On the consumer side, the trend to higher prices often means a scramble
to economize. I saw that in a recent trip to a supermarket in a
low-income section of North Carolina’s Triangle area. In the meat
aisle, I saw people carefully comparing prices, and gravitating to sale
items.

I asked one woman, scrutinizing a beef chuck roast on sale for half
off, what she thought. She told me chicken prices had gotten much
higher, so she was surprised to find herself buying more beef for her
family — something she didn’t used to do so much. “There’s been some
good sales on beef,” she said, plopping the roast into her cart.

As she spoke, I remembered reading that prices for beef hadn’t risen as
rapidly as those for chicken; the big beef producers had been reluctant
to pass on their higher costs to consumers, hoping to protect their
market share. And since four giant companies slaughter 83.5 percent of
U.S. cows, such companies are masters of maintaining profitability by
cutting costs.

But low costs in the supermarket come at a price.

The massive recent recall
imposed on a smallish beef packer in California — sparked by
revelations that workers had tortured “downer” cows and pushed them
into the food supply — comes to mind. For a beef packer facing severe
cost pressures, hustling severely sick cows into the food supply might
have seemed like a rational choice.

Likewise, beef and dairy feedlot operators are rushing to replace
expensive corn with cheaper “distillers grains” in their feed rations.
Use of distillers grains, a waste product from the corn-ethanol
process, seems to significantly increase the incidence of the deadly
E. coli 0157 virus
in cows, among other environmental and public-health consequences.

I wonder what other corners are being cut to keep those “good sales on beef” coming.

Every Downer Cow Has a Silver Lining

Americans, particularly low-income ones, find themselves at a
precarious juncture. Not only are food prices rising rapidly for the
first time in decades, but gas prices hover near all-time highs, even
adjusted for inflation. Adjustable mortgage rates — the only kind
people with shaky finances can hope for — continue their upward swing.
Last year, 1.5 million U.S. families got hit with foreclosures, and
Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke recently warned
of more of the same in the year ahead. The economy, meanwhile, seems
tilted toward a recession. That means job cutbacks, and downward
pressure on wages.

As Naomi Klein shows in her recent book The Shock Doctrine,
such economic crises have often been used to consolidate corporate
power. You can see Klein’s thesis at play in Burger King’s recent
actions: squeezing low-income workers in one area in order to make
money selling cheap food to low-income workers in another.

But shocks also open opportunities for positive change.

As prices for industrial food inch up, food grown close to home, free of increasingly expensive agrichemicals
and not shipped cross-country with ever-more-dear gas, has a chance to
be more competitive. Now more than ever, it’s critical to patronize
your nearby farmers’ market, buy a CSA share, participate in (or start) a local-food council in your area, and harangue your congressional representatives
to support Community Food Projects — federal programs, funded by the
farm bill, designed to bring healthy, affordable food into low-income
areas.

Amounting to just $10 million annually — equivalent to a rounding
error in the context of the mammoth farm bill — Community Food
Projects currently stand in jeopardy of being cut [PDF]. Don’t let the scoundrels get away with it.