After 1870, the proportion of family incomes spent on food gradually diminished, averaging 50% around the turn of the century and 40% by the 1950s.

In most developed countries today, the figure is a fraction of that. Contemporary statistics supplied by Scholliers relate that typical Europeans (averaged between 27 EU countries) spend less than 15% of their current incomes on food. According to the USDA and Tom Philpott, in 2006 Americans spent 9.9% of their disposable income (income after tax) on food. Is this progress, or a devil’s bargain cloaked as such?

Certainly it’s a triumph of the modern age—due in large part to the modern food system—that people have money to spend on things other than food. But are we spending too little? Most food in America, for a variety of reasons including farm subsidies, efficiencies of scale and lack of a harsh pollution tax, is sold at prices that don’t reflect true production cost. This causes problems for people who suffer the misfortune of producing food they must sell at true cost—organic farmers who pay a fair wage to people who spend hours weeding, for example, or small-scale animal breeders who give their animals lots of space. Sure, by comparison, their food seems really expensive. But not only is the quality usually higher (and as such deserving of a premium), but the price of crappy food doesn’t take into account the hospital bill someone will have to pay when it gives you a heart attack.

Sure, statistics can confound. Some studies only count money spent on food meant for the home; others consider funds spent both eating in and eating out, and the USDA, for some bewildering reason, includes money spent on alcoholic beverages and tobacco into their calculations. It’s also important to take into account how widely salaries today vary—billionaires, of course, can eat very well for far less than 10% of their incomes. Anyone who’s ever paid for meals in Manhattan knows that the fact that residents only spend 8% of their money on food reflects inflated salaries more than it does the affordability of going out in New York.

However one chooses to measure, it’s clear that Americans have never spent so little on food (In just one example of this, Starbucks has decided to stop selling organic milk, for which it charged an extra forty cents, due to lack of customer demand). And this in an age where people in neighboring countries are rioting in the streets because the food cost spikes due to biofuels like ethanol have resulted in thousands going hungry! Taking this into consideration, and looking at the data over time, proves that our national reluctance to invest in good food is less a question of capacity than it is of priority. How can we change this? Kill corn subsidies? Apply the money to underwrite small farms? Teach horticulture in schools so people know what goes into it?

Supermarkets like Tesco are planning a massive operation to apply carbon labels on all the products they sell so that customers are better informed about the true carbon cost of their purchases. It’s a laudable (okay, nearly holy) quest—BUT carbon is only one of the environmental and social costs of putting a product on the shelf. Towards the end of the conversation, Warren Belasco, a professor of American Studies at UMBC in Maryland, referenced Thoreau: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Sounds a bit scary. But it sounds about right.