Who Pays The Price For Cheap Meat?

     The fast food industry is hugely profitable because it benefits from not incurring the true costs of its business. Cheap meat is not really cheap, no matter how much money is made by fast food corporations, or by their meat producers and suppliers, or by any of the other companies that benefit from cheap meat.

      These corporations are not held responsible for the enormous environmental damage and harm to human health that results from the agricultural and industrial practices that support the meat they sell or produce. The waste from pig farms, the inefficient use of land and agricultural resources to produce crops used to feed livestock, the runoff from fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals, and much more, have contributed to enormous degradation of land, poisoning of rivers and lakes, and dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico*. 

      There has been some focus on the fast food industry and how human health is impacted by the direct consumption of their products. Some attention, although hardly enough, has been paid to the humane care, treatment and slaughter of animals raised to be eaten. This is an area still far too lacking. Cheap meat too often means misery.

       Little attention has been paid to cheap meat's impact on the environment. Fast food and other corporations involved in the cheap meat business are not held accountable for environmentally damaging agricultural and industrial practices and how these practices affect human health.
       Cheap meat is cheap for a number of corporations, but exacts a heavy cost that the public, not the corporations, ends up paying.

            

           

( * The impact on oceans from the fast food industry's use of plastics, disposable gloves and other non biodegradable items is significant.)