Cheap: Chapter 8 Cheap, a Summary of Chapter 8:"Cheap Eats"

Ellen Ruppel Shell takes a critical look at some of the intended and unintended consequences of efforts to produce inexpensive food in Chapter 8 of her book Cheap. Shell argues that our penchant for saving money on our diets is in reality more costly because this practice promotes factory farming. Shell warns that food grown on the factory model is in reality more costly in the long run due to erosion of health, the environment and its impact on humanity.

Shell notes that the modern factory farm is more analogous to a factory than a farm. Agribusiness and the technologies supporting it provide results beyond the capabilities of any ordinary farmer. Genetically engineered livestock fattened on corn and growth hormones in confined facilities and pumped with antibiotics grow to enormous size as do crops grown from scientifically optimized seeds with large quantities of petroleum-based fertilizers and herbicides. These practices work to keep the cost of food low, not only in the United States, but in much of the world as well.

Furthermore, government supported protections and subsidies for mega-farms works in the same manner. The independent family farm has become a thing of the past in the U.S. And developing countries are importing cheaper Western-subsidized food. In developing countries these subsidies have an effect on native farmers who often abandon native farming traditions and...

This in turn increases the demand for imported food.
Shell writes about the spike in food prices in 2008 and claims they were at least in part a consequence of the market's inability to sustain the low prices that preceded this event. She notes that as the market becomes saturated with a specific commodity the price of that commodity falls to an artificially low level. Eventually, as happened with food in 2006, the market will correct itself and prices will climb. However this increase in price resulted in a panic and people began hording, which led to scarcity. Prices jumped even higher which led to the food crisis of 2008. Ironically, there was no shortage of food in the world during the food crisis of 2008; however the panic in the trade market left millions in under developed countries on the edge of starvation.

While at first cheap food may seem like a good thing, an over reliance on cheap food contributes to food dependency, complacency, and even social unrest. Shell believes if agricultural prices were higher incentives to produce food in developing countries would be higher and there would be more food production in the developing world. The author points out that another reason for the food crisis of 2008 can be attributed to reduced investments in agriculture and rural infrastructure throughout the 1980s and 1990s in developing countries. This resulted in falling productivity. When…