You’re Paying More for Meat than You Think

The meat industry is a powerful economic and political force, and besides spending millions of its own dollars to promote meat-eating, it has also managed to grab an unfair share of our tax dollars. Practically speaking, the meat production process is so wasteful and costly that the industry must be subsidized to survive. Most people are unaware of how heavily national governments support the meat industry with outright grants, favorable loan guarantees, and purchases of its surplus products, which are often destroyed. The price tag of those government subsidies shows up in the health of our children. In 2003 the U.S.’s National School Lunch Program gave schools more than 6 billion dollars to offer low-cost meals to students. That sounds like charity, but the National School Lunch Program was originally designed to serve two purposes: to provide healthy meals to children regardless of income, and to subsidize agribusiness by „shoring up demand for beef“. In light of all the health hazards of a meat-based diet, what is this doing to our children, and to families who have little choice but to accept the subsidized lunches?

These days, the federal government purchases more than $800 million worth of mostly meat and dairy products each year and delivers them to schools to serve to their students. Altought the federal government is supposed to purchase all farm products – grains, vegetables, and fruits, as well as meat and dairy – it tends to make its purchases in direct response to lobbying. In 2001, the USDA spent a total of $350 million on surplus beef and other meat products for schools – more than double what it spent on fruits and vegetables (most of which were canned or frozen). Jennifer Raymond, a nutritionist who has worked with schools to develop healthier menus, states, „Basically, it’s a welfare program for suppliers ... It’s a price support program for agricultural producers, and the schools are simply a way to get rid of the items that have been purchased.“ The money to run this „welfare program“ comes out of tax dollars.And citizens are also left with their schildren’s health bill, as parents now battle such previously rare problems as schildhood obesity, heart disease, Type II diabetes, and all the other once adult problems that go along with a high-cholesterol, high-saturated-fat diet.

More tax dollars go down the drain in the form of the millions of dollars the U.S. government spends each year to maintain a nationwide network of inspectors to monitor the little-publicized problem of animal diseases. When diseased animals are destroyed, the government pays the owners an indemnity. A New York Times editorial called this subsidy bill „outrageous,“ characterizing it as „a scandalous steal out of the public treasury. „Nowadays, governments around the developed world pay farmers for their „mad cows.“ In 2001 alone, the UK government paid out over 91 million pounds sterling for „mad cows,“ and other governments have had similar bills.

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