Open Thread

The price of food is rising because as emerging and frontier countries improve their economies, starving and impoverished people demand more food. Particularly meat.
It takes a lot of land, fertilizer, grain and energy to raise livestock. This puts upward pressure on all food products.

I think corn subsidies are a bad thing on many levels, and should be gotten rid of as soon as possible.

Getting rid of them will not have a huge impact on most food prices (and may even lower the price of other grains), but will raise the price of heavily sugared foods and most meat.

‘Yes. That’s right. You have to struggle to be poor. ”

Bullshit. The rest of your rant sounds like a televangelist pushing a self-help program to sell to those “struggling to be poor.”

You can make all the choices you want- if the circumstances don’t match up, you’re screwed. Believe me, I do know. And I’ve seen too many good, hardworking people in the same circumstances so pedal that tripe elsewhere.

My main theory on high produce prices has nothing to do with organic farming, pesticides, agro-business, or any other production aspect

I think that the modern system of selling produce is very labor intensive with large amounts of waste, and that translates into higher costs.

In the grocery stores that most of the middle and upper class shops in, there is an expectation that all fresh food will look perfect, with no blemishes or imperfection.

To do that, it means that store employees have to sort through every items they receive from their distributors and throw away any that do not meet up to standards for whatever reason.

It also means that produce sections have to be cycled on a frequent basis, with anything approaching old being thrown out.

In Los Angeles we often shopped at a Hispanic supermarket that had a different system. They would put out large containers of produce direct from their distributors without any sorting, and leave it out until most of the produce was gone or obviously bad.

That meant that you would have to pick though imperfect and sometimes bad fruits and veggies to find ones you wanted, but the prices were usually half what the other supermarkets charged.

G10, in my opinion there are going to be some serious increases in the price of food and energy over the next few years.