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By Root 386 0

families dealing with it and to agencies like Medicare and Medicaid, which are ultimately funded by us, the taxpayers. When you look at the skyrocketing costs of treating heart disease, cancer, diabetes, as well as diseases like Alzheimer’s, it’s clear that it makes far more sense, both morally and monetarily, on both a personal and societal level, to take preventive measures such as changing the way we eat.

It just makes sense to factor in the true costs of a meat-based diet.

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In the long term, it’s a lot less expensive—and less painful—to prevent debilitating diseases through our food choices than it is to treat them later.

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In short, at the very least, a fat-and calorie-filled meat-based diet makes us feel bad. It lowers our energy and keeps us from thriving, both physically and financially. A plant-based diet, on the other hand, gives us a feeling of lightness, clear-headedness, and energy. Over time, meat-based diets can cost us our health, whereas a vegan diet delivers healthy longevity.

Why Is Meat So Cheap?

Getting back to the wallet, why is meat so cheap?

Because it’s subsidized.

That’s right. Not only does the meat industry get away with not paying the full costs of its operations—costs to animal welfare, to our health, to the watershed, to the land—it also benefits from a steady blizzard of government subsidies.

Wait! Don’t turn the page.

If you’re like me, your eyes probably glaze over at a word like subsidies. But subsidies are actually pretty interesting business—and not at all hard to understand.

A government subsidy is a form of financial assistance paid to an industry to help prevent that industry’s decline. The U.S. government provides all kinds of subsidies—to cover housing, water, etc.—using taxpayer money. When it comes to agricultural subsidies, our tax dollars literally keep the meat industry afloat.

Here’s how it works: With help from government subsidies, many farmers are able to sell their corn and soybeans for far less than the cost of production. The subsidies—paid for with our tax dollars—compensate them for the difference. As a result of these artificially cheap prices, owners of factory farms are able to then purchase at bargain-basement prices the grain they need to feed their chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows. This gives them an enormous advantage over foreign competitors (not to mention a huge leg up over small organic ranchers who wouldn’t think of feeding conventional [often genetically modified] feed to their animals, but that’s another story).

One lucky recipient of such subsidies is Tyson Foods, the world’s largest poultry company. Like many other meat companies, Tyson has collected billions of dollars worth of government subsidies in the last decade alone. Why does Tyson get such heavy subsidies, but companies that make healthy plant-based foods don’t? It seems so wrong. And yet from 1997 through 2005, Tyson Foods effectively collected government subsidies worth $2.59 billion.

Subsidies have given these industries such a boost that others naturally want to get in on the action. Half the fish consumed worldwide now comes from fish farms, which are lining up for their share of government subsidies. And government officials want to expand the U.S. aquaculture industry to five times its current size. It seems we have to get ready to open our wallets yet again.

These fish farms are already beneficiaries of government aid. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Small Business Innovation Research program has given away millions of dollars in grants to fish-farming companies. Even the much-maligned “stimulus” (officially, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) set aside $50 million for states to help compensate fish farmers for losses associated with the high cost of feed. These are forms of subsidies as well.

It seems that eating fish is not only a health and environmental hazard (PCBs, mercury, destruction of the aquatic food chain, antibiotics and other medicines necessary to aquaculture, etc.), but a fiscal hazard as well.

Okay, you say, so