Lately, every time I go to the grocery store, all of the most basic items I routinely purchase seem to have increased in price anywhere from a nickel or two to a dollar or more each. Milk, eggs, cereal products, rice, and fresh vegetables all cost more now than they did just a few weeks ago, and as of this writing no relief is in sight. In the middle of summer, green peppers are $4 a pound. Milk is up to $4.59 for half a gallon. A 12-ounce box of Rice Crispies is $3.99 and will probably cost more by the time you read this.

Meat has become especially expensive; no doubt a result of the increased cost of the grain needed to feed the animals and the now insanely expensive diesel fuel needed to transport the animals, butcher them, and bring their meat to market. A recent trip to my favorite grocer found me staring forlornly at a package of five bratwursts marked ‘on sale’ for $7.98.

$7.98 for five sausages? On sale? My son can eat five sausages as a snack!

I didn’t buy them. It wasn’t just the price. The truth is I’ve been put off by meat and the way it is grown and processed for quite some time now. Not too long ago we all witnessed (over and over again) nightly news footage of a downed cow being shoved around by a couple of guys driving forklifts. Cows that cannot stand because they are sick or injured are not supposed to be processed into meat for human consumption, and they certainly aren’t supposed to be shoved around with forklift prongs.

But there it was, in living color, right on the evening news.

Before that, the news flash was all about packing plants that pumped carbon dioxide into cellophane trays to give the hermetically sealed meat a bright-red, fresh appearance even if it was spoiled and no longer safe to eat. Before that, it was corporate hog farms causing e. coli contamination of nearby vegetable fields, city water tables, lakes, and rivers. And before that (and still, today, as the Korean protests over American meat imports show) it was another case of BCE or ‘mad cow disease’ turning up in the U.S., with the beef industry out in front of the cameras assuring everyone that it was a truly isolated incident, so move along folks, nothing to look at here.

Too many isolated incidents and, like the South Koreans, I get nervous.

And I haven’t even gotten to the part yet about the unsafe hormones and chemicals that are fed or injected into the meat and dairy animals or the fact that the grain the animals eat is badly needed in other parts of the world right this minute for food. Corporate meat production is one of those issues that, once you start to dig into it even just a little bit, can make you pretty sick to your stomach.

So usually I handle this issue the way most Americans do: I try not to think about it.

However, as food becomes less and less affordable, all that is starting to change for me. It’s one thing to buy dirty, mistreated mystery-meat when it’s a dollar or two a pound and my family is clamoring for it. It’s something else again to part with a ten-spot for a little package of bleeding poison that is barely going to make one meal for us. That’s two whole gallons of gasoline or twenty pounds of potatoes.

I’m finding that, at least in my own case, empty pockets make for loftier principles.

I don’t believe it is intrinsically wrong to eat meat. My own perspective is that everything eats everything in this world, and you don’t have to look very far or think very hard to realize this. Life by definition is a carnivorous game. Right this minute some microbe in my very own gut is devouring some other microbe. Even the virtuous plants embraced by vegans eat decomposed matter (which gardeners call “compost,” but let’s be honest, we’re talking about dead stuff here.) Some day, each of us will become worm food, and when the worms are done with us then whatever is left will make some hungry tree very happy. It never ends. So if you want to get worked up about the morality of digestion at any given point on the food chain, that is your prerogative, but I don’t generally go there.

However, I do believe that we are responsible for our actions, and that our actions should at minimum aspire to be humane and intelligent. The way that meat is grown, processed, and marketed in the U.S. today has become selfish, inhumane, profit-driven, and dangerous. The meat is no longer predictably safe to eat, and enormous resources are wasted to produce a single pound of the stuff. While much of the world goes hungry, we use our grain and disappearing fossil fuels to fatten cattle and hogs that are not safe to eat when we get done with them, not even here.

When socialist Upton Sinclair wrote his famous novel The Jungle in 1906, he wasn’t thinking of the fate of the unfortunate food animals themselves so much as he was protesting the horrifying conditions under which the packing plant employees eked out their meager livings. The novel vividly drove home the packing plant as a metaphor for unfettered capitalism: the bodies of the workers were no more valued or cared for by their corporate overlords than the bodies of the animals they slaughtered. The filthy, dangerous conditions in the plant mirrored the violence and utter squalor in which the workers themselves were forced to live.

So, apart from the price, that’s what I was actually thinking about, looking at those five $7.98 sausages last week. I was wondering: how many people lost arms so I can clog up my arteries with this crap I can’t even afford? How many people will not eat at all today because pounds and pounds of grain that could have been shipped to them went into this expensive, unhealthy snack instead? What kind of life, if you can call it a life, did the pig that got ground up for this sausage lead anyway? Did it ever see the sun? Or did it live out its days cramped into a big tin building with a pig poop lake under it, getting fat as fast as possible, aided by hormone shots, force-feeding, and God knows what else?

You are what you eat, or so they say. I bought a 10-pound bag of Jasmine rice instead.

It’s pretty good.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Game Theory: Why Do Restaurants Serve My Food to Everyone?
2. Is There Widespread Price Fixing in the Food Industry?
3. We Grow Enough Food to Feed Everyone in This World, So Why Don’t We? (Part 2)
4. We Grow Enough Food to Feed Everyone in This World, So Why Don’t We? (Part 1)
5. Multi-National Food Chains: The Poor Aren’t Buying It