Good article in the NYT last Sunday about using policy to improve Americans’ health by influencing food choices. (I have mixed feelings about this. I’m all for free choice, but with the health care system becoming completely unmanageable — whether you favor a public system or an employer/employee-supported one — something needs to be done. I guess I think that as long as the policy is designed to influence choice and not mandate it, it’s a good thing.)

One of the points of the article is that subsidies have created an environment that greatly favors unhealthy fat- and sugar-loaded fast food. Subsidies on corn and soy (used for animal feed and oil) are huge. (Some day someone will explain to me why the people who supposedly stongly favor the market economy favor subsidies.) As a result, in the last 15 years or so, the inflation-adjusted price of a Big Mac has dropped 5.4% while the price of whole fruits and vegetables has risen 17%.

Everytime I see fast food pricing, I’m amazed by how cheap it is. Tacos for $.33? Burgers for under $1? It defies logic.

People are very sensitive about food pricing though. As a friend pointed out to me recently, someone who chooses the cheapest eggs or milk because of a dollar or so difference might easily spend $100 or so on dinner out and a movie. When we buy food at the grocery, we think it should be cheap and often don’t equate price differences with differences in things like health, the environment, or humane treatment of animals.

Milk is milk, and it should be cheap. Or so the thinking goes.

In a lot of ways, this is the same way most Americans view pricing of gasoline and even water. It is as though we have a god-given right to these things being cheap. In all of these cases, it is subsidies that have made the commodities historically cheap. And it seems unlikely that this is sustainable.

Interestingly, in Europe, food, gasoline, and water are all priced at something closer to a real market price (and are much more expensive than they are here). I rarely read about food or the environment (including the above-mentioned NY Times article) where the significant differences in European and American policy aren’t discussed.

Longer term thinking would serve us all well. In the meantime, individual choices do make a difference.