On Special at Your Local Supermarket: Moral Choices - New York Times

On Special at Your Local Supermarket: Moral Choices - New York Times: "And Dr. Nestle maintains that, if anything, too much food is available in the United States — 3,900 calories per day per person, she writes, about twice as much as an average adult needs. Poor families are spending a far smaller proportion of their income on food today than they did a generation ago, she says.

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Rather than insisting that producers make sure that produce, eggs, meat and shellfish are safe, Dr. Nestle says, food regulators advise consumers to wash their produce, avoid eating anything with raw or even soft-cooked eggs, cook meat until it is well done and buy fish from 'reliable suppliers,' as if such suppliers were easy to identify.

Both books also point to one of capitalism's most intractable and widespread problems — costs that are important but do not show up in the balance sheet.

Organic food is more expensive than conventionally grown products, the authors concede, but that is because conventional growers do have to not pay for the damage done by pesticides in the soil, fertilizer runoff in the water or greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If you add these 'externalities' to the cost of a piglet and its feed, shelter and slaughter, conventionally produced bacon is no longer so cheap."