How much each country spends on food
J Thoendell stashed this in Maps
Source: http://www.vox.com/2014/7/6/5874499/map-...
Note that the map above is based on data for food consumed at home — the USDA doesn't offer international comparisons for eating out, unfortunately. Still, even if you do include food consumed at restaurants, Americans devote just 11 percent of their household spending to food, a smaller share than nearly every other country spends on food at home alone.*
Stashed in: Awesome, America!, The World, Maps!, Food
There are dozens of forces making food in the United States so cheap — from farm subsidies to advancements in industrial agriculture that have pushed down the price of food.
40 maps that explain food in America: http://www.vox.com/a/explain-food-america
It's not an apples to apples comparison.
Real food is still not cheap in the United States. Here are a few items offered at local farmers markets in Austin, TX:
Whole milk: $8 to $10 per gallon!
Cream: $9 pint!
Tomatos: $4 to $5 per pound!
What this chart represents in the US is a variety of industrial products that have been manufactured into passing for real food, but the vast extent of food products in our economy simply aren't real food. And the price of real apples and foods grown naturally are responsibly more expensive than what you pay at our grocery stores of crap and candy masquerading as food.
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, has said that in the US our historic average percentage of household expenditures on food was at 50% about 100 years ago, then 25% 50 years ago and now (since the complete industrialization of our food supply) stand roughly as reported above, at 8% today. In correlation, household medical expenditures have inversely mirrored food percentage expenditure declines and today stand at the highest percentage of their household expense in US history.
The inferences can be many, yet one fact is certain: our country has culturally chosen to spend less and less of our household money on real foods and instead prefer cheaper crap food-like products and candy instead. Fewer US consumers recoil at paying the higher costs of nutritional quality and health offered only by real food... but we are just waking up to how we've been fooled into thinking a tomato is a tomato.
And Big Ag industry isn't standing idly by, they're doing their all to combat the truth and have spent millions to billions lobbying and creating policies, campaigns and research to make us believe that a fake tomato is the only way the world can survive. And as long as we provide industrial farms US government subsidies to grow these ever increasing profit margin fake foods Big Ag can indeed pretend to feed the world with Roundup Ready low cost crap. Whether or not the world wants it.
Yes, Big Ag wants us to believe the only answer to feeding the world is more and more cheaper crap and GMO food...
...and it certainly is the only answer, at Monsanto.
8:57 AM Jul 09 2014